Authentic Leadership: How to Be an Authentic Leader

Authentic leadership is a leadership style that prioritizes team members, emotional intelligence, and social values. Traditionally, a business leader’s core values might include company growth, increased profits, and other quantifiable and, often, monetary goals. Authentic leadership involves honing different leadership skills that focus on social, political, and ethical values. Authentic leaders use personal values to inform decision-making, meaning their authentic self (and those of team members) is important to the story and success of a brand.

The practice of authentic leadership can instill greater trust in employees and have lasting value for the company. Some elements of this ethical leadership style include:

1. 1. Strong sense of values: In authentic leadership theory, it is important that companies have a strong self-awareness about their ethics. These will act as a north star for a business and dictate leader behavior, making the company’s strategies more predictable and straightforward for workers to discern if a business is the right fit for them.
2. 2. Emotional intelligence: Emotion sometimes drives actions at work, and employees need the tools necessary for success. For those in leadership roles, this includes both emotional instincts—checking in on team members during one-on-ones, seeing how to increase their job satisfaction—and also the deploying of services like a human resources team and proper healthcare packages that tend to the tangible and emotional needs of a team.
3. 3. Self-discipline: Great leaders handle dilemmas respectfully and know that disagreements can lead to growth and self-reflection. Self-discipline is one of the more important authentic leadership characteristics as it ensures that an office feels welcoming and inclusive as opposed to hostile and off-putting.
4. 4. An acceptance of various points of view: Employees naturally bring their personal experiences to work. Varying life experiences at work allow for a more diverse set of ideas, leading to more dynamic collaboration.

Those looking to cultivate an authentic leadership skillset can find it to be a transformational process. Leadership development training for authentic leadership might include:

• Analyzing the true self: Authentic leadership works most effectively when leaders can identify their core values, allowing them to find a company that aligns with their cultural, social, and political values.
• Seeking feedback: Leaders can create a work environment with an even distribution of power by seeking feedback from subordinates. Leaders should conduct performance reviews at least on an annual basis, but it is also important that those in higher positions seek out employee feedback. This can create an environment where people feel they can speak their minds and be heard in a constructive manner.
• Leading by example: This could be said of many leadership styles, but it is particularly important for authentic leadership. If you work extra long hours, seldom use vacation days, or don’t take lunch breaks, you may normalize these practices and, as a leader, subliminally communicate that it is how others should behave as well. In reality, those actions are the opposite of authentic leadership, where workers’ emotional well-being and safety is most prized.
• Prioritizing transparency: Authentic leaders can gain trust by upping transparency, which entails free and open communication and rejects power hoarding or favoritism of employees. Such transparency leads to greater stability and consistency of the team's work ethic and greater respect and appreciation for the leader’s command.

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