This post really got me thinking about the meaning of authenticity.

While I agree that authenticity is a key element of leadership, I don't think that it implies either caring or integrity. Take the Wall Street CEOs who almost bankrupted the world. I am sure that they authentically cared about their employees (who made lots of money) and their shareholders (who also made lots of money). While it is clear that Goldman Sachs systematically abused their customers, I would suspect that the GS leadership genuinely felt it was their right to do whatever it took to make a lot of money. The concept of authenticity does not imply anything about the social good, only that someone is genuine. In that sense someone can be authentic even if they are a jerk as long as they are a genuine jerk.

Just to give this more perspective though, a short while ago, I was asked to work with the Japanese team of a multi-national company to create a leadership development program that would be proliferated globally if it worked in Japan. To do this, we assembled 8 positive deviant Japanese leaders and conducted a 3 day workshop that produced a set of best practices on how to be a great leader in their organization and a learning program for becoming a great leader. Authenticity was a critical part of both the best practices and the development program. They felt very strongly that a great leader had to be authentic.

However, we immediately ran into 3 problems:

1. The Japanese have many words for authenticity that do not have American English equivalents. The Japanese have a much more complete and nuanced perspective on authenticity than Americans, and it was reflected in the language and to a degree in the culture.
2. The Japanese had some specific ideas on how you could guide someone to be authentic that were also a little different from US approaches. Specifically, the Japanese recommended that all prospective leaders spend several days meditating in a Budhist Temple. Their view was that self-reflection was the road to authenticity and meditation is great self-reflection.
3. Given the first two issues, it was very unlikely that the program, which was tremendously successful for the Japanese management team, could transfer to the US. Can you imagine US CEOs giving their teams 2-3 days to go meditate (and the reaction of the teams to the request)? It just wasn't going to happen.

So we ended up creating a separate leadership development program for the US, which was also quite succesful, but it only briefly touched on authenticity. Overtime, we did many such programs in the US and the results were always similar.

The conclusion of all of the work is that authenticity is actually critical for effective leaderhip, but in US corporations, authenticity does not mean there is caring and integrity too. For most organizations, it is just luck if their leadership has even one of these attributes, much less all three.