Page 6 - Leadership Basics Educative Leadership

1. Authentic Leadership

The Authenticity in leadership is concerned about values. It comes from personal integrity,
credibility and a commitment to ethical and moral conduct. Leaders are authentic when their actions
incorporate such values as fairness, compassion and integrity. Authentic leaders raise themselves
and others to higher levels of ethical conduct and social awareness. They may fail sometimes, but
they try to live their lives to the best of their abilities and with total transparency and honesty. The
ideal of authenticity in leadership is expressed in everyday individuals who are credible and
trustworthy. Whilst under pressure to achieve outcomes they nevertheless strive to be ethical,
caring and conscience-driven. Why? Viewed with a cynical eye, one lesson learned from the ‘greedy
90s’ and the subsequent crash of many start-up companies was not to invest money, time or skills in
organisations lead by people who are untrustworthy. Trust is a key value of any successful
organisation in the 21st century, and the most important criteria for underpinning trust is authentic
leadership.

Authentic leadership can be characterized as leadership that seeks to find solutions to problems and
to achieve objectives by emphasizing the capacity to empathize and understand the needs of
individuals within the organization. An authentic leader demonstrates emotional intelligence
through:
a. the capacity to feel empathy;

b. the ability to work effectively with emotions (not reject them);
c. a willingness to dedicate time, effort, and resources to learning the needs of followers;

d. an approach that is underscored by a widely accepted moral foundation;
e. a willingness to work individually with people to achieve success including
acknowledging the contributions of all in a timely and appropriate manner.
Authentic Leadership is also ‘dangerous’, because it is about people’s emotions. Taken wrongly,
authentic leadership can be seen as contrived leadership by teachers. This is particularly true in
times of major change and innovation (which means nearly all the time in schools).

Even if an organizational head is truly empathic, and possesses the values of an authentic leader,
teachers are likely to view the leader with skepticism, if not outright cynicism, if the change is not
seen to be of value to them personally.

Without a results-centred approach and effective goal-setting which helps staff see that the leader is
sincere and willing to assume personal risk to better the lives of everyone, the leader is likely to be
considered manipulative, insincere, and perhaps even dangerously deceptive.
Authentic Leadership involves an empathic approach to human relations. Not only does it require
active listening, it also stresses tolerance, flexibility, a willingness to engage humour appropriately,
and most of all, a high degree of resilience.

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