E008: Authentic Leadership

This is the world of work podcast with James and Jane. Hi. This

is James and just before we start this episode, I wanted to remind you that you can support us via Patreon on our website at WWW dot, World of work.io. Forward slash support. Okay, let's get on with the episode.

Hey everyone. This is James and Jane, and here we are again. This is episode eight of a world of work podcast. We've made it all the way to eight, a that feels like a pretty special number. Maybe we should celebrate. How are we gonna celebrate? And I think it's too high level to be meaningful. I'm not sure I agree with the way. Yes, what do you think about that? So we're actually focusing today on authentic leadership, and we'll do the usual structure, but we normally do. We'll have a bit of an intro, do some definitions, do a bit of a research, round up, share some hints and tips. Have a list of a week all that good stuff, and to help us through. We've got a friend from the lovely city of Edinburgh called Laura Kinsler, who's here, who's spent a bit of time looking at authentic leadership, and who hopefully will help guide us through the subject a little bit today. Would you like to say hello, hi,

yeah. So you've been in Edinburgh for a while now, and you're working here running a consultancy of your own. Is that right? Yes, I've been here six years. I'm originally from Oz,

but yeah, run a consultancy called Yellow owl cool, which I'm sure I'll share more about in a second. But yeah, yeah. Okay, cool. All right. Well, anyway, welcome to the podcast as ever. You can look us up on the internet, www, dot the WoW podcast.org, or you can tweet us at the WoW podcast. Cool. All right, so

why don't we jump straight in with some definitions? Jen, do you want to run through a few definitions? It is that favorite, my favorite time of the podcast, where we get to see what all the big black books and Google are saying about some of the terminology that we're going to use today, and some of the terminology and definitions relevant to the subject of authentic leadership. So I'm going to start with authenticity, which I think is really interesting, because I suspect it has its roots in the legal profession with authentic documentation and

around how do you check something as an authentic copy? So, but the definition that I'm going to pick up on is the one from Miriam Webster, which is more relevant to the topic we're talking about, I think, which is true to one's own personality, spirit or character, which I really like? Yeah, I kind of like that as well. I mean, you've seen several different definitions out there, but that's quite a good one for me. Yeah, I like that one. And then I think also something that we talk about a little bit more is around identity, which is something we think quite a lot in politics and sociology and psychology at the moment, but I think it's really relevant here. And there's a definition from ditchery.com which is the conditional character as to who a person or what a thing is, the qualities, benefits, etc, that distinguish or identify a person or thing cool. And I think the two together are really important for this subject. Yeah, I don't know what other people think. Yeah. I think that's a real sort of core building block for authentic leadership. I am much simpler. Oh,

well, there's a notion of personal identity and collective identity, but the idea of personal identity is just one self view that's it cool.

Anything simpler is always better in our view. I think sometimes, particularly with some of the academic definitions, they try and go so prescriptive and what they're explaining that they lose their meaning. For a lot of people out there, yes, I agree, which is very true. And then I'm just going to throw in one more definition, which I really like, or I certainly like the concept of, I think it's important to share, which is around self regulation. That James picked up a definition from Psychology Today, which is behaviorally. Self regulation is the ability to act in your long term best interest consistent with your deepest values. Yeah. And the brackets, the brackets from the definition, I think, which is violation of one's deepest values, causes guilt, shame and anxiety, which undermines well being so don't do it right? Why did you

know all of my frustrations? I was thinking about that when I looked at that. So, yeah, those are my picks of the definitions. I don't know what other people have got or, yeah, I mean, I'm with you again. I'm one for simplicity. For me, authenticity, the one of the themes that comes out

across literature is this idea of one's true self, which I guess you could have a whole podcast on. What does that really mean? Yeah, and philosophize about that, but yeah to me, and it's. In its simplest form, it's one's true self

and self regulation. Yeah, it's interesting because I'm just noticing as the definition I've got is an ability to act in alignment with a person's core values and beliefs. And I'm just noticing that word ability that's interesting because it makes it sound as if it's something that you've got to sort of work at which I actually believe is true. You do have, I think you do. I was just you listening to you talk about that makes me realize how much similarity over not similarity, but overlap there is with the podcast that we did

earlier on, when we were talking about the changes that we've seen in the focus on personality versus inner values. We did a podcast on a big thing in the literature where pre 1970 1980 Yeah, this is sort of personality and character. It was about your values internally. There a little bit around what makes up organizational change, some frameworks of organizational change. Talk through some model interesting. Because I think self regulation, you can look at it two ways, can't you? You can look at it as in, are you? You hiding anything? Are you, if you're not your true self,

should you be self regulating? But I it completely contradicts what you've just said, which I totally agree, which is, you have to work at it. You have to work really hard yourself. Yeah, yes. And even before you're true to yourself, you, I think you need to work hard to understand who your true self is, right? So you need what new things you can bring to the market, and that absolutely is not in response to change. It's about driving your own only once you do that can you start to self regulate. And for me, self regulation isn't different to authenticity. It's just being true to yourself, but managing yourself through the world. And you want to present authentically and be your real self, and know your real self, but you polite to people and you know, I think that's a fair part of it. Yeah. I think we grow up in a

from being kids to adults. We grow up in a world where we are either trying to avoid the stick or get the carrot Right, yeah, yeah. And that political that that really plays out in the corporate world. You know, leaders are trying to look after stakeholders. They're trying to look their management team. They are trying to follow and avoid the stick same time. And so I think we are compromised in that process, yeah.

