Authenticity

THE TENSION

Authenticity. There is a version of leadership that looks like leadership - the language, the posture, the decisions - and a version that actually is leadership. Your team is rarely confused about which one they’re dealing with.

“Your team doesn’t need you to sound like a leader. They need you to be one.”

THE SCENARIO

Daniel Kowalski has been Surveying and Mapping Team Lead at NSW Spatial Services for eleven months. He came up through the cadastral data side, knows the base mapping framework inside out, and was the obvious choice for promotion. His team trusted him before he got the title.

In meetings, he sounds different now. More considered. More formal. He’s been attending executive briefings and reading leadership material, and somewhere along the way he started leading with borrowed language - “strategic alignment”, “value proposition”, “bandwidth” - rather than the direct, plain-spoken way he’d always operated.

His senior team member Chloe raises a data integrity issue in the weekly stand-up. Daniel responds: “That’s something we’ll need to contextualise within the broader quality assurance framework.”

Chloe blinks. Three months ago, Daniel would have said: “You’re right, it’s a problem. Let’s pull the records and sort it.”

After the meeting, Chloe speaks to a colleague. “I don’t know who that was,” she says. “But it wasn’t Daniel.”

Daniel is trying to perform leadership. His team is waiting for him to just lead.

WHAT’S DRIVING IT

Authenticity is how you relate to the reality of matters in life - including the reality of who you are. It is the congruence between your self-image and the persona you project to others. When there is a gap between those two things, people feel it, even when they can’t name it.

Daniel’s instinct to grow into leadership is entirely reasonable. The problem is that he is importing a persona rather than developing one from his own character. The language he’s adopted is not untrue - it just isn’t his, and his team knows the difference.

The trust Daniel built as a technical specialist was built on exactly the qualities he is now suppressing: directness, honesty, and the willingness to call a problem a problem. Leadership did not require him to abandon those qualities. It required him to bring them into a bigger room.

A HEALTHY RELATIONSHIP WITH AUTHENTICITY

A healthy relationship with authenticity means your team encounters the same Daniel in a strategy session as they do over a dataset. You take the time to thoughtfully examine your beliefs and communicate them clearly - not to perform certainty, but to be genuinely present with what you actually think.

Others experience you as consistent and trustworthy. Your actions match your words. You don’t feel the pull to perform a leadership role because you have grown into one that is genuinely yours. The result is a team that trusts not just your technical judgement but your character - which is the foundation on which everything else in leadership is built.

REFLECTION PROMPTS

• Is there a version of you at work that your closest colleagues or family wouldn’t recognise?

• What aspects of your pre-leadership self did you leave behind when you stepped up - and should you?

• When did you last say something in a meeting because it was true, rather than because it was what a leader is supposed to say?

• What would it feel like to lead entirely from your own character, without the script?

If the gap between who you are and how you’re leading is something you’ve felt but not yet named - The Being Profile maps exactly this: the alignment, or misalignment, between your authentic self and how you are showing up for your team.

Get in touch at hello@mappingbeing.com.au

While the organisations referenced exist, the team lead, other people and the team name have been used for demonstration purposes only. Any resemblance to real-life people, teams, organisations or situations is purely coincidental.

Reference: Tashvir, A. (2021). BEING (p. 250). Engenesis Publications.

[Published 11 May 2026]