The Niagara Institute

Authentic Leadership Helps Steer Organizations Through Uncertain Times

Global economic uncertainty and fast-paced workplaces create a pressure cooker for workers and organizational leaders. In this stressful environment, leaders face multiple and often-conflicting demands from their customers, senior management, board of directors—and staff. Employees are seeking greater transparency and a stronger relationship of trust with their bosses. In short, organizations are seeking authentic leaders.

Being authentic is different from being everyone’s friend. Authenticity means demonstrating consistency between words and actions, and being coherent in the various roles that leaders play. Workers don’t expect bosses to be perfect, but they do need to trust that their leaders are acting in their interest.

Authentic leaders know themselves—their own values, strengths and weaknesses, and impact on others. This knowledge helps prepare them to manage themselves, and others, under stress in the workplace.

Leading With Authenticity, a newly launched program of The Niagara Institute and the DeGroote School of Business at McMaster University, helps leaders learn how to build successful, trusting relationships with those around them.

Most people who move into a leadership role want to be good at it. Leaders are often aware of the strengths that have allowed them to move into their roles, but they want to fine-tune their talents so their behaviours contribute to the long-term performance and growth of the companies and organizations where they work.

Being authentic is different from being everyone’s friend.

As part of the three-day program, participants receive the results of four psychometric instruments—one of which provides feedback from people who work around them in the organization. The information is not shared with their boss or with the organization; it is used to help the individual leader realize what kind of impact he or she is having on fellow workers. This feedback, along with the results of personality-related assessments, helps participants produce their own personal developmental goals and the plans required to achieve them.

Organizations themselves realize that leadership development is crucial to their current and future success. A Conference Board of Canada survey of human resources executives in 2010 identified retaining critical talent and building leadership as top priorities. In the short term, management or leadership development is the highest priority; in the longer term, succession management is the second highest priority.

To make the situation more complicated, many organizations have targeted the middle ranks of management for restructuring, effectively increasing the responsibilities for the remaining leaders. With the tough competition that all organizations face these days for clients and talent, they don’t have the luxury of ignoring leaders whose behaviours prevent trust from forming. The research on workplace turnover clearly shows that individuals don’t leave organizations—they leave bad bosses.

High-quality leadership is a competitive advantage for organizations. That alone makes it extremely important for organizations to support the development of their leaders. The skills and behaviours that build relationships and trust are investments that pay off in greater productivity, sustainability, and success.

The next Leading With Authenticity program will be held as three one-day sessions, which will take place February 2, March 1, and April 5, at the new, state-of-the-art DeGroote Ron Joyce Centre in Burlington, Ontario.

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