Building Authentic Leadership
Presenting the CHIC Principles for Building an Authentic Leadership
After serving more than a decade in prison for his role in one of the largest corporate scandals in history, Jeffrey Skilling, the former CEO of Enron Corporation, was released in 2019.
Enron’s corporate culture was based on power and ambition, rather than genuine values and social responsibility. Skilling and other company leaders focused on short-term financial profits, which led to financial statement manipulation and poor risk management. This lack of authenticity and business ethics led to one of the largest bankruptcies in history, the loss of thousands of jobs and millions of dollars for shareholders.
This downfall is leading to an increased awareness of the need for authentic and ethical leadership in business.
In this article, we present the four “CHIC” principles that help leaders create healthy and sustainable corporate cultures. We also describe the characteristics of the four principles as well as some suggestions for successfully implementing them.
Authentic Leadership
Authentic leadership rests on two fundamental pillars: self-awareness and relational awareness. Self-awareness refers to a leader’s ability to understand his or her own strengths, weaknesses, values and motivations. Relational awareness refers to a leader’s ability to connect emotionally with others, understand their perspectives and needs, and build meaningful and lasting relationships.
Authentic leadership is also based on the idea that leaders must be consistent and congruent in their behavior and actions. This means that leaders must act in accordance with their values and principles, rather than acting in ways that contradict their core beliefs. Authentic leaders are also transparent and honest in their communication with others, and are willing to be vulnerable and acknowledge mistakes and weaknesses.
Consciousness (C)
Self-awareness is therefore the first principle of authentic leadership. To be true to oneself, one must first know “who am I”?
There are many selves. First, there is the role you are playing at the moment: parent, friend, professional, boss, colleague…
Then, there is the past self, yesterday, a year ago, the present self, today at this moment, and the future self that we do not know well. Every day we shape ourselves according to the events and the experience that we accumulate. Our beliefs, our prejudices, our values evolve every day. It is therefore normal that our behavior also evolves.
Knowing yourself is therefore a daily task, which has no end. It consists in analyzing one’s personal history, in searching among the events of the past, from the most pleasant to the most difficult, and in finding for each one what lessons one has learned from it. See also how these events connect to each other. Steve Jobs said that we can only connect the dots after the fact, after they have happened.
Then we analyze what our talents are, our genius in a way, which allowed us to get out of the difficult moments and led us to the moments of glory. We can also identify our frustrations, those areas in which we do not shine. Being aware of them allows the authentic leader to have the humility to admit his weaknesses and to know how to lean on others.
We emerge transformed from this quest for the “me”. This is the first step in the transition to authenticity. We will have understood what our life purpose is, and we can then create our own path. Because an authentic leader follows the path that he or she has set for himself or herself, never the path of another.
Honesty (H)
Honesty is the second principle of authentic leadership. Authentic leaders are honest and transparent in their communication and foster an open corporate culture. This creates a culture in which team members feel safe to express their opinions and concerns, which fosters innovation and creative problem solving.
Honesty is also about making decisions that are aligned with our own values. The ones that lead us to wholeness. When we deviate from these values, we stop being honest with ourselves, and it is with ourselves that we must begin this process.
There are many pitfalls on the path we have chosen, temptations that keep us from our ambition. Starting with our own ego. It is important to take this into account, but it plays many tricks on us! How often are we not tempted to read “I’m not a man”?
Integrity (I)
The third principle is integrity. An authentic leader demonstrates integrity at all times, acting in accordance with their values and principles, and maintaining consistency between what they say, what they do, and most importantly, what they think. Integrity is fundamental to building trust and credibility in leadership, and to establishing a healthy and sustainable corporate culture.
And it’s not an easy task. Are we prepared to always reveal what we think? To always admit our mistakes? There is often a strong belief that it is important to be confident in front of your employees, to be right all the time, and to know everything. We think that by showing weakness, by admitting our failures, we will no longer be recognized as a leader, as a capable leader. This belief, although erroneous, is strongly imbued in our culture, by our education. Starting with school, where having a zero is considered an unimaginable shame. How can you go home and admit to your parents that you got a bad grade? Getting a bad grade is proof that you’re not up to par, that you haven’t studied hard enough, that you’re not smart. If we have bad grades, we will repeat a year, we will not be able to enter university, to study, to have a good career, nor to succeed in life.
But it is through our failures that we learn the most. It is therefore necessary to admit them, to analyze them and learn from them.
It takes courage, being an authentic leader requires a lot of courage.
Emotional Connection (C)
The fourth principle of authentic leadership is the ability to connect emotionally with others. Authentic leaders understand the importance of building meaningful relationships with team members and strive to understand their needs, motivations and concerns.
To achieve this connection, it is important to listen. Active listening, focused on the other person, non-judgmental, caring.
In short, authentic leadership is based on self-knowledge, honesty, integrity and the ability to connect emotionally with others. Leaders who practice these principles are able to create healthy and sustainable corporate cultures based on trust, transparency and mutual respect. By applying these principles to their leadership, leaders can inspire their teams to achieve new levels of success and growth for both themselves and the organization.
