Recently I have heard many colleagues and friends both in and out of education sector talking about the authentic self. In the education sector specifically I have heard more about authentic leadership, and in fact just leadership itself in recent weeks and months than typically, and I think we are on the brink of some kind of leadership revelation event! In that aspect
Carl Jung would have a field day with us, and that is to mean that it’s a highly emotive politicised topic these days. Occasionally it embodies the firm and machavellian leadership, or