Authentic Leadership

“You don’t have to be a ‘person of influence’ to be influential. In fact, the most influential people in my life are probably not even aware of the things they’ve taught me.”  

-Scott Adams

In this article, I want to propose an empowering perspective about leadership. 

It can be easy to assume that you don’t practice leadership and cannot be influential if you’re not the formal “leader” of some kind of project, community, or organization.

However, I want to offer a different perspective: Leadership is the willingness to observe and the ability to respond. 

In this view, we can exercise leadership anytime we are 1) willing to recognize a need that arises around us, and 2) able to take action to answer that need in an appropriate manner.

I want to bring special attention to two key words in this definition: Willingness and Ability. 

Willingness is the courageous choice to bring our attention to something we care about (in us or around us) and to recognize that something can be done to hopefully improve the conditions of the specific context, situation or experience. It can be painful to see something that is not working or where there may be an injustice. It can also be scary to identify something that could be changed. This is why the first step in authentic leadership is a willingness to make a courageous choice to observe and truly acknowledge what is happening. 

The next step is to tap into our inner and outer resources to take response-ability for the change that needs to happen. This is an intentional decision to respond and take the appropriate action. 

Examples of this leadership in action can be anything from observing where we’re stuck in a particular role and deciding to become more authentic, seeing someone crying on the street and asking if they need some support, or noticing that a pattern of behaviour at our workplace that may be having a negative impact, and choosing to name it so that others can see what we see. 

After all, underneath everything else we may associate with leadership, at the core of true leadership is the ability to help people to discover their power of seeing and seeing together, in order to respond to the reality people face and enact. 

Be the change. 

-Text by Solomon Krueger