Are you an authentic leader?

You do not have to be born with specific characteristics or traits of a leader. You do not have to wait for a tap on the shoulder. Instead, you can discover your potential right now. You can be an authentic leader, it’s a choice.

Authentic leaders demonstrate a passion for their purpose, practice their values consistently, and lead with their hearts as well as their heads. They establish long-term, meaningful relationships and have the self-discipline to get results. They know who they are.

They are careful to balance their motivations so that they are driven by these inner values as much as by a desire for external rewards or recognition. Authentic leaders also keep a strong support team around them, ensuring that they live integrated, grounded lives.

My Personal Story

Being a values-driven person, the idea of “authentic leadership” really resonates. After all, closing the gap between values and actions is a pursuit many of us chase on a daily basis. The idea of living and working by a shared set of values is very attractive proposition. When I align my values and actions, an authenticity surfaces within me and it allows me to be my very best in all contexts of my life. If authentic leadership emerges from life narratives, experiences, and lessons learned then I should probably tell you my story.

Family

My immediate family are all entrepreneurs with a heavy dosage of creativity as most are artists. My mother was an English teacher, writer, co-founder of a design agency and now is the co-founder of a photography business. My father is a playwright and performance artist. My brother is a music producer and musician. My sister was a writer and actress, now she is a full-time mom. I also had relatives who owned content publishing and medical supply companies. Growing up, I witnessed the sacrifices and commitment necessary to peruse these passions, it has been a constant source of reference and inspiration. This is where I get my entrepreneurial mindset, creativity, self-starter attitude, work ethic, calculated risk taking, and courage to make tough decisions. I was immersed in the creative process, always surrounded by collaboration and iteration on ideas. These performance artists influenced my path to experience design as I admired how they crafted these immersive interactive “experiences” with a keen awareness and sensibility for their audience.

Social Diversity

I grew up in a newly gentrifying Chicago neighborhood that was very ethnically diverse. You name the country, good chances we had a first generation family from there on our block. I hung out with the trouble-makers but excelled in school and played sports. I had a corporate office job working at a market research company while I was in high school. Including my family’s creative circles, I had a very extensive social network but what was more influential was that I was the hub and connector to all these tribes and clicks. I learned early about cultural awareness, community, networking, diversity of thought, understanding different value systems, brokering connections, personality traits, office politics, team dynamics, collaboration, and creative egos.

Early Business Exposure

My family is made up of entrepreneurs, essentially self-employed business owners. While some of them were independent artists, my mother was small business owner with a respectable client base, and my uncle owned a large well-known magazine company. They provided a variety of insights into small business management and creative fundamentals from accounting to promotion to boot strapping new ideas to event planning. Working at a market research company through high school and college gave me invaluable insights into the corporate environment and business fundamentals. This is where I learned about the value of consumer insights, how they influence marketing and product strategies, and the methodologies for executing projects and research. This was also my first exposure to technology disruption and opportunity to contribute to digital transformation and lead organizational change.

Entrepreneurial Experiments

The mix of family creativity, early business exposure, and a new era of technological capabilities presented some interesting opportunities. I have entrepreneurial blood flowing thru me so naturally I had to take a shot at following in the family business of “doing my own thing”. There were many pursuits including being a talent agent, band manager, marketing advisor, event promoter, web consultant, and a non-profit board member. I learned about identifying opportunities, selling ideas, building concepts, being a liaison, managing competing agendas, politics, power of networking, value of quality work, currency of a reputation, and most importantly the acceptance and lessons of failure.

Business Degree

Getting my college degree was not a required pre-defined path. Like many of my early life decisions, my parents gave me lots of latitude to charter my own journey. I took off a year in between high school and college, I already had a full-time job and I wanted to experiment with a couple entrepreneurial ideas. It was from these failures and watching other lost opportunities, mainly from a lack of business savvy, that motivated me to go to college and peruse a business degree. I channeled my ideas into my college courses writing extensive business plans and getting credits for them. I worked full-time during my college years plus I was more of a hands-on visual learner, so overall it wasn’t the ideal educational experience. Nevertheless, it did formalize much of what I learned organically and grew the left-side of my brain to compliment and balance my creative right side. The ability to blend and work in both a business and creative capacity has been my biggest strength in my career.

Values

I define values as important principles or standards for my behavior. I am always re-playing events, interactions, and outcomes that seem to have impacted my life, attempting to make sense of them to find my place in the world. Being an introspective person, these thoughts are always being reconciled and they cluster into lessons and learnings that have informed the creation of my value system. I do consider myself “values-driven” because my values are intrinsic drivers, things that motivate me, inform my decisions, and shape my actions. However it is my personal narrative that matters most, not the mere facts of my life or list of my values.

My Values: Choice, Wellness, Personal Growth, Inspiration, Simplicity, Activity, and Critical Thinking.

Life Transformations

As I started defining my values and put them into action, life starting getting more focused and purposeful, big and small life transformations (“moments of truth”) started to happen. I created my own path and I started setting up guardrails to keep me on it and boundaries to protect it. The challenge is to keep my values aligned with my lifestyle, social circles, relationships, family, and career. It is not without tough deliberation and challenging compromise at times. When I moved from Chicago to LA it was a profound lifestyle change that was long overdue. Most transplants that move west shared the same story and experience of arriving and evolving their values as a result. For me it was opposite, my pursuit and commitment to reconcile my actions and values was the catalyst, upon my arrival I was finally aligned, liberated from an environment for which I was not suited. When I hold that alignment of values and action, an authenticity surfaces and it allows me to be my very best. My leadership style has emerged from these values, moments of truth, and transformations.

Archetype & Leadership

These archetype attributes are the outputs from self-evaluations, peer reviews, and personality tests. They certainly influence my leadership style and personas. “Authentic” is now the primary way I would describe my leadership style, meaning values-driven, using my life experiences and lessons to guide judgment. “Adaptable” refers to the flexibility to adjust depending on scenario and needs (from daily mentorship to complete autonomy). “Trust Builder” is a persona that develops strong ties, alignment, trust, reputation, community with disparate tribes, understands deep connections that bond people and gives them common identity and purpose, all of which leads to group performance and social capital. “Broker/Connector” is a persona that builds bridges, generative relationships between tribes, seeing differences between groups, cross-pollinate ideas, developing differences into new idea and opportunities, all of which leads to innovation.