Good Morning dear reader,
Let's take 4 minutes to empathise with the friendly neighbourhood founder-CEOs. They are not okay.
LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman once equated starting a company with jumping off a cliff and assembling a plane on the way down. Three years later, the lived reality of anyone steering a company amidst acute uncertainty has become astoundingly more challenging.
In fact, the Harvard Business Review (HBR) recently shared a story of one such leader:
A few weeks ago, a senior manager at a global technology company we work with burst into tears mid-meeting. For months, she had been fighting fires and chasing one AI update after another, rewriting roadmaps every week as new tools arrived. That same morning, she had stepped out of a call where the CFO confirmed that a restructuring would almost certainly eliminate many of her team members' roles. Minutes later, one of her direct reports had asked her, "Am I going to have a job in six months?" By the time she joined our leadership session, the weight of pretending she had answers had become too much, and the emotions spilled out.
Building something, rallying teams, investors, and users, and battling a myriad of complex problems every day was hard even at the best of times. But there was solid ground of long-standing management advice to stand on. Being true to yourself, expressing your beliefs, thoughts, and feelings, and building rapport with your team—this was the advice that separated new leaders from the bottom-line-obsessed business owners of the past. The new leaders learned how to balance managing people, technology, and money to steer an organisation ahead.
But as technology creeps into the role of humans within companies, it's creating an existential moment for leaders. They don't just have to learn how to adapt to the technology but also discover a new way of being humane in the workplace, especially as employees are anxious and overworked, and the existing management advice was shattered this year.
If this feels disorienting, you're not alone. In fact, 71% of CEOs reported experiencing imposter syndrome, in part because they’re facing challenges that they cannot overcome with past wisdom or training.
The death of authenticity and one-on-ones
In October, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, an international authority in people analytics, talent management, leadership development, and the human-AI interface, published his eighth book: Don't Be Yourself: Why Authenticity Is Overrated (and What to Do Instead).
He argues that science does not support the authenticity movement, which came as a response to technocratic leadership styles.
From Silicon Valley's authenticity worship to failed diversity programs, he exposes how our fixation on our "true selves" undermines both individual and organisational success. The most successful people aren't those who rigidly "stay true to themselves." They're the ones who adapt and evolve, largely by paying attention to how others see them and adjusting their behaviour to the requirements of each situation. The evidence is clear: when we focus less on expressing our authentic selves and more on understanding others, we become better humans.
Chamorro-Premuzic shows that authentic leadership, once seen as trustworthy and the key to a positive work environment, carries significant risks. It can cause professional and social setbacks if it's not balanced with empathy and collaboration, which requires compromise, he pointed out in a podcast:
I think our ability to collaborate effectively is one of our fundamental skills as a species. It does require compromise. It does require focusing less on unleashing our real self and actually being more other-oriented...We trust people because, unlike Adolf Hitler, they engage in prosocial behaviour. And engaging in prosocial behaviour requires you to display EQ, emotional intelligence, and to actually care about what other people think of you, and to put other people first. So all I'm trying to do with the title is controversial, but the book is an attempt to help people understand that at some point, the right to be you ends and the obligation to others begins.
In another counter-intuitive research paper published by HBR, another celebrated tactic met its end—one that was considered the pinnacle of trusting human connection at the workplace until last year: the one-on-one meeting.
The new research suggests that they're bad for business—at least for senior leaders.
When too much time is spent in fragmented meetings, there's little left for the work that only senior leaders can do: stewarding enterprise priorities, developing talent, and advancing culture.
The death of the old world is unmistakable. And the answers on how to lead a company or any organisation moving forward cannot be found in the past. The north star remains the same: earn trust by telling the truth. The process is going to be different.
I will share these answers in the next edition—including what the HBR research actually recommends senior leaders do instead of one-on-ones, and how the best leaders are navigating this moment when pretending to have answers no longer works.
Until then, please share what do you think: If authenticity is overrated and one-on-ones are wasteful, what would trustworthy leadership actually look like?
Yours,
Ruhi
(Photo by cottonbro studio)