Authentic Leadership
by Ian Hunter
Ian Hunter is Associate Professor at The University of Auckland Business School and Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the University of Reading and Henley Business School in the U.K. He is a leading commentator and speaker on entrepreneurship and innovation and works with a number of businesses and government agencies. For this issue of Business Radar, Ian discusses leadership and what it means to be an authentic leader – in business and in life.
Ideas about leadership have been popular for several decades now. Almost routinely some fashionable guru comes out with a new-fangled feature of leadership: We’ve had transformational leadership, transactional leadership, situational leadership, and charismatic leadership.
Yet, at the heart of the leadership question is not which style you adopt, but who you are as a person. For the true calling of leadership is to be someone whose leadership embraces sound values and whose walk matches the talk. In a word, you are authentic.
It can be easy, behind all the jargon and clever-speak of the business world, to give the appearance that you know what you are doing. This can be especially true of leaders. In a booming economy, leaders are often feted for positive business results that were at times more to do with the growth of the economy than their own individual contribution. However, when the chips are down and things are tough, the true qualities of leadership are tested. Have you got what it takes to make things work in a difficult situation? Here are two examples of leaders who did.
In 1914 Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton left on his ship Endurance with the aim of crossing the Antarctic continent. Shackleton never reached his goal. Just short of his starting point, the Endurance became stuck in pack ice. Efforts to move her failed as the pack ice began to crush his vessel. Facing a desperate situation, Shackleton and his crew abandoned the ship. ‘Difficulties are just things to overcome, after all,’ said the redoubtable Shackleton. With games, lectures, and incredible camaraderie, Shackleton kept the spirits of his men buoyant for months, before leaving the ice continent himself in a small lifeboat to find rescuers. With only rudimentary equipment to guide him, Shackleton navigated 800 miles across open sea and landed at the tiny island of South Georgia, to personally rally a rescue attempt. Nineteen months after they commenced their journey, all his 27 crew were saved: none were lost. Shackleton never crossed the ice continent, but he demonstrated that great leadership is more than just achieving goals.
Closer to home, Colin Prentice was a successful teacher and school principal, before changing career paths to become CEO of World Vision, New Zealand’s largest aid agency. Prentice demonstrated outstanding leadership in taking on challenges as diverse as improving exam pass rates in multi-cultural schools, to mending broken lives in Rwanda and Kosovo. For Prentice, the most fundamental principle of leadership was service.
“Service takes many forms,” said Prentice, “but it always includes commitment, empathy and sympathy. It may be as simple as visiting the cold warehouse in winter to talk to the caretaker about his sick wife, or chatting to the car park attendant about the study she is doing after hours to try and better her position. It involves knowing the names of your colleagues’ partners and something of their families’ aspirations and disappointments so that you engage with them at a human level, taking a personal interest in them. For ultimately the organisation will be successful not so much because of the work you do, but because of the work your people do – and you must know your people.’
Prentice knew his people – and they loved him for it. Each Saturday he would write heartfelt messages of commendation to his staff: a note of thanks for help with a school activity; a word of encouragement during some personal difficulty. Staff treasured those notes. In fact, when one staff member died, every note Colin had sent him was discovered pinned to a notice board by his workspace.
Prentice, like Shackleton, understood what it meant to be an authentic leader. That what you say and what you do matters; that your capability as a leader is ultimately measured by how well you lead and care for those under your direction. How well you sense the talents of your people and bring them forward, so that the organization as a whole benefits.
Authentic leadership is not just defined by the goals that you achieve but by how you complete those objectives. Do you negotiate the business challenges before you at the expense of everyone around you? Or, like Shackleton, when you return back from the tough assignment, is your team still intact and ready to follow you onwards to the next mission? This is the mark of authentic leadership.