Why Authenticity is Overrated
“Be yourself.” It is the most common — and perhaps the most misleading — piece of leadership advice ever given. In our recent Open Leadership Session, we set out to challenge it. Not because authenticity does not matter, but because the way we usually talk about it sets leaders up to fail.
The leaders we meet
We work with leaders every day, and we keep hearing the same things:
- “I do what I do because I am who I am.”
- “I have one style, and that’s the one I use.”
- “If they know me, they’ll know I mean well.”
- “I can’t help myself. It’s stronger than me.”
These statements sound like self-knowledge. In practice, they often function as a defense — a way of insisting that the world should adapt to the leader, rather than the other way around. Behind them sits a quiet conflation between two very different things: identity and reputation.
Identity is the story you tell about yourself. It is often the person you want to be. Reputation is how others actually see you. The interesting question for any leader is not which one is “true,” but how congruent the two are — and what to do when they drift apart.
The promise and the cost of authenticity
The case for authenticity is genuine. It is linked to well-being and to engagement. People who feel they can be themselves at work tend to feel better and bring more of themselves to the job.
But there is a second column on the ledger: effectiveness. And the evidence there is more mixed. If being “authentic” makes a leader less effective — less able to adapt, to influence, to build trust across difference — then its benefits may be outweighed by the costs.
Two voices we returned to during the session are worth quoting here.
Jeffrey Pfeffer argues that leaders succeed by becoming a version of themselves they have practised hard enough that it eventually feels natural. Your “authentic self,” in his framing, is simply whatever you have spent the most time being. His advice is bracing: engineer yourself for impact. Fake it until you make it.
Herminia Ibarra, in Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader, makes a related point. Authenticity, she writes, becomes a constraint precisely when people step into new roles where their old self no longer fits. Growth comes from borrowing from others, trying on new behaviors, and tolerating the awkwardness of feeling like a fake. Start by doing what works, and the thinking will follow.
You are unique — but that is not the whole story
None of this denies what we might call Unique Individuality. Nobody like you has ever lived before. We described that uniqueness in four layers:
- Destiny — not determinism, but the givens: DNA-encoded traits, the time and place we were born into, circumstances we did not choose.
- Drama — the formative events, ruptures, and turning points that have shaped us.
- Deliberation — our conscious reflection, our choices, our meaning-making.
- Development — the cumulative trajectory of growth across a lifetime.
You are genuinely one of one. That is precisely why “just be yourself” is too small a frame to hang a career on.
The four authenticity traps
Drawing on Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic’s work, we walked through four pieces of advice that sound wise and turn out to be traps.
- Always be honest, with yourself and others
Truly knowing yourself is hard, and accuracy about the self is correlated with low mood, not happiness. Slightly distorting reality in your favor feels good and is even contagious. We tend to prefer dishonest kindness over rude honesty. A better rule: make an effort to be kind, and act like you genuinely mean it.
- Follow your heart and be true to your values
This rests on two flawed assumptions — that what we feel is right is the ultimate yardstick, and that spontaneous emotion carries more wisdom than reason. But following your values can lead to suffering for others, and being true to bad values just amplifies the harm. The real moral work is often revising your values to align with prosocial norms, even when that costs you.
- Stop worrying about what others think
Impossible, harmful for your reputation, and — at the extreme — pathological. Leaders cannot opt out of how they are seen.
- Bring your whole self to work
The whole self is too wide to fit at work. It includes parts no one wants. What organizations actually reward is culture fit, not full self-expression. Many people are happier with a healthy separation between the professional and the private.
Taken together, these four ideas turn authenticity into something impractical, impossible, and at times undesirable.
When authenticity does work
This is not a takedown. Authenticity is effective — under specific conditions:
- when there is a genuine fit between the person, the role, and the culture;
- when there is psychological safety;
- when colleagues are supportive of self-expression;
- and when there is leadership support from above.
Take those conditions away and “being yourself” becomes a liability rather than a gift.
It is also worth noting what the research actually shows about “authentic leadership” as a model, typically described as self-aware, relationally transparent, guided by an internalized moral perspective, and balanced. The honest answer is that research cannot confirm it as a distinct style. It overlaps heavily with transformational and servant leadership.
A more useful frame: strategic self-awareness and versatility
So what should leaders aim for instead? We offered a different scaffolding for the second half of the session.
It starts with what Robert Hogan calls strategic self-awareness: you need to know yourself well enough to understand your impact. That means looking at your potential (the bright side), your pitfalls (the dark side), and your values and needs (the inner side), and taking each of them seriously.
Once you understand your impact, you can adapt. That capacity to adapt is versatility. Drawing on Rob Kaiser’s work, effective leaders move fluently between supportive, enabling behavior and steering, forceful behavior — and between a focus on today’s operations and tomorrow’s strategy. They do not pick one pole and call it authentic; they shift between them as the situation demands.
Versatility serves a deeper goal: your reputation and trustworthiness. Leadership is relational. You cannot be effective without relationships, and trust has to be earned. Jason Colquitt’s research on trust identifies three components that matter most: being seen as competent, as having integrity, and as loyal (or benevolent toward those who depend on you). Vulnerability has a place in this — but only in safe environments, with people you can genuinely trust, and used sparingly.
Effectiveness, then, sits at the intersection of reputation, trustworthiness, vulnerability, and versatility.
The takeaway
Leadership is not about excavating a fixed inner self and broadcasting it. It is about finding the right balance — between who you are, who you are becoming, and what the situation asks of you.
If there is a version of authenticity worth keeping, it is this: professional authenticity is about consistent behavior, not unfiltered self-expression. Being someone people can rely on. Being recognisably the same person across rooms and across days, while still adapting to what each moment needs.
That is harder than “be yourself.” It is also a lot more useful.
—
Thanks to everyone who joined the session. If you would like to continue the conversation — or bring it into your own leadership team — get in touch.
