SmartPulse — our weekly nonscientific reader poll in SmartBrief on Leadership — tracks feedback from more than 170,000 business leaders. We run the poll question each Tuesday in our e-newsletter.
Last week, we asked: How authentic are your leaders?
- Extremely authentic — they epitomize the term “genuine”: 15.92%
- Reasonably authentic — they sometimes put on a front: 40.35%
- Not very authentic — they’re more about image than being “real”: 33.76%
- Not at all authentic — they’re a bunch of posers and frauds: 9.97%
Fraud alert. Forty-four percent of you don’t find your leaders to be authentic at all. The scarier news is these poll results also apply to you — 44% of you out there have team members who don’t find you to be authentic. Why is it so hard for us to simply be real? The combination of the pressure of behavioral expectations and insecurities leads us to act differently than we truly are. Fight the urge and seek to be the authentic YOU every day.
Mike Figliuolo is managing director of thoughtLEADERS and author of “One Piece of Paper: The Simple Approach to Powerful, Personal Leadership.”