Open LinkedIn on any given day and someone senior is telling you to "bring your authentic self to work."
Millions of people talk about authenticity every day as though it's a new religion.
I'm beginning to think they have 'Authenticity Tourette's'.
Why is there such an obsession with the idea of authenticity?
And are all these books on 'authentic leadership' even about authenticity?
It seems authenticity is a fashionable coat masking a much more interesting and fundamental idea.
And the coat falls off the moment you ask the only question that matters: authentic to what?
The Gospels of Authenticity
It's not hard to find a stack of books preaching the Authenticity Gospel.
But very few people have read the gospels. They accept the word of the preacher and assume these books are pointing at something that's true or useful.
But if you take the time to read the text, the claim of biblical power given to authenticity evaporates. What lies beneath is a much more useful and frankly way more interesting story, but more of that later.
Let's examine a few of the Gospels. Bill George's 2003 book Authentic Leadership is about personal values and purpose. Even George himself experienced a 'fall from grace' and stripped the word 'authentic' from the title, repackaging the content in his later 2007 book True North, which is a nice piece about the importance of finding your personal purpose.
The HBR 2017 anthology on authentic leadership fares no better. At the centre of this collection of Gospels is Herminia Ibarra's essay "The Authenticity Paradox." She argues against 'naive authenticity', suggesting that leaders who cling to a fixed idea of a 'true self' actually struggle to adapt to new roles. In contrast, people who have a more fluid sense of self fare much better. She accidentally reveals the more fundamental truth, which is at the heart of my whole argument:
The real story is nothing to do with authenticity. It's about self-awareness and self-development.
Karissa Thacker's 2016 The Art of Authenticity turns out to have little to do with authenticity either. It's simply a set of exercises for replacing habitual reactions with more considered ones. It's simple self-regulation, repackaged as psychological insight.
And John Templeton's 2025 book Authenticity: The Art & Science of Being Your True Self continues the tradition of earlier Gospels, mixing invented taxonomies such as the 'Vectors of Perception' with populist tricks from the classic pseudoscience genre, to suggest a robustness where none exists.
These four Authenticity Gospels are illustrative of many, many more books on this topic. They all share one word in common. But if you read the text, you discover many unrelated concepts, such as purpose, adaptability, identity, self-regulation, and a lot more.
None of these Gospels explore the real question:
What is this thing we call the 'Self'? How is it built? How does it evolve? And what's its relationship to leadership?
It's worth noting that even readers of these books seem to sense their emptiness without quite naming it. The most common complaint attached to the HBR anthology, across review after review, is some version of "interesting, but I didn't learn much I didn't already know." That's not a coincidence. It's what happens when authors write about something profound but don't really understand it. They try to wrap the Self in the trendy new coat of authenticity. The obfuscation of the Self is not limited to the coat of authenticity, either.
Vulnerability Is Not Authenticity
Brené Brown has added to the obfuscation, folding 'vulnerability' into the authenticity debate. Vulnerability, in her framing, is a leadership virtue. She suggests that sharing your failures, your fears, your imperfections, is an act of courage.
But there's a significant difference between quietly accepting that you are fallible, which is simply true of every human being alive, versus performing that fallibility publicly to generate empathy. Performing vulnerability isn't courage, it's a bid for connection dressed up as depth. Watch the room next time a leader speaks of the importance of 'vulnerability'. Are they seeking admiration for their bravery, or sympathy for their pain. Or is there genuine humility that creates real change in organisational culture?
Marianne Williamson called out fake vulnerability decades ago, in her 1992 book A Return to Love, which was all about self-worth. She wrote:
Your playing small does not serve the world.
There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you.
Broadcasting your weakness so others will like you isn't enlightened. Neither is shrinking. Both are performances aimed at managing how other people feel about you, rather than genuine self-examination.
The uncomfortable truth is that "I sometimes fail" is not a profound insight. It's a description of being human. Elevating it to a leadership virtue tells leaders something they already knew, dressed up as a discovery. That's precisely the trick the 'authenticity' books are pulling.
Psychological Safety Is the Same Trick, One Level Down
In 1954 Carl Rogers coined the term 'psychological safety'. In 1965 Edgar Schein suggested it was important for group performance, and in 1990 William Kahn linked it to employee engagement. But it wasn't until 1999, when Amy Edmondson's research with Harvard nurses revealed that high-performing teams feel safe enough to admit errors to each other, that the idea became popular. The basic finding is that teams where people can speak up, disagree, and fail without fear, perform better. No argument there.
But just as authenticity is really about self-awareness and self-development, psychological safety is really about emotional regulation. It isn't a rare, mystical quality a leader bestows on a room. When leaders and teams manage their emotions effectively, disagreement doesn't trigger defensiveness, retaliation, or withdrawal. Psychological safety is just a downstream consequence of ordinary emotional self-regulation, at both an individual and a team level. Naming it as a distinct, elevated construct risks the same category error as authenticity: taking a basic developmental capacity and marketing it as a discovery.
The Question "Authenticity" Quietly Avoids
None of this means self-disclosure, humility, or team trust don't matter. They matter enormously. What I'm objecting to is the packaging: taking ordinary, well-understood human capacities such as self-regulation, adaptability, tolerance for discomfort, and re-badging them as mysterious new leadership virtues with invented names.
So rather than obsess about authenticity ask yourself:
- How is the Self, that's meant to be ‘authentic', constructed?
- What is the Self made of?
- What happens to a leader's judgement, compassion and capacity to hold complexity as the Self develops?
And if you want to know what you're being authentic to, you should study the nature of the Self.
So, where do you start?
Well, you could do worse than look towards the world champions of self-awareness, - the contemplative traditions. They've been asking, with considerably more rigour than most management books, questions about the Self for well over 2,000 years. Buddhist psychology in particular has spent millennia examining how the Self is constructed and impermanent. It has much to say on the idea of what we call 'I'. It suggests that the thing we call the 'self' isn't a fixed thing to be discovered and then projected, but a process, assembled moment to moment, that can be examined, understood, and matured.
If you want a serious, current entry point that bridges that contemplative tradition with modern developmental psychology, Ken Wilber's 2024 book Finding Radical Wholeness is worth your time.
It's explicitly built around the difference between 'waking up' to insights into the nature of the Self, and 'growing up', which requires structural development of that Self over time. That distinction is exactly the one the authenticity industry collapses, and exactly the one your leadership team needs if they want to get past the LinkedIn slogans.
The Question Worth Asking
Next time someone in your leadership team has Authenticity Tourette's, or performs their vulnerability, or demands psychological safety, ask them how much time they've spent studying the nature of the Self.
Or more simply: 'Who is asking?'
If your colleague struggles to even understand your question, you may want to invest in some proper leadership development. Not classes that trade in old ideas wearing popular new labels.
Find someone who brings fresh thinking. Someone who has themselves studied these questions deeply for years. They can help you understand who you really are, and what's possible for you, your team and your organisation. They can help you go further, faster.