‘Effective leaders are always authentic’

Mahatma Gandhi, Jack Welch, Bill Gates, Barak Obama are the few examples of successful leaders. The most important reason of their effectiveness as leaders has been their authenticity. If you try to be one of them you can never achieve what they have achieved. No one can be authentic by trying to imitate someone else. You can learn from others’ experiences, but there is no way you can be successful when you are trying to be like them. People trust you when you are genuine and authentic, not a replica of someone else.

To find if you are somewhere close to being authentic,

Think of your life as a house. Can you knock down the walls between the rooms and be the same person in each of them?

But with today’s pressures to promote style over substance, dress for success, embrace flavor-of-the month fads and fashions, and compromise one’s values to satisfy Wall Street’s unquenchable thirst for quarterly profits, the challenge of knowing, showing, and remaining true to one’s real self at work has never been greater. In the face of such pressures, we are told that people look for organizational authentic leaders of character and integrity to provide direction.

Again and again, leaders who believe they can manipulate the system, managing an impression of doing what’s right, come to find out that in a relatively short period of time they can completely lose all that was gained by manipulation and subterfuge.