One of the more insistent cries from MBA faculty and many business gurus has been an emphasis upon “authenticity” in work and team relationships. Being authentic is pretty clear: it’s simply the willingness to be who you are and to tell the truth. It’s appropriate to think of authenticity as a personal characteristic, but it’s also useful to think of it as a “tool.”
Calls for authenticity seem to be cyclical, driven by both culture and context. In the sixties and seventies psychologists continually emphasized and even wrote books about relational honesty. But those discussions and experiences dried up in the ‘eighties and ‘nineties. It’s like the “authenticity grease” finally ran out and we need to go back to the garage and get all the parts lubricated again. Yet, the fact of the matter is that authenticity is a constant need in life and business. You can’t build partners without authenticity.
But authenticity can be a very slippery, even dangerous experience for consultants and especially for organizational managers and employees. What’s being authentic can be personally constructive to one and destructive to another. Indeed, one manager suggested that “many people who pride themselves on their transparency in fact have a mean, aggressive spirit which they excuse as being unusually truthful. I doubt that they would respond positively to similar bluntness applied to themselves.”
Authenticity is like feedback. It’s a tool, not an innate characteristic that a person is born with. And like feedback, some people are comfortable using it and others are not. Just so, some people move quickly to authenticity while others tend to play their cards fairly close to the chest. Some people become experts in its use and others stumble with the process. Authenticity like feedback is best handled with care by a caring person.
What authenticity can do
Both consultants and organizational members can find that authenticity is the most powerful tool for building trust and commitment from others. When your authentic communication demonstrates care, honesty and depth, those are qualities that can change the world. Authenticity has the capacity to deliver us from the doubts, reservations and unpredictability between people. It can make work not only great fun, but also very productive and satisfying.
Many people, especially in business, have an economist’s view of the human spirit: they think people can only be counted on to pursue their own narrow self-interest. This “economists’” view of life is so widely shared and frequently used that it has become the way people think about relationships, organizations and even how they design their relationships. This “economic,” suspicious view of life inherently rejects authenticity and full trust. It’s frustrating to realize that even if people do not regularly act in their own self-interest (and they don’t), the research clearly indicates that these same people believe that others do act on that basis. As you can imagine, that seriously limits teamwork, collaboration, and mutuality. It throws an axe into the middle of organizational work and impacts personal relationships negatively, limiting the potential for authenticity.
Building authentic relationships
One way to understand authenticity is to view it in teamwork and collaborative experiences. In those contexts, building authentic, trusting relationships starts out like a dance with back and forth exchanges of personal background or experience. From there the discussion can move to work relationships. Authentic relationships inevitably flowers in the form of a social contract. In my business, I am very straightforward about building authentic relations (even though I rarely use the term), and I test those waters before we have a financial agreement. Development and coaching don’t work without a contract that either states or implies authenticity. I also don’t think there is such a thing as collaboration or teamwork without a level of authenticity. Clients are often starved for authenticity and revel in the relationship. Authenticity is the grease under all social contracts. I’m certain, also, that authenticity is the reason why clients and colleagues remain friends, long after the end of financial ties.
In team settings where authenticity is profoundly helpful, relationship rules emphasize authenticity. Typically, I recommend that the team begin its work with issues like the following:
How will we go about setting mutually shared goals?
- How will we ensure follow-through and completion of agreed-upon tasks?
- How can we best collaborate?
- How will we keep issues open for discussion and disagreement, and manage our conflicts?
If you can get buy-in from all team members on these rules which essentially create a “social contract” there’s a high possibility for authenticity among the members. But you’ll find that the social contract and authenticity will break down. That’s inevitable, so you renegotiate the contract--again and again. The straight-talk renegotiation serves as a real plus—celebrating authentic relationships.
Typically, in my client relationships I’m not aware that our contract has broken down until I walk away from the meeting and sleep on it. My clients are not at all surprised to get an occasional phone call the next morning to get the news that we’ll need to renegotiate. Serendipitously, the act of renegotiating usually results in an even better, more authentic relationship than the initial negotiation. The payoff can be phenomenal.
Flickr photo by tstaires