Just makes it more difficult to really be authentic in lots of ways. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think

part of this call around authentic leadership is around bringing consciousness back to ourselves, yeah, which I think I could talk about that later. But

yeah, bringing consciousness to the choices we make to what is important to us, and that is really challenging and takes a lot of courage. Yeah, well, it sounds like a good time to jump straight on to a bit of a research Roundup. I mean, I think we're kind of getting into it. So listeners, know, normally, sort of James or I will talk through some of the research we've done, but given that we've got Laura here today, we thought we'd, you know, fire off some questions and have a bit of a discussion around to move topics. So I guess just starting out, what would you say authentic leadership, really is, we've talked around it there with some definitions and things, but how would you kind of encapsulate it into into a phrase? Well, there's so many definitions that are thrown about in the academic literature, but one of the ones that I love, that that calls to me a lot is this idea of a behavioral pattern of leadership

that involves different elements. And the different elements that they talk about are being really clear on your values. They talk about relational transparency, so being open in your relationships,

they talk about Balanced processing. So it's this idea of being open to different perspectives, even if you don't necessarily agree with those perspectives,

this idea of self awareness, raising your self awareness and authentic behavior, which sort of ties into self regulation, this idea of walking the talk, but in in lots of ways, it's a bit complicated. It provides a lot of factors, but it provides a useful framework pattern that involves those different elements,

but and it's not nice and neat, but I like it, because I don't think leadership is nice and neat. I don't think that this space is linear, and I think that it's this allows for this. This sort of broad definition, allows for complexity and allows for the reality of being a leader. I also see authentic leadership as I'm going a bit all over the place, but I'll come back

as a sort of core construct that other forms of leadership emerge from. So again, it's this idea of getting these fundamental principles right, walking the talk, living by values, self awareness, getting those principles right. And.

The other forms of leadership emerge from that. So, charismatic leadership, okay, five level leadership, yeah, for me, this notion of to us at the WoW podcast.org or you can tweet us at the WoW podcast, yeah. So that's a really interesting concept about

but both the challenges that we experience when we're working with people and talking to people about leadership, and that one they want an answer, yeah, and it's so frustrating when you the people are so different and they're so diverse, yes, and the people they're serving are so diverse, and yet, people quite often have a bit of a dive into some definition discussions, as we usually do, then we'll do a research round up. We're going to look five things that will make great leader. There's five things that I can talk about with you that might help you identify what would make you a great leader, first, for organizational change, and those external factors influence your organization and the level. So let me take a step back on that definition.

They talk about a behavioral pattern. They talk about those different elements, but they also talk about the need for this is about not just about leadership, but followership. And the idea is that,

you know, authentic leaders, and it's not just about their egos. It's about creating a positive culture, a positive climate, and developing their followers. So it's a it's, in a way, it's more of a selfless form of leadership, yeah, so I was reading the other day self, I was reading the other day about the prevalence of sort of dark personality traits and leadership, and this almost feels like the antithesis. Yeah, exactly. So we've got what we got. What we got, we've got, like, narcissism, psychopathic behavior, and another one which I can't remember what was, Machiavellianism, okay, right. So, so that's like the dark trinity of behavioral types within leadership. And in some ways, I think when we're speaking about authentic leadership, we're almost talking about the inverse of that does that, yeah, it's really, interesting. We I was on a

monthly Tweet, tweet along, oh yeah, with a via the AVM, which is an association of volunteer managers. And we were talking about how there is a debate to be had about whether leaders in the nonprofit sector can look to volunteer managers for examples of leadership because volunteers aren't getting paid. You have no leverage over them. You have no contract, no control. They they have to follow by choice or not at all. So there's a really interesting thing about actually quite junior people in non profits who have really quite extensive abilities to be authentically leaders of their volunteers. And it kind of turns the whole thing on the head, which I think is really hard for corporates. I think it's more think it's much harder because they've always got all of these additional levers, yeah, which brings us back to the car and stick. That culture of Caron stick then creates different motivations for people,

whereas I think that the third sector is much more self self directed. There's much more self motivation, because they're not doing it for the stick. It's a lot more purpose driven, isn't it like an individual purpose drive? Yeah. And it's interesting, because someone recently in the third sector for organizational change, and it shows a series of relationship between the factors. So what it's trying,

my belief is, you know, I haven't done it for the corporate or the particular workshop I'm thinking of, but I wouldn't,

I wouldn't do them any differently, yeah, probably do them exactly the same thing, different things would emerge from the workshops. But

