https://www.druckerforum.org/blog/a-recipe-for-authentic-leadership-to-boost-innovation-by-guillaume-alvarez/ Tue, 17 Oct 2017 14:25:29 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.2.4 https://www.druckerforum.org/blog/a-recipe-for-authentic-leadership-to-boost-innovation-by-guillaume-alvarez/#comment-189414 Tue, 17 Oct 2017 14:25:29 +0000 https://www.druckerforum.org/blog/?p=1623#comment-189414 A recipe for authentic leadership? I hope that you don’t really mean that. Either it’s authentic or it’s not. As Mary Parker Follett wrote many years ago: “Our task is not to ‘find’ causes to awaken our loyalty, but to live our life fully and loyalty issues….Loyalty to a collective will which we have not created…is slavery. We create the common will and feel the spiritual energy which flows into us from the purpose we have made, for the purpose which we seek.” In short, purpose and direction cannot be set top-down and sold transactionally via ‘buy-in’. They must emerge from a process in which all are involved. Authentic behaviour is not done for instrumental reasons (‘to boost innovation’) but because it is intrinsically valuable and the leader has no choice. We want leaders who are authentic by character and conviction, not calculation and choice. If anyone thinks you are following a recipe that’s fatal to the process. Always remembering, of course, as Marx (Groucho) once said, “Sincerity is the key to everything. Once you can fake that you have got it made.”

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