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Inner Work to become an Authentic Leader

It was 11:52 PM on a Thursday night. I am alone in a small room with a cot, a computer, and a phone waiting for it to ring. The building is unmarked and uninhabited except for myself taking on my first ever solo overnight shift at a short-term crisis counseling hotline. The phone rings and I let it for a few rounds. Finally, I take a deep breath to compose myself and answer. “National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, this is Aaron,” I say in the most compassionate and neutral voice I can muster in my panicked state.

Image from: https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/media-resources/

I’ve heard the platitudes that our experiences shape who we are, but Bill George makes an interesting point that our experiences alone do not shape us. How we process our experiences and receive feedback about them is what can develop us into an authentic leader (Key Step Media, 2012). As a counselor for the suicide prevention hotline, I had plenty of experiences that still sit with me to this day. If it weren’t for the debriefs that I had after my calls I could not reflect on how I was able to show up for the caller and the impact that I truly had. I’ve had other experiences that profoundly shaped how I think and how I show up at work: good experiences like becoming the supervisor for a small call center, and terrible ones like being let go from my employer as a pandemic bubbled into a global crisis.

Throughout all of these experiences, I’ve had a small circle of trusted others that I would go to for support, to process my experiences, and glean the lessons from even the most devastating of experiences. My closest friends Jade and Victoria were there through it all, and are my closest confidants to this day. My spouse Ryan also shows up for me when I need most someone to process with. These days, as our lives become more chaotic, I set up weekly meetings with each of them where we catch up from the week before, look to the week ahead, and reflect on all that is happening in the world and in our lives. Even in my professional life weekly team meetings are deep, and we reflect on both our personal and or work lives.

While this may sound like good mental health, the effects of reflecting on my experiences benefit more than just my own wellbeing. Authentic leadership can be viewed as leadership that is deeply intrapersonal and interpersonal at the same time (Northouse, 2016). My experience as a crisis counselor provided me with plenty of opportunities to connect deeply with others, while my experience with debriefs and feedback loops give me a great deal of internal reflection or "inner work" as described by Bill George (Key Step Media, 2012). The benefits of authentic leadership are measurable and can create lasting change in teams and organizations. Lyubovnikova et. al (2017) found that authentic leadership behaviors resulted in a higher level of employee reflexivity which caused them to perform with a higher level of productivity and effectiveness. These outcomes were linked to self-regulatory processes found within authentic leadership situations where a leader's behaviors "become contagious among team members and manifest in team reflexivity," (Lyubovnikova, et al., 2017, p. 62). Developing authentic leadership requires critical life events viewed through the lens of positive psychological traits and showing up at work with self-awareness, internalized moral perspective, balanced processing, and relational transparency (Newhouse, 2016). The experience I've had throughout my life and even the ones I am going through now are helping me develop into a transformational leader that shows up authentically for my organizations and my team.


References

Key Step Media. (2012, November 1). Harvard's Bill George: Inner work for authentic leadership

Lyubovnikova, J., Legood, A., Turner, N., & Mamakouka, A. (2017). How authentic leadership influences team performance: The mediating role of team reflexivity. Journal of Business Ethics (141)1m 59-70.

Northouse, P. G. (2016). Leadership: Theory and practice (7th ed.). Sage Publishing.


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