I've done, really, done a lot of workshops on authentic leadership in the NHS, sure. Okay, mainly, and that that's such an interesting space to do it in. Again, there's so many similarities and values. Yeah? Says your structures and your systems affect individuals in an organization, and the factors that are close and sideways positive, yeah, that's the other thing with this stuff, that you're right when you say it's the antithesis of the dark side of leadership, because it really is anchored in integrity and positive values. Yeah, and that's a theme that runs through all the literature. Do you ever get a sense from the literature that it's

how we want authentic leadership to be, rather than how it is. Because there would be a counter argument that if you are Machiavellian, yeah, and narcissistic, but you present that in its true itself to the people and they choose to follow you, are you still being authentic? Yeah. I mean, don't get me wrong, not a place that I want to be, but, but if it, if they are offering you purely with the carrot and the stick in its most sort of extreme terms, you will share in the in the riches still, Does that, does that? Is that still authentic and that it's funny, because when I run workshops, when I talk about it, when I look at look. At this. From an academic perspective, I tend to steer away from

the morality behind this. And you're right, it's great. It's not that black and white. And is that an authentic leader or not? You can have a whole debate about that. And I guess again, another thing that another challenge. I think I agree that it's not, you know, detailed enough to be hugely useful, but it's just kind of simple, because to put it in a box, they can all of a sudden go, Okay, it's getting better, it's getting worse. It's right, it's wrong. Yeah, that's what they're driven to do, which has its pros and cons. Yeah.

So in measuring it, they've just, they've said, Okay, well, this is what we believe. This is, this is what it's pointing towards. If we Yeah, but, but is that? What they're saying is, in these five behavioral patterns, the openness, the values, the authentic behavior is that exclusively what authentic leadership is, I don't know, as a construct, as a psychological construct, within the world of academia, this is what they're pointing to, saying that it has got moral, positive values. They're saying that is it is anchored in authentic behavior. It does. People are

clear on their values. They are open. They're open to different perspectives. But in the real world, how does that play out? Well, probably not as nice and neat and clean, yeah, as it's being presented, definitely, yeah. It sounds like, in the academic writings, it's it has taken on a sort of a moral element to it, and you've applied, you know, the good side of things to it when, yeah, you know, when you can have, absolutely, you can have values, organizational structure. Those are all factors of organizational change, and they're kind of what a generally moral approach would be, yeah, and you can, you know, you can, but I think greed is good, whatever. Well, you know. And then you have a really interesting thing around, you know, if you look at the wolf Wall Street, or if you look at certainly mind Street, don't really have any particular business experience, because they're experts in what they do. And that's the reason the heads of the in terms of the looser sense of they were true to who they were to be. I guess in the definition of authentic they probably are. But it feels like authentic leadership has a separate definition that's evolved by bringing together some sort of moral compass element to it as well. So two things. One, this is not about a person in a leadership position all of a sudden getting to be themselves. Yeah, that is the definition, you know, that that sort of what you're saying,

authenticity and leadership, and these two words coming together, yeah, yeah. It's a construct, yeah, authentic leadership, which is slightly different to,

you know, now I'm gonna be myself on the boss I just get to, which is how, which is how it seems to be portrayed in a lot of the sort of more mainstream, quick win, yeah. Sign up on LinkedIn. Learn about how to be an authentic leadership. And that feels like it's very much being sort of hijacked. Effectively, something that's important and good is being hijacked for a quick, a quick here's five ways to be really authentic. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's not if we're looking at it from a academic psychological construct, that is not what they're talking about. And equally, you know, I think I do refer in the paper around,

you know, Hitler. Do we know that Hitler is an authentic leader? Well, actually not according to this construct, because, number one, he was mad. Number two, he was not looking after his people. And number three, he he was obviously not anchored in positive moral values, so we can't define him as an authentic leader. But was he a leader in a position of power acting authentically? Yes, he was, but he's not an authentic leader. Yes, on our definition, that's sort of confusing. I know that's sort of, I would argue number one, it's not confusing. It's really clear. Number two, what? What an effective tool that would be calls out style, which is the way that you you do things, and then it calls out your shared values. You're standing up there and being true to yourself, Okay, even, you know, and it's the narrative in about, you know, taking tough decisions and running your gut and all of this stuff. It comes out this bluster, yeah. And if I get bundled under the authentic leadership, yeah, name, but it's a different thing, isn't it, giving professionals a simple way of saying, hang on when we talk about authentic leadership. These are the things we're talking about. These are the things we should be looking for in people in our organizations. What a powerful tool that is. Yeah. So these are the behavioral patterns, yeah, that academia is telling us point to this thing that emerges, called authentic leadership, and this we can measure Yeah,

in different contexts, which might nicely bring us to the research. Yeah, I'd love to do that just one thing, just before we do do you want to introduce your paper to people as well? And we should Yeah,

a bit so I used to work in corporates, really in marketing roles, and worked in London and marketing roles. I've worked for Canon, Australia, NCR, and then transitioned into the world of coaching through a Master's of coaching psychology at the University of Sydney.

Community and really coaching executives for the last eight ish years in Sydney, Singapore and here in the UK.

And throughout that this, I had this thing when I was working at Canon, actually, I was seeing all these different forms of leadership, and particularly male dominated. It was a male dominated organization, and wondering, well, what's right, what's wrong, what's my form of leadership? You know, what's my voice? Where's my voice in all this? And that was sort of the inspiration for a paper I wrote, which was the development of authentic leadership using mindfulness and coaching, which I'm gonna have to talk about, mindfulness, of course, yeah, of course. And coaching, and I know we'll touch on that, and through that paper, really, I've delivered workshops mainly to the NHS in this space, but across different organizations

in different subject matters, but always really relating to authentic leadership, mindfulness and coaching.

