Authentic Leaders Serving Others

Authenticity is often touted as a critical leadership attribute, but with change accelerating and expanding, it is becoming more crucial than ever. Authentic leaders are using their organisations to serve others. This means looking at their organisations not as an end but as a vehicle to make a positive impact. They care about the world and addressing its problems, from inequality to climate change.

It means leaders being true to themselves, and that authenticity, in turn, provides their organisation with a focus: why does this company exist, and who does it exist for? It’s about leaders having the awareness to look outside their business bubble at the broader picture to ask what they care about. How can my business have a role in impacting those things positively and constructively?

Authentic leaders are talking less and listening more

There’s a significant shift away from that one-way communication to leaders that listen more than they speak. At a basic human level, everyone knows what it’s like to feel heard by another person and how that changes our behaviour. When employees are listened to by their leaders, it can only help and unify an organisation’s operations.

During the pandemic, they had to take a genuine interest in people and their lives to function as effective leaders. There was something humanising about that, and listening became an essential skill which many leaders strengthened or were forced to discover.

Authentic leaders don’t have all the answers

A typical leadership role used to belong to the alpha; alphas always have the answers, so it has been a complex process for leaders to leave the ego behind and transition through this disruptive pace of change. It’s much less possible to have all the answers and much more acceptable for leaders to sit with not knowing and admit: “I don’t know.”

But being able to accept not having all the answers means leaders can prepare for difficult conversations and how they will lead people through challenging circumstances. There is a paradigm of moving out of the rational and into the intuitive. This kind of openness allows companies to reflect deeply on where they are in the company and where they are going.

Authentic leaders understand future solutions come from not knowing

To address the challenges of the 21st century, we need leadership mindsets that transcend the challenges of today to find solutions. This involves taking problems and the limited and fixed thinking patterns associated with them and reinterpreting them as opportunities to move forward positively. Looking at and repurposing major problems as a way to investigate and find innovative business solutions.