Yes, good leaders are authentic leaders — but here’s what that actually means

1. Authenticity is being true to yourself: But if the ‘self’ is changing, how is one authentic to the past, present or future self at the same time?
2. Authenticity is being sincere: It is about saying what we mean, and meaning what we say.
3. Authenticity is being true to your values: If one has an ingrained value, one cannot sabotage it.

A professional moving up the ladder wants to be successful and have the desired impact, but if in doing so has to sacrifice the ingrained values and integrity, one would end up being less sincere and more ‘political’.

The answer to this paradox may be on how we see our job. If we are only focused on content delivery, knowledge, ideas and research, we would not be able to do anything with ourselves. We have to focus on owning the space where we work with our presence, creating engagement and increasing learning.

Being authentic and sincere is only possible if we grow ourselves through learning, which happens when we do things we aren’t very comfortable with.

We have to move out of the comfort zone we have created in our existing job roles and take the approach of self-authoring, by experimenting and learning things we haven’t done before.