So yes, I'm not an expert that they have segmented stuff. And when I think about the concept that everyone is, reflect on back to our last conversation before we jump into the research. We talked about authentic leadership being, you know, those combined words being defined as a collection of behaviors that in some of our language, bring together some of the lighter elements of behavior and actually create followership. So that feels like, you know, we've had a bit of a discussion on that. We've also then talked about authenticity and leadership and said that, you know, if you embody some of the darker behaviors, you can be a leader who is authentic, right? But then you will not embody this essence of authentic leadership. And I think a key thing to point out here is that if you're being true to yourself, but you're a jerk, then you have predominantly or often a negative impact on your team, right? So if there's somebody out there in your organization who you think is being themselves, and they're just really not a nice person or embodies some of these bad qualities, they might be being authentic, but they almost always have a negative impact on the effectiveness and engagement of a teams where they lead. Is that a fair summary from what do you think? Yeah,

yeah, yeah, yeah, cool, yeah, that we're talking about this as a almost psychological construct. We're not talking about this as a,

you know the idea of authenticity and leadership, talking about authentic leadership, yeah, yeah. So that distinction, yes, that's cool. You've made that clear. Well, it's clear to me, I'm getting there. I'm getting clear. I feel like we're between us

being able to flush out some of the challenges and questions that everyone might have. Yeah.

And for me, I think authentic leadership, and we'll come on to it, I believe, leads to better outcomes for the people that are following that authentic leadership, whereas just being true to yourself, if you're a jerk, doesn't

help your teams in the slightest. It might serve you, but long term, it's not gonna serve and that's the point, isn't it? Yeah? So yeah, the organizations that you're working towards, and that's sort of at the heart of this, that this is about serving others, yeah, not just yourself. Cool, yeah. All right. Well, do you want to tell us either a little bit about your paper or a little bit around why you think Authentic Leadership is a good thing? Yeah, I thought I'm interested in this question of, Why? Why do I care about it? Why is it important? And I sort of sat with this, which is

weird that I've sat with it for you, you know, like, years and years after I sat with it before this podcast. Yeah. Why am I so interested in this? Why is it important? And a few things came up for me. One was,

what a lot of the evidence or what the evidence points to? Well, actually, let me take a step.

There's a guy called Tony grant who's the as is that every time you affect one of these things, you affect every other one of those things, and that they're all actually interconnecting. You'll see that. And one of the issues, one of the challenges that he had as a coach, was people kept talking about, what's the return on investment, on coaching? Has everyone heard that

question every week? What's the return on investment? I don't care. Exactly. Okay, so I used to be an accountant.

So where's the ROI he was. This was driving him mad. He came up with this framework, which I often refer to, and I love, and it's, you know, it is what the label is, what the package is, which is the

well being and engagement framework. So he talks about the idea that, you know, if you have high wellbeing and high engagement, then people are flourishing. People are happy. If you have high wellbeing but low engagement, you've got people that feel great, but they're bored, and that has knock on effects, right? If you have people that have high engagement, so in other words, they're working really hard, they're doing the hours, but actually their well being is being compromised. Then we start to have people start dipping into areas where they're languishing, they're struggling, they're stressed. And equally, if we move into a quadrant where we've got low wellbeing and low engagement, all of a sudden we're hitting, you know, people are hitting the wall. You can say metaphorically, you know.

You're starting to get high levels of stress, probably depression, yeah, maybe time off, absence related Exactly, exactly. So this is like a two by two matrix model, yeah, and, and, like, ultimately, whether it's for a moral value or whether it's just for profits, yeah, I would like to think most organizations want people to be in the quadrant where they're flourishing, the sort of things

that way to achieve that. That's the same idea behind the volunteer army. So in an organization, how can you help improve a well being and quality of life and fulfillment of the people who work for an organization, but also help improve for productivity and efficiency, which is a really similar sort of

conceptualization, exactly, exactly. So if you look at, you know, the intention of trying to keep people flourishing, high wellbeing and high engagement, and then you come back to authentic leadership. Now, authentic leadership, in a way, has its roots in positive psychology. You could argue, because what part of what are the what the evidence is saying is number one for the leader, the evidence is saying that they have high levels of psychological well being, high levels of subjective well being. In other words, they're happy. Yeah, for themselves as leaders, operating from this space of authentic leadership, they're happier.

It's also linked to enhanced personal autonomy, positive relationships, a sense of purpose, mastery of your environment, and motivation to grow. Interestingly, it's negatively correlated to contingent self esteem. So their self esteem is not

they're not defending their self esteem in this space, which is sort of interesting. But for me, what the evidence is demonstrating is that

leading from this space, being open, being transparent, being clear on your values and leading from that authentic behavior, working on your self awareness, leading from that space you know, sort of social recognition within your organization and ideas and bring those people together almost into it, yeah. So then we look at the followers. If we look at followers, there is overwhelming amounts of evidence that if they rate their leaders as high on an authentic leadership questionnaire? Yeah, they a whole heap of things happen. So I

