Authentic leadership is based on transparency, integrity and alignment between values and actions. It's about inspiring others by being yourself. This type of leadership fosters commitment, loyalty, collaboration, resilience in the face of change and well-being.
Understanding the difference between management and leadership
First and foremost, it's important to distinguish between leadership and management. Leadership focuses primarily on vision and mobilizing people, while management is more concerned with processes and organizing work. One is more people-oriented, the other more task-oriented. The two complement each other, but you don't have to be a manager to be a leader.
What makes a good leader?
It's important to understand that there is no such thing as “perfect” leadership per se, but rather leadership adapted to a specific team and context. Every team has unique needs, and every context - be it corporate culture, project type, area of expertise or socio-economic context - requires particular skills. In this context, a leader who performs well in one situation may not do so in another.
To develop and optimize a person's leadership style, it is therefore essential to ensure that his or her style complements his or her responsibilities, team, hierarchy, corporate culture and context.
Although there are many definitions of leadership, certain concepts are recurrent: inspiring, motivating, mobilizing, leading and developing others to achieve a common goal. Which is the most important?
What's the magic ingredient of leadership?
To answer this question, I'll quote Simon Sinek: “A team is not a group of people working together. A team is a group of people who trust each other.”
The key to leadership is peer trust. To mobilize, motivate, inspire, develop and guide a person or a team in a given direction, trust is essential (I'm ready to follow you and give my best only if I trust you). The climate of security created by trust also fosters authentic communication, stimulates creativity and encourages initiative-taking, which is essential to innovation.
How do you gain the trust of others?
There are many elements involved in building trust: competence, transparency, responsibility, openness, consistency, honesty, humility, respect and recognition, to name but a few.
One concept, however, is central: consistency between what we say and what we do. To achieve this coherence, we must first and foremost be coherent with ourselves, in other words, be authentic. A person who is not authentic is inevitably incoherent, since he or she will behave differently in different situations or with different people, which invites mistrust, misunderstandings and misinterpretations.
How to be authentic?
Authenticity is the ability to be true to oneself, to be fully oneself. It means trusting yourself enough to accept yourself as you are, without striving for an impossible ideal or convincing yourself that you need to change in order to succeed or be valuable. Being authentic means accepting and embracing your personality, valuing your strengths, and having the courage to acknowledge your limitations and mistakes, even when this means being vulnerable to others. In a leadership context, therefore, there's a notion of “trusting yourself to inspire the trust of others”, and self-knowledge becomes fundamental since it lies at the heart of authenticity.
Authenticity, vulnerability and stress
When fear, manifested as a stress reaction, takes the reins of our decisions, it pushes us to protect ourselves. This can take the form of avoiding certain actions or situations for fear of failure or judgment by others, or a tendency to try to control everything and strive for perfection for the same reasons. In such moments, authenticity and vulnerability have no place. If our actions are dictated by fear, we lose the fundamental freedom to choose, which prevents us from being truly ourselves (what we choose to do to protect ourselves is different from what we would like to do out of will).
Brené Brown defines vulnerability as the courage to face “uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure”. What holds back vulnerability and authenticity is essentially fear: the fear of failing in the face of uncertainty, and the fear of emotional exposure in the face of the risk of disappointing or being judged by others.
In this context, managing stress and emotions is essential to authentic leadership. Those who are aware of their protective mechanisms are in a position to avoid letting them take control of their behavior and decisions, so as to ensure consistency between their actions and their words, and thus inspire confidence in others. In short, emotion regulation is the best way to achieve fulfillment, joy and happiness at work!
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