Becoming an Adaptively Authentic Leader

When I first addressed the community as their new superintendent, I felt apprehensive. “Just be true to yourself,” I was advised. “That is how you got here.”

That was true. Overall, I felt confident as a leader. My values, behaviors and the way I interacted with others always had been rewarded with promotions and new positions over my 20 years in preK-12 education. Being true to myself and being “authentic” was comfortable, congruent and effective.

Over time, I have grown to understand, however, that being true to oneself as an organizational leader is less about comfort and congruence and more about messiness and personal growth. Most importantly, it is about accepting that our identities as leaders of public school systems are not static but rather works in progress.

Collaborative Tendencies 

During my first years as a superintendent of a 10,000-student district in Illinois, I felt most authentic when I engaged in collaborative, often behind-the-scenes, consensus-driven leadership practices. Being authentic meant focusing on our mission and vision and writing regularly to my staff and community to communicate coherence between our actions and our overall vision. I loved playing with ideas and creating new possibilities (e.g., two-way language immersion programs and freshman integrated learning experiences), and I shied away from being the focus of attention. I relied heavily on relationships and doing the work in smaller, more personal settings through extensive engagement with my board of education and a wide array of committees and teams.

These behaviors were congruent with my identity as a leader, and I practiced them consistently throughout the school community. These behaviors, and the beliefs that underscored them, shaped the culture of work in the school district.

As I now reflect more deeply on these practices, I appreciate all that we accomplished. In many ways these leadership behaviors served our district well. At the same time, however, I recognize that they also may have inhibited personal and organizational growth. Could it be that engaging in predictable and consistent leadership behavior can be both effective in the short term and limiting over time?

As leaders, we learn quickly that the people with whom we work and serve expect us to be confident about what we believe and competent in our ability to lead. A clear and firm sense of self exudes confidence and can help us navigate choices and progress toward our goals. But if our sense of self is too rigid, it also can become an anchor that impedes our progress.

In reflecting on my daily interactions as a superintendent, I believe I generally met my team members’ expectations about how I should act. I am confident that my behavior elicited trust, but I wonder now whether it also might have fostered complacency. As a team, were we too at ease in our interactions, making our expectations for one another and our capacity to address new challenges more complicated? Were the comfortable routines we had established impeding our capacity to think differently and more creatively? Had I personally modeled behaviors that were less comfortable for me, would my administrators have stretched themselves as well? Could I have enhanced our organizational effectiveness by simply being less me?

Discomfort Zone

When we move beyond our daily practices, the questions become even more challenging. As superintendents, we often find ourselves in stressful situations of great uncertainty, well outside our comfort zone. When confronted with new challenges, particularly those that potentially impact our sense of self, our first inclination is to rely on those familiar, tried and true, authentic behaviors that have worked for us in the past. But what happens when they don’t work?

This threat to my identity, or my authenticity as a leader, became strikingly apparent during a long and heated community debate around school boundary restructuring. The district was seeking to better equalize enrollment among the neighborhood elementary schools. One school represented a very different socioeconomic demographic from the other sites, and although not explicitly stated, this difference became the underlying issue.

I realized my preferred authentic behaviors of engaging and empowering stakeholders to make redistricting recommendations were not working when, despite efforts to be inclusive, those members of the community who were most privileged had assumed the most power. As the superintendent, I needed to be far more authoritative, directive and political in advocating for those students who had limited power and voice in our community.

Trying to learn and adapt these new behaviors (at least initially) felt awkward and disingenuous.

Herminia Ibarra, a professor of leadership and learning at INSEAD and author of “The Authenticity Paradox” in Harvard Business Review (January-February 2015), says it is typical to feel uncomfortable when we try something new. When we learn actively, we initially engage in behaviors that may feel unnatural and even calculating, instead of genuine and spontaneous. Therefore, Ibarra says, the only way we can avoid becoming stuck or pigeonholed (and become better leaders) is to learn to do new things that a rigidly authentic sense of self would keep us from doing.

Adaptive Role

As I grew in my role as superintendent in three school districts over 12 years, I became much more cognizant of the political complexities of the job. I know now that in many ways I had become pigeonholed by the behaviors that had landed me my first position. When these behaviors became no longer sufficient in effectively addressing the ever-changing realities of my job, I learned I had to adapt and add new, less-comfortable behaviors to my personal repertoire.

Assimilating these seemingly less-authentic behaviors is not easy. We often feel like imposters, especially when the stakes are high and we are forced to practice these new behaviors in a highly visible context. I was made aware of my own growth in this area when I was in the process of transitioning from one superintendent position to another.

During an extensive round of interviews with different groups (administrators, parents, teachers, etc.), a board member who was accompanying me observed that, while my answers to questions were substantively the same, how I answered them and what I chose to focus on differed depending on how I assessed what mattered to each group. In essence, my responses reflected my ability to more effectively adapt to my audience and context, something that would have felt less authentic earlier in my career.

Revising Our Narratives 

So how can we embrace this essential part of our personal and professional growth as leaders? What can we do to better prepare and position ourselves to personally assimilate an adaptively authentic way of leading?

We can begin by simply being open to new possibilities. We can learn a lot from observing other leaders, engaging in new networks and actively seeking perspectives that differ significantly from our own. Coupled with a genuine willingness to learn from others, we must think more flexibly about who we are and embrace personal learning through active trial and error.

In addition, we must continually revise our personal narratives, or the life stories that we tell ourselves about who we are and why. Researchers have found these personal narratives can be powerful in defining identity and shaping our behaviors. The stories and images we’ve internalized since we started our leadership journey are very much a part of who we are, but they also become outdated. We must regularly edit them to reflect a more expansive and authentic sense of self that reflects our continuous learning and growth. Even though I still see myself as a collaborative leader, I have added new descriptors that reflect my ability to better assess need and adapt accordingly. My new narrative includes the words ”context matters.”

Most importantly, given the high (and sometimes unrealistic) expectations others have for us as leaders, we must have the humility and courage to defend our need for personal learning, not as a sign of weakness but as evidence of strength.

I believe that when we are true to self we constantly are growing our personal and organizational capacity. We grow as leaders by stretching the limits of who we are. We do new things that make us uncomfortable but help us learn through experience who we aspire to be and who we are capable of becoming. When we personally grow, adapt and evolve as leaders, our organizations will do the same.