haven't said that clearly, not that if they rate their leaders, but people who rate their leaders high in authentic leadership behavior, yeah, I'm with you. Also rate themselves high in levels of well being, yeah, in levels of engagement, in performance, in I could keep going. You know, organizational commitment, behavior, yeah, commitment, high satisfaction with superiors, hope, positive, emotions, optimism, positive. I mean, I could just keep going. There is just an overwhelming amount of evidence. So if I ask you a question on this, it feels like what we're saying with this bit is there's clearly correlation between my opinion that my leader is an authentic leader and my own engagement and well being and enthusiasm. That's it, right? So we've got a correlation. Is there any chance that just because a leader is good at being authentic, they might also be really good at other aspects of leadership. So that what's engaging me as an employee, yes, is the other side as opposed to the authentic leadership? Or, do you think I don't know, in these studies, yeah, put when they've asked people to write, yeah, you know. So in these all I can say is these stuff, of course, yeah. I don't know if it's beyond that, when that comes down to correlation and causation, and that is, I think, for a lot of academic psychology work, it's really, really hard, yeah, but, but the bottom line is, if the if the construct is good, yeah, and it appears to be useful for people, that's at least half the battle. If there's evidence that there's a correlation, at the very least, it's something that you want to delve far deeper into. There's no reason not to do it? No. And I think there's also a really interesting concept around diagnostics. So if you have someone who has the ambitions for a work, a group of followers who have good, high well being, and who are happy, ultimately, yeah, and they have, they tick a lot of the boxes being able to use these different patterns of behavior to see what they're not doing, to help them identify how they can be able to get better results. Yeah, is going to start to build that, that evidence base, and that's the problem, isn't it? There isn't an evidence I just wanted to open up. We can start, you know,

doing what scientists do, which is really hard, and it is. It has got its pros and cons, a whole causation. Because, you know, yeah, because, you know, yeah,

but yeah, so, and we'll touch on that a little bit in a couple minutes. The next one I want to touch on is John wellbeing, engagement, yeah. Number two, what a lot of the evidence talks about, is trust, yeah. And I think.

So in this day and age, what is happening, you know, really, what's been happening the corporate world, specific, particularly, and what's happening in politics, I think trust in our leaders is becoming so much more important. And again, what the evidence is saying is that it promotes employee trust, respect and identification. So if I can trust, you know, sometimes talk about the fact that if I can trust you, then even

when you make decisions that I don't necessarily agree with, yeah, I have to trust that you're making them for the benefit. Yeah, because you've, you've given me the evidence over time. It's about relationship capital that, that you can draw down on, yes, yes, yes, even though I might not, yeah, like it, yeah, you've just got that credibility that actually, my boss is making that call, yeah, greater good. And I'm not saying everything, yeah, they're saying and I think, I think that's really key. It's about motives. You don't have to actually trust you in every aspect. Yeah, trust that your motives directionally, directionally, going the right way for the right way for the organization and for the wider group of the people. And it's that, for me, it's always that bit, particularly around restructures and things like that with leaders, where you can totally disagree the personal decision. But if you believe the person is doing it, and if people believe the person is doing it for the right reasons, for the most or for something that is comfortable for them to understand, yes, they're much more likely to be comfortable with that. And again, if I go back to those five behaviors,

if, as a leader, I can see that, number one, you have this idea of relational transparency. So you're open,

you're not Machiavellian. You know, we can see that you're open in your relationships. If, number two, I can see that you have a balanced processing. So

again, it's this idea of, you know, you're open to different perspectives, even though you don't necessarily agree to all my my views. You're open to different perspectives. If I can see that you you're clear on your values, and you're consistently living by those values, that you have enough self awareness to know your own strengths and weaknesses and the impact that that has on me and the people around you, if I can see that you do generally walk the talk then,

then yes, exactly what you said, James, like you're building the capacity in me to trust you. Yeah, you're earning the right to be trusted. Yeah, yeah, you're owning your trustworthiness, aren't you? Yeah? Well, ultimately, if you behave in those ways and create those patterns, yeah, no one has any reason not to trust Yeah, you're literally saying there's no reason you evidence anything about the way I'm doing it, except that I'm doing it for the best interest. And that exactly. So again, that idea of moral compass, yeah, and actually does, it totally comes back in you know? It's like, okay, once again, it's like, I gotta trust that you said, yeah.

So again, for me, and, you know, I can, I can go into other reasons why I think it's important. But really, to me, it's those two things in this day and age, yeah, the well being and the trust are just so important, yeah?

And, you know, the trust thing that there's a whole heap of evidence around creativity, yeah, quite a human level. It is human, but it's also real, like instantly, you say, volunteers and this individual and team innovation and creativity increases when they again in this authentically. Yeah, I can, I can see that linking to other things I've read in that space, and for me, what that is about, or that some stuff is going to have unintended impacts, or that some stuff or that the situation changes. So you're in the middle of, do you worried about, oh God, have I got this fear of failure disappears, inhibiting exactly mind traps, or whatever phrase you want to use, so it tips into other benefits as well. But for me, this well being and the trust thing are just fundamental and critical in this day and age, in the corporate world, in the social, you know, in the third sector, across our society as a whole, these are really important yeah pieces, yeah. So, so you know, some of the key things we've talked about there is that, you know, that dual view of well being and engagement and how you can improve both through authentic leadership and how authentic leadership builds trust that leads to other ancillary benefits. And we said it's beneficial for individuals as leaders, so leaders have a better sense of well being, and they're more productive themselves, and have less sort of cognitive dissonance, maybe in terms of being who they are and what they present. And at the same time, it helps our teams be more self assured, more confident in themselves, more trusting, more creative, better delivery, better well being, and better deliveries or engagement, I guess, as well. Yeah. And what I haven't touched on, which you've sort of reminded me of, is I think that this starts to tip into culture, yeah, okay. And I think you and I have personally spoken about this idea of personally, I I'm sort of sick and tired of these organizations who have all the beautiful values on Yeah, don't do it. Yeah. I think most people are, you know, I think, I think you'd really like my last boss, my last boss. We had a conversation about exactly that. And yeah, he struggles, he tries to and it's interesting when you talk through and fill in on those five behavioral patterns.

