Authentic leadership

It never surprises me when I see a business doing great things, they are recognized as a leader in their field and then attract a large amount of people to hear them speak about what great things they are doing.  What does surprise me, and frustrate me, is that there are not more businesses doing great things. Is it fear? Ignorance? Stubbornness? I’m not quite sure.

I’m specifically talking about doing great things in the leadership space. I attended a HRINZ special interest group presentation last night on what Refining NZ is doing in respect to leadership development. The key message I got was: be yourself. This is the concept of being who you are rather than what other people want you to be. It’s about being comfortable in your own skin. Indeed, Ken Rivers (CEO, Refining NZ) spoke about 17% of people’s performance being related to them being comfortable with themselves and only 3% of performance being about people having alignment with the business values. Furthermore, it is not about money or technology it is about the people. How are the people using the technology?

And this all comes down to the conversations that leaders are having with their people. People, people, people, conversations, conversations, conversations. Need I say more?

What really struck me though, was that the leaders at Refining NZ really do walk the talk on this. Even down to the way that the content was presented. Ken Rivers, in particular, was authentic. He presented in such a way that I felt like I was having a conversation with him (without another 100 odd people sitting there). Also, who has the balls to say that they don’t really do anything all day but talk to people and check the sports results? Traditional managers must be rolling in their graves (although I don't think they're dead yet)!  But it sends a very clear message to the business – my job is to talk to people. People are important.

It’s not new-fangled, complicated to understand or even, seemingly, difficult to implement. So why aren’t we all doing it? Well, first of all it should start at the top. For most people/managers/leaders, if you said that you just talked to people all day and that was your job (putting aside people whose jobs it is to talk to people all day – sales, recruitment etc.)  you’d then, probably, be waiting for the redundancy hammer to fall. If it starts at the top, then that fear should be removed. Secondly, how comfortable are we being ourselves? And, how has that been ingrained in us over our careers? In my short career so far I have at times felt like I’m not allowed to be myself. Because it might rock the boat, people might get upset or it’s not the way the business does things. Some of this has been the nature of my job, and some of it a tension between my values and the values of the company.

On reflection, if I was more aware of my values and leadership style earlier in my career I might have made different choices. It is all a learning curve. So, I really like this concept of getting in touch with your own self and your own authentic leadership before focusing on the business values. And if your business doesn’t yet facilitate this, then there is nothing to stop you doing it – take personal responsibility for it.