A Call for Authentic Leadership

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Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?
The idea that great leaders are simply born that way is a damaging myth. The best leaders heed the lessons of life experience, pay close attention to the examples of others, and if they’re lucky, receive focused support to develop their leadership skills from their employers. Great leadership doesn’t come easily.

So why do so many organizations assume their employees will magically learn to be leaders simply by giving them a management title? When managers are thrown into positions of leadership without the proper training and support, they do what they’re best at: they manage tasks and timelines. They don’t, however, automatically inspire staff loyalty.

In fact, these leaders may feel trapped in a job for which they don’t feel qualified. They perpetuate the daily drill of scheduled and rescheduled meetings, assigned and re-assigned workloads, and tight-and-getting-tighter deadlines. Yet they may feel powerless to motivate a staff who seem to share no common values and expectations with each other. When leaders don’t lead, corporate visions go unarticulated, corporate missions go unsupported, and employees lose faith in their employers.

Under such circumstances, how can a company successfully navigate through times of unprecedented economic change? How can it profit? In the worst of times, how can it survive?

News flash: it can’t.

Success today requires managers ready to lead through times of change, a flexible, engaged, and innovative workforce, and deep support for foundational business values. But most of all, it requires companies to be open-minded about a different way of doing things–one that no longer revolves around throwing your best managers into the deep end of the pool and watching them slowly go under.

The match game of corporate success.
I’m a woman on a mission. I want to help organizations open their eyes and realize that success is a direct result of re-engaging their leaders and support staff from the inside out.

Research shows that engaged employees are more productive and less likely to leave an organization–yet around 20% of employees are actively disengaged, costing $300 billion in lost productivity for U.S. companies every year. Real engagement requires that employees feel a deep connection to their work and their company, and needs visionary leaders who bring creativity, authenticity and energy to their work with staff and peers.

I know from experience that finding and forging a deep alignment between employee passions and company values creates great workplaces, motivates great leaders, and causes buy-in to naturally happens. And a committed workforce means a more profitable company.

I’m a strong believer in the words of Albert Einstein: “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” If businesses want to succeed and thrive, to pulsate with a high level of energy, if they want their employees to generate innovation and productivity, then they need to change the way they think about the workplace.

Instead of dreary environments, one-size-fits-all titles, and rigid information management, organizations can envision workplaces that focus on collaboration and co-creation, where employees fuel the shared corporate vision with their unique talents and individual passions. They can also envision leaders who lead from an authentic power that comes from within, who tap into their personal creativity and unique style, and use the inherent gifts they find there to inspire and motivate others.

In fact, if businesses really want to survive today’s turbulent market forces, they absolutely should envision these things. They should want them with every fiber of their corporate being. Achieving a compelling future requires a compelling vision to get there. The time is now for companies to reassess their ideas about work environments and leadership–and to throw away the ones that don’t work, once and for all.

The challenge to walk the walk.
I know change like that doesn’t come easily. But I also know the power of reinvention. I used to believe the only way to succeed was to forge ahead with blunt force, using all of my energy and even more of my time to force myself to fit into a stereotyped role that never felt quite right. The blunt force trauma of a spinal cord injury in my driveway ended that belief as suddenly as it almost ended my ability to walk.

I learned to walk again, assisted by two canes, after many months of physical therapy. I did not return to my previous ways. The accident had forced me to take stock of the things in life that really mattered to me, to take a good look at my values and wonder why I wasn’t abiding by them in my career. The challenge to get back on my feet required me to harness inner strength I never knew I had. Inside, I found this remarkable power to fuel resilience to life’s toughest challenges.

When I finally went back to work, I did so on my own terms. No longer content to check my passions at my office door, instead I began to abide by my personal values in the workplace. And armed with my new-found inner strength, once I decided to show up for work as an authentic, whole person, I became more successful than ever before–not to mention a key asset for my then-employer.

I did not consider my journey a singular one. My success was a natural process waiting to happen. Given the right motivation, I knew anyone had the potential to take stock of their inner passions to enhance success in the workplace for themselves and their companies. And I knew I had just found my calling.

Towards a workplace where people love working.
Besides honoring employee values and passions, I’m also calling on companies to start rolling out other important elements of tomorrow’s successful workplace:

• Keeping a focus on a vision for the future, to help make sure the future is realized little by little, every day;
• Valuing diversity in all its forms, including racial and ethnic background, gender, sexual preference, and open-minded thought;
• Developing measurement systems that reward new behaviors, acts of integrity, and interactive feedback between managers and staff; and
• Promoting full and open dialogue via all methods of communication while avoiding relying too much on electronic means, in order to ensure true engagement between coworkers.

No more unhappy Mondays.
And one more thing I’d like to see more of in the workplace: laughter. An office where people feel free to laugh in the midst of conducting business is a healthier workplace. There’s no fundamental reason beyond the inertia of past practice why energy, personal passion, diversity, open-mindedness, and even mirth cannot co-exist in the corporate workplace. They are natural byproducts when employee values and company missions are well-matched.

If these adjectives describe your company, you’re doing something right. If they don’t, it’s high time to do some revisioning. There’s no way around it, fully engaged employees and great leaders are the keys to success in these uncertain times. Companies brave enough to reinvent the workplace are the ones most likely to thrive.

How brave is your company?