Because I can see where he succeeds and fails and where he keeps trying to succeed, like you say, it's an ongoing effort. And since you've got new behaviors, you've got new ways of working, and what you need to do in culture change is you need to mention about those ways when marketing would get a bit excited about, oh, and we could do this with the corporate report, and it's like, doesn't matter. We can but that's not what's going to change who we are and change how we do things which are very good. There's a first stage to help you deliver any large organizational changes to create a sense to actually walk at the top. Yeah, leaders cast really big shadows, and that's what a lot of a culture is, yeah?

So I think yeah, it's, it doesn't, necessarily doesn't start at the top. I guess that's a whole other podcast. Yeah, it starts at the top. But I that's one of my favorite phrases, by the way. That's a whole

other. You're right. It is another. It's definitely, it's a really interesting thing. And I think the truth is it's, I always, I always think about that whole culture, and I think Authentic Leadership helps so much, because I don't think that is limited. I don't think those behavioral patterns from reading them and the way you describe them are limited to leadership, absolutely in the traditional sense that a lot of people are talking about it and selling it okay. And to me, creating a really healthy culture, I always think of it as like an expanding bubble that unhealthy culture is trying to get in, and the more strong, capable people you have of protecting and safe regarding that culture and living the values, and the more you're pushing out all of the stuff that might hurt or hinder and all of the challenges, all of the challenges that are constantly fighting, you know, to make yourself more profitable, to serve the interests of all The different stakeholders, yes, to deal with all the challenges that come from internal politics. Yes, and everyone's constantly safeguarding and pushing out. I love that, because what's coming up for me, and I don't know if this is a good metaphor, but you know, it's about all the different it's like

the littles a, I'm a true believer. And my supervisor always talks about this, Louis Gardner, who's a legend, you know, there's a whole other subject as well, but, and she talks about this, and who's my man, the tipping point, yeah.

He talks about this idea of, you know, the littles matter, yeah, yeah. And it's not about, you know, it's about your idea of, yeah. And I think we're different conversations. And you build a wall out of bricks, it's for certain, yeah? And I'm sure people listening, we always talk about, you know, what does it look like in the real world? And this is what it looks like in the real world. Is when you see a culture start to change for whatever reason, and quite often it's an absence of leadership. It does happen, right? But you see these little things creep in. It's not about a sudden mass change. The little things in meetings, interactions and in emails and

like broken glass theory. Do you know that New York policing? So there's the whole thing. Well, just in a nutshell, you know, New York prime used to be obviously a big issue back in the 80s and so on. And there's a change in police leadership. And one of the things that police leadership said is what we need to do is we need to tackle the small things that make it permissible. Yeah. Okay,

exactly. Yeah. So by by fixing broken windows, you massively reduce crime, right? So, so while the little broken windows itself a minor thing, the impact of addressing some of these minor things is a huge thing. And likewise, the invasion of negative aspects of culture starts with a broken window. It starts when someone looks the other way for maybe a behavior that isn't isn't ideal in a scenario. To me, that's where one of the classic examples is when important key people, and I'm not going to call them leaders, because I think we're talking about think we're talking about but important key part of the managerial people start to ignore or not or tolerate. Yeah, exactly. Maybe aren't great, and it just it snowballs, because every time as a leader, if you don't take an action, you're sort of endorsing coalition. Create a guiding coalition vision. Create an inspiring, vibrant vision. Is a battle every day to do the right thing in terms of the five, five behavioral patterns you're talking about, yeah, it's not just being passive, yeah, and stuff. For some people, if you're if you get yourself in the right space, and I think we'll talk in a second about how to get yourself in the right place, I think if you're really in the right place, then it becomes like, place, then it becomes less of a battle, you know, if you manage yourself and then then you're aligned to all these qualities that we're speaking about, and ways of thinking. So it becomes almost second nature. It's building habits, isn't it? Building a habit of calling things out. It's building the habit being positive. It's building the habit of really reflecting on, did you do what, out of out of the system, so that things flow a little bit more smoothly. So that's removing barriers. And there's another plugging Louis, because she's amazing. But what was it for me? Louis Gardner, right. She has written piece which I'm always handing out to people, which is about safeguarding your own trustworthiness.

Great. Love that concept, yeah. I really like, yeah. So, you know, it's, yeah, yeah. We should, we should do something on that at some point. And the sort of, yeah, anyway, it sort of tips nicely

into the next question, yeah, I was gonna say so the next question was, and maybe we'll look at combining the next two sort of together a bit. Yeah. So request I wanted to ask is, how can leaders develop to become authentic leaders? Or, how could a coach help themselves? So how do we help that journey? So first thing I want to say that I'm very conscious of, you know, I talk about these five behavioral patterns, these five elements of this behavioral pattern, that it's not a checklist. So it's not all of a sudden an opportunity to go, Oh, what are those five patterns? I better start doing those five patterns. Five buttons. This is an ongoing journey, which Jane sort of touched on. You know, this is a journey. Yeah, so that's the first point.

How do I? How do I, what was the question, how do I develop as myself, yeah. Or, how can you help somebody, if you're a coach, how could you help somebody? Or, how do leaders go about that climate process? Well, process? Well, firstly, I go back to the paper. Fundamentally, I believe that coaching yeah and mindfulness Yeah,

based on and that could that, I could go on for ages about a thing called self determination theory. Was developed by a guy called Ryan and Deci, which two guys called Ryan and Deci, which is self determination theory is,

I guess again, what it says it is, it's a theory of self motivation, okay, and it's complicated, and there are loads of bits to it, but ultimately, what they took, what they say is, if You want to nurture self motivation. There's three elements. One is self efficacy. In other words, I need to feel like I can do something. I need to have a sense of confidence. One is relational, relationship and relatedness and a sense of being loved, okay?

And the third is choice. I need to feel that I have choices in what I'm doing, yeah, and if I feel those three things, it's more likely that I'll be self motivated enough to get on with whatever I've got to get on with. Now, funny enough, coaching does it because coaching is all about relationship. Coaching is all about

helping a client build their own confidence. Yeah, take on challenges, and coaching is also about autonomy. So, you know, as a coach, I'm trying to encourage autonomy, right? Yeah, yeah, encourage choice making, yeah. So for me, coaching helps bring back your own sense of self motivation in your own voice and and brings back what's important to you. It helps to realign realign yourself. That's a bit of a strange thing to say, but I believe it helps you

create the space to remove yourself from the carrots, the sticks, from all the things that are external drivers, and come back to internally. What's important to me? Yeah, I also believe coaching is a really good way to look at

raising your self awareness massively. I think is really important in this. And for me, the coaching I'm talking about is not like, let's set up another goal and let's drive towards another goal. So not transactional coaching, that's how I describe it, right? It's more around looking at,

you know, what are my own behaviors? What are my own triggers? Who am I being? What's my being and doing? How am I showing up in the workplace? And the language I'd use for that, based on things I've looked at, is something like transform. But there's also, there's a glaring hole for me, which is that in real life, what happens is you start changing stuff and realize that realize that some stuff's not gonna work. What steps are, what's your current reality, what you need to do to get them all together, whereas transformational coaching is more along the lines of what's on your mind. Why is that the case? Why do you feel this way? What would happen if you felt another way? And so it's more reflective on personal motivation. So again, you're looking at patterns. Yeah, exactly,

beliefs you have around yourself, absolutely. How do they act out? Yeah, and all too often in the real world, people's beliefs around themselves are shaped by the external influence that they're confronted against. So particularly in the workplace, what you see massively impacts the way that you think about yourself, the way that you make decisions, the way that you perceive value and action right. And individuals seldomly find the time to step away and really go back to themselves and say, Well, what's my interpretation of this? Once I've shaken off all the static and drops of impacts and influence from others. So if I get rid of that, I can think about myself. And I think coaching does help. I really do, and just that self reflection, I think, is so important as a leader, which is something you don't need a coach to do, you know, to be able to step out of a meeting and go something went on there. I was really uncomfortable. I was.

Really angry at, was it? You know, it's not about what they did. It's about what has that, what's emerged for you, what has been triggered in you, and what do you need to look at? Yeah, so taking the time self reflect. Sorry, no, I just, I think so you, you said it's, it's, it's an oldie from before. It is, I think it's, it's a goodie. But there's some dispute about part.

I actually think realignment is a really, really good word, because I think leaders, too often are in those meetings. They in all those situations, and actually what happens is they aren't able to take the time to step outside and think, how does that sit with me and with my values and with who I am, and actually have the space, and actually I really like it. I think it's I think that giving yourself the space to look at your patterns, behavioral patterns say, Hang on, look at what's happened in the scenarios in a coaching environment is a really powerful thing. And I'm kind of drawn to that term, yeah, realignment, I think for a lot of values who do feel a lot of leaders, who do feel they generally are heading in the right direction, but still are battling and struggling to make sure that they really are doing the best they can. Yeah, I think realignment to self is a great thing because you've got yourself, yeah, and the world sort of sways your sense of self all around and it does that's exactly that's a real world to me. That's a really good example of what it looks like in the real world. You're pushed and you're pulled and you're dragged in all of these different directions. Person, yeah, anywhere that's an individual, you know, there is a driver in me to please other people. And, yeah, there are points where

that drive to please others actually doesn't honor Me and doesn't honor the other person, and yet that's still in me, yeah? And it's, again, I go back to this word about bringing consciousness, yeah, you know, noticing and you know, and that's why I think mindfulness is so important in this space, the ability. And when I say mindfulness, and we could do a whole nother,

