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Leadership
Adapt your leadership style, but stay authentic
Authentic and situational leadership may look incompatible. They’re not – if you know what must remain fixed, and what can flex to meet the demands of your role and situation.
Rapid read:
- Authenticity means remaining consistent with your principles and values, while adapting your leadership behavior to your role and situation.
- Build self-awareness, explain changes in your approach, and establish psychological safety so your team understands and trusts necessary style shifts.
- Prepare before pressure arrives: identify your default style and triggers, decide how you will explain a change, and plan when and how you will return to your usual approach.
The company had to change strategy quickly, and there was no time for the consensus-building processes Sarah usually ran.
Sarah was an experienced executive running a tech startup through a period of rapid growth. She was known for transparency and inclusion, and for the psychological safety she built within her teams. Her people trusted her because she operated with a consistent set of principles and did what she said she valued.
Then the market shifted. The company had to change strategy quickly, and there was no time for the consensus-building processes Sarah usually ran. She could see that the situation called for fast, top-down decisions and a drive for execution, but she also felt that doing so would mean abandoning the way she led. She struggled with how to be transparent and decisive at the same time.
She made the decisions and defined the action plans, and she told her team what she was doing and why. They accepted her shift, and trust was maintained.
Is it possible to change your style – or pattern of leader behaviors – to fit the situation and still lead authentically? Yes, but only if you stop defining authenticity as behaving the same way everywhere and always.
The authenticity-adaptability paradox
Authentic leadership and situational leadership are both cornerstones of modern leadership practice. At first sight they contradict each other. Authenticity seems to ask for consistent behavior, steady adherence to your values, and transparency about both. Situational leadership asks you to change your style to meet the demands of the situation, and sometimes to adopt a pattern of behaviors that doesn’t come naturally. If you take both seriously, one of them looks like it has to give. At the same time both have real benefits, which is why the tension is real and important.
Principles and values are the bedrock of trust…
An authentic leader handles hard situations by relying on guiding principles and values that are sustained in the face of situational pressures. Your principles and values give you a direction to steer by when you can’t wait for complete information, which is often the case when your role shifts or hard decisions need to be made. They also give your people something to rely on. A team that knows what you will do when things get difficult commits more of its energy and more of its own judgment to the work, because nobody is holding back to see which version of you shows up. Leaders who trade their principles and values for expediency may get through the moment, but they have used up trust they will need the next time.
…and situational adaptation is essential to effectiveness
Situational leadership has a different point of departure: it rests on the belief that no single style works in every situation. The behaviors that work depend on the role, on how capable the team is, what the moment demands, and the situation the organization is facing. Daniel Goleman’s research on leadership styles supports this: the leaders with the best results used several styles and switched among them as circumstances changed.
The STARS framework I described in The First 90 Days applies this logic to the business situation(s) the leader is managing. A startup, a turnaround, an accelerated growth business, a realignment, and a sustaining success situation each call for a different approach. Sarah’s case is an example. She was running an accelerated growth business, where building consensus and creating the structures to support growth are the right focus. But the market shift dropped her into something closer to a turnaround, where the situation rewards fast, directive decisions. So, a leader who can only collaborate will be slow when speed matters, and a leader who can only direct will be alone when judgment and nuance matter.
Authenticity is about staying consistent with your principles and values, not about your behavior looking the same in a crisis as it does in a regular planning cycle.
Origins of the paradox
The paradox flows directly from the definition of “authentic.” If authenticity means behaving the same way everywhere, every adaptation is a small betrayal, so you either refuse to adapt or adapt and feel like a fraud. Both are costly: the leader who refuses becomes ineffective – the risk Sarah was navigating before she chose to act – and the leader who adapts and feels fraudulent adapts badly, hedging the new style with apologies until it does neither job.
Others have said this before me. Herminia Ibarra found the same pattern in leaders taking on bigger roles: the ones who held tightest to a fixed idea of their true selves were the ones who stalled, refusing the adaptations that would have taught them the role. Ibarra’s subject is growth over a career, and mine here is shifts in response to changes in role or business situation, but the diagnosis is the same.
Authenticity is about staying consistent with your principles and values, not about your behavior looking the same in a crisis as it does in a regular planning cycle. What must stay constant is the principle you are protecting and how open you are about your approach. That is the shift Sarah made: she changed how she decided, kept the “why,” and said so.
