The Authenticity Paradox | Professor Herminia Ibarra | TEDxLondonBusinessSchool

so I think we have reached peak authenticity I've been plotting how often the word authenticity appears in the business press either in headlines or lead paragraphs and this is what it looks like an upwards line it's tripled over the last ten years if you go on amazon.com you can buy about 20,000 books on how to be more authentic if you google it you'll get about 4 million workshops you can choose from on how to be yourself so you know from my point of view clearly we have a problem if we have to spend so much

money just to be ourselves but the cost as I see it is not just to our pocketbooks I've come to conclude that the way we think about authenticity poses a real danger to our capacity to grow and learn let me explain so I teach in I research people who come to those points that I call what got you here won't get you there moments well got you here won't get you there those are those moments when whatever is made you successful in the past what got you here is not gonna make you successful going forward

there and may well just get in the way so for example say that you're fantastic at delivering results through your own efforts but now you have to deliver results through other people or say you're an amazing analyst and you get promoted and now your technical brilliance is getting in the way of your ability to communicate very simply with people who don't have the same technical training as you and what's tricky about these transition points is not that those new skills are hard to learn it's that the old ones have become core to our sense of

who we are our identity and so not sticking with them feels like we're somehow being inauthentic and so we do and we get stuck let me give you an example Anna one of the people who I talked to in the course of my research was the CEO of a midsize transportation company she had been brought in from the outside to turn the company around and she had the results were great they were profitable again she had raised revenues they had overhauled operations but she was always finding herself across purposes with the chairman of the company

and this was playing itself out badly at their board meetings they were not aligned and essentially what was going on is that he wanted her to give a much more inspirational personal message that was his style and she was your prototypic engineer by the numbers kind of person and so there was a clash and as I listened to her talk about her frustration I said to her look and I it sounds to me like what he's saying is that maybe the next time that you have a key meeting instead of leading with the spreadsheets as

you tend to do perhaps you might think about telling a bit of a personal story an anecdote about something important that taught you something about the way you think what you're bringing to the party now and she just looked at me cold and said you know we're in danger today I can still hear her voice we're in danger today of being mesmerized by people who play with our reptilian brains for me it's manipulation of course I can tell a story but if the string is too obvious I can't make myself do it now here's the

question is Anna being authentic yeah is Anna be rigid yeah and so how do you tell the difference so let's look at some of the ways in which we define authenticity and see if they can help us sort it out the most simple way the most common way we define authenticity is being true to yourself but that begs the question which self your old self the past today's self the future and does being authentic condemn you to being as you always have been of course not now often times will be true to an aspirational self

that's what we talk about when we say fake it till you make it but for Anna motivational storyteller is not an aspirational self she does not want to become like those idiots who were all about the form and had little substance a second way we define authenticity is being sincere saying what you mean and meaning what you say now as it turns out the word sincere has a really interesting origin it comes from two Latin roots seen it without antenna wax without wax and it comes from the days of ancient Rome where it had become

common practice for statue merchants to hide any flaws in their statues with wax and the more scrupulous merchants the ones who didn't want to be dishonest would hang a sign outside their shops that said seen each other they were sincere now for Anna numbers are sincere unbar nisht anything else is playing games but we all know that the first principle of effective communication is tailoring to your audience your message to your audience but when you're new to it when you're not comfortable with that you insist that the numbers should speak for themselves a third definition

is being true to your values now for Ana the values of substance over form or no BS had been so ingrained all the way back to engineering training engineering school where I'm sure they didn't have courses on the art of telling a good story but she's no longer working as an engineer and she needs a bigger repertory so what's happening with Ana is a classic example of what I call the authenticity paradox and it looks like this you get to a what got you here won't get you there moment and you see yourself is facing

a trade-off between doing what it takes to be effective or being yourself it's one or the other you define being yourself in terms of the skills competencies and values that got you here you want to move up or be successful or have more impact but you're a little bit ambivalent about the transition you're a bit afraid you're gonna have to sacrifice your values your integrity you don't want to do it like all those bozos who came before you who were less sincere or less well-prepared or more political and so the whole situation evokes a version

of yourself that is at your most conservative at your most cautious which is neither authentic nor accomplishing what it is that you want to accomplish but you stick to it because you feel morally justified in being authentic can you recognize those situations so how do you get out of that what works well let me tell you you can not think your way reflect your way out of the authenticity paradox you have to act your way into a new way of thinking about yourself let me give you another example this is based on my own experience

when I started my career as a Business School professor many many moons ago I think it's pretty fair to say that I was dismal as a teacher really not very good at all by all measures I was at the bottom of the barrel in terms of the teaching ratings my students were disappointed that they didn't get the kind of gray-haired one that could tell the good war stories and connect them to the right networks and I was not having any fun in the classroom teaching and this was dragging out and loads and loads of people

try to help me and they gave me invariably that same advice that we all get when we're having a hard time can you guess what it is just be yourself and of course you know as far as I could see it that was the problem I was too much myself too introverted to academic too theoretical to an experience too scared you know but one day one of my colleagues came by to help me out and gave me somewhat different advice somewhat different feedback and I could hear him very well still today he said you know

when you walk into that room you have to recognize that this is an arena and you have to own it he said you're walking in there as if this was all about the content of what you have to deliver the knowledge the research the ideas he said let me tell you it has nothing to do with that this is all about you owning the space about your presence and the only way that you're gonna make it - clear - each and every one of those 90 students sitting there that this is your space and not

their space is to be a dog and go mark your territory in each of the four corners of that amphitheater you go up there Herminia go all the way to that back row that's where the troublemakers sit they think they're safe you're not gonna see what they're up to but you go right up there and you look at what are they doing did they take notes do they highlight the case are they prepared are they doing something else you get to know them one by one you put your arm around them whisper in their ears

get in their face touch them develop a relationship even if they're sitting in the middle row the middle person use for them in there and you have a conversation and by the way if you get a little hungry in all of this and they have some food just take a bite to have it you know it's your room it's not theirs now how much do you think I want to take this advice I'm much much preferred sticking to my highly ineffective method of staying up all night / preparing but at some point I got desperate

enough to do it you think it worked out now right away not right away some of them really didn't like me being in their face but I got their attention I started to get to know them a little bit better I learned more about what they were interested in I learned more about what they were looking for from the class and ultimately this little experiment of mine eventually ended up changing two important things how I saw my job and how I saw myself because before the way I saw my job was about me delivering what

they needed to know this shifted me to thinking about how do I create conditions that increase engagement that increase learning and that freed myself up to it bearment and I started to learn in terms of how I saw myself I was an introverted serious academic I wasn't one of those people into the infotainment and silly theatrics but as I started to see the power of teaching in this new and different way I started to see the value of it and I came to see that I could be good at it and that he could help

me accomplish what I wanted to accomplish I had acted my way into a new way of thinking about myself and thinking about my job now years laters I started to see more and more people take the experiment and learn approach with more success I started digging for a more expansive definition of authenticity and it turns out that the word authenticity comes from the Greek word authentic which originally meant that which you do with your own hands and started to develop to mean being the author acting of your own authority and eventually being self authoring which

is the definition that the humanistic psychologists Abraham Maslow Carl Rogers the people who are interested in self-actualization that's the definition they built on and they saw authenticity not as a trait that is something that you either have or you don't have but the outcome of a process of becoming your own person a lifelong process of learning about yourself now before you start nodding great this is good learning about yourself as good remember what's involved learning means doing stuff that doesn't feel very comfortable because you don't know how to do it yet it means being a

Machiavellian marked the four corners when you're an introverted academic it means telling a soppy emotional story when you and by the numbers kind of person and so that's why it helps be playful with your sense of self and by that I mean the opposite of taking a work like approach when you work you're serious you don't deviate from the straight and narrow you're goal-oriented when you play you're playful you're free to experiment you try things out if it doesn't work you try something else you are not committing to being that person you iterate think of

it as fast prototyping with yourself so the next time you face a what got you here won't get to there moment you have a choice about what definition of authenticity you're going to hold yourself to are you going to favor the insecure conservative historical self or will you choose to learn and act your way into becoming truly authentic thank you [Applause]