if you wanted to, but that's at least three. That's at least three when we talk about mindfulness, I'm not talking about meditating, per se. So some people might hear that word and go, yeah,

yeah. I'm not talking about meditating per se, although that may be a way into it. I'm also talking about just noticing, is it almost conscience? Yes, just conscious thought, yes. So so often we can be on autopilot. I talk about coaching quite a lot. I talk about developing conscious practice, yeah, so taking meetings that you would have normally, and actually being conscious throughout the entire thing, and giving yourself tasks to force that to happen, so either taking certain types of notes or observing certain things to allow you to be rooted in that moment and understand what's actually going on. Yeah, and I think part of it is being consciousness to ourselves, absolutely, yeah, and

which sort of brings me into, you know, one of the things you asked me for this five listing, yeah, yeah. Well, let's jump on that. So yeah, I wanted to quickly run through list of the week. So, as you guys know, every week we do a list. We asked today, if Laura do some lists for us. I think you came up with two, two quick ones, one on a list of five people who you think are authentic leaders, and a list of five books worth reading. Do you want to just run through those quick ones? Yeah. What I just I wanted to touch on the people, because the people, it was really interesting doing that list again, because what became evident for me as I did that list was that they're all very clear on their values, yeah, and I'll talk about Tim Cook. I won't talk about all of them because I am so conscious of time. Yeah, we'll share the list online. Yeah, you can share the list online. Tim Cook came into Apple and really transformed it. He opened it up. He got rid of the boys club. He's a consensus based collaborative leader. Isn't an interesting background of his own. Yeah, he's first openly gay man to stand up. You know, hugely powerful Bucha, which for me, is again about walking the talk. How do you become bigger than just you in order to be able to lead? He was in a meeting, and there were journalists and shareholders, and,

you know, they were presenting on how Apple was performing, and someone had said, Oh, we noticed you're doing work, giving work money to charities, and doing work in the environmental space. How does that link on return on investment? Return on Investment? That's

my question. That's all I care about. Tim that's comfortable, exactly what's the link? And apparently he got up and went on a rant in this meeting and said, you know, Apple is more than just that. And yes, we're here to look after shareholders, and yes, we're here to make money, but if you want to invest in a company that is purely about making money, then don't invest in Apple. And you know, because we're more than just that, the sort of phraseology we use for this that occasionally sneaks in and leads us towards some ramps is stakeholder capitalism as opposed to shareholder capitalism, right? So it's not about returns for your shareholders. It's about working out who your stakeholders are in the wider world, be that your employees, be that.

Your local communities, be they the country that you live in, yeah, and treating all of them as people that you need to return to, and how, not shareholders, which I think is a huge challenge. Yeah, that's our second podcast series. It's a whole different like Name Genre, I

just want to mention him, yeah, briefly, I'm not going to go through the books, because you can all have a look at the cells, and I know they're not all directly related to authentic leadership, but there's a, there's a sort of

connection, yeah, and will we be able to put up a link to your paper as well? Is that possible? That'd be great. Yeah, through just along. But I think he's a good example of really, you know, he doesn't just have these values as a badge. I mean, he just is those values. And he's very clear about that. And he's really infiltrated the whole of apple with that. Yeah, he's changed, right? People didn't think he'd be able to do it, yeah? And he's just opened them up as an organization in a way that was never done before, yeah? And you think about things like a current example around showing people screen time and even starting to embrace the fact that your product might be detrimental, but the right thing to do is to help people see that and manage that. That's a massively powerful thing that other tech leaders haven't done. Yeah, so again, that leading with values and morality in the light is good.

Cool. All right, so I think we're getting to the end here. Any last thoughts or top tips? Should we go straight to some notes, top tips around authentic leadership from either of you? I guess my one would just be around,

firstly, read the paper. Yeah, really helpful and really interesting, yeah. But I do think as well be thinking about this is for people really looking for new roles, particularly in the OD world,

I know it's not tick list, but if you're looking at new jobs yourself, look at the leaders in the organization, and look at how they behave, and look at those behaviors and those behavioral patterns. Because in my personal experience, and I have no academic research on it, except my four roles in life, where my bosses have shown up and shown those behavioral patterns. My career has been great, and I've been really supportive, and I felt nurtured, and I've been in an organization with predominantly what appeared to be quite happy and engaged people, yeah? So that's my tip, yeah? No, that's great. You know, choose your leader and look for that is a really helpful thing. I guess. My tip on this is, though, it's hard to spend time trying to figure out who you are and reflect on yourself, and that's, I think, the key to being authentic as a leader. And we know authenticity and authentic leadership are different, but at least if you do some of that introspection and work out what your values are and are clear on what's important to you. And I guess, you know, I kind of wrote this down earlier, but I guess if you do that, re baselining and realigning to yourself, and that's a great start in moving towards being an authentic leader. We still realigned ourselves all

right. So there are a couple last thoughts and tips for us there. I know Laurie you said that coaching was really one of the key things, so you recommended that as a tip. So I think that's a good one. So I think it's just time for us to say goodbye. You can get in touch with Laura, Laura at yellow owl.co.uk, or check her out of our website. So it's goodbye from Laura. Thank you so much for having me. You'll be back from podcast number two and three, and it's goodbye from me. James, goodbye Bye, Hi.