Erving Goffman made the useful distinction: every social encounter is a performance, and what separates a sincere performer from a cynical one is whether she believes in the impression she is giving. Sarah directing a turnaround, and meaning it, is a sincere performance of a role she rarely plays.
Moving away from your default style inevitably will be uncomfortable.
Three practices that help, and build on each other
Recognize that self-awareness is the foundation
It is essential to know three things about yourself: your guiding principles and core values, your default style and its strengths, and the situations that push you into adaptive responses. The first tells you what must not change. The second tells you what your team is used to and therefore what they will notice. The third tells you when you really need to shift your style and when it’s a mistake, so you don’t flex badly, either by refusing or by overcorrecting.
With that in mind, strive to anticipate the need to make style shifts and decide in advance how you will respond.
Moving away from your default style inevitably will be uncomfortable. There will be times when the wise course is to work against the grain for a while. Don’t confuse the discomfort with being inauthentic, and don’t punish yourself for feeling it. Do plan how to keep the gap between who you are and what the situation demands as narrow as it can be.
Help your people make sense of what you are doing
Sarah needed to shift to a more directive style, but how she explained the shift – think of it as sense-making – was the important part: “We’re in a difficult situation. This one is time-critical, so I’m going to be more directive than usual to protect where we’re trying to get to. My commitment to this team’s role in decisions hasn’t changed, and we’ll go back to it once we’re through this. The final decision is mine, but I want your views on the options.” The decision stays with her, which is what the turnaround needs, and the request for input keeps the collaboration she values.
If you state your reasons, you still look like yourself under pressure, even in a style your team has not previously seen from you. Three things matter: name the shift, give a reason tied to the situation and not to them, and say when it ends. Leave any of this out and your team will supply its own explanation, and it may not be the one you would choose.
Build psychological safety before you need it
The time to prepare for a style shift is before you need to make one. If you have been transparent and values-driven from the start, your team has watched you make hard calls on principle, so a later change in behavior doesn’t read as weakness. Amy Edmondson defines psychological safety as a shared belief that the team is safe to take interpersonal risks, and backing an unfamiliar style from you is one of those risks, so a team that already has that safety takes it more readily. If you haven’t built that trust yet, be realistic about how far you can flex, and explain a first solo decision especially carefully.
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The tension in yourself
Everything so far has been about your team. The tension is also yours. Sarah’s struggle follows a pattern Leon Festinger’s cognitive dissonance describes: acting against a belief produces discomfort, resolved in one of three ways.
- Disown the action and you soften the style with apologies until it stops working.
- Disown the belief and you cease to be the leader your team trusted.
- Reframe the action as an expression of the value itself – the resolution you want, and the way Sarah’s turnaround decisions expressed the collaboration she was protecting.
Arlie Hochschild’s distinction between surface acting, displaying what you don’t feel, and deep acting, aligning what you feel with the role, explains why this matters. Surface acting wears you down; deep acting, connected to a value you hold, you can sustain.
Three things follow: name the tension, give it an end date, and plan the recovery. The “when it ends” clause you give your team is a promise to yourself too, and reconnecting with what you value afterward is what lets you do it again.
The implication is that the work has to be done before the crisis.
Finding your own mix
There is no single “right” balance. How far you can flex, and for how long, depends on your temperament, on your organization’s culture, and on the kind of challenge you are facing.
The implication is that the work has to be done before the crisis. So get clear on your values and your triggers now, build the trust that will carry a style shift, and decide how you will explain one when it comes. Do it while nothing is at stake, because you won’t have time to think it through when the stakes are real and need urgent attention.
Before you take a new role or encounter different business challenges, answer these:
What are the values you would not trade for a faster result? Write them down.
What is your default leadership style, and what would your team say it is? Where the answers differ, work with your teams.
Which situations push you into adaptive responses? Name the most recent one.
Of these roles – directing, delegating, mentoring, or advising – which sits furthest from the default style you named earlier, and so would be hardest for you to adopt? Rehearse that one.
When did your team last watch you make a hard decision on principle? If you can’t recall one, you have less room to flex.
If you had to shift style tomorrow, what would you tell your team? Explain what you are changing, why, and when it ends.
Which of your values will the shift serve? Answer that before you announce the shift.
When the pressure lifts, how will you return to your default? Decide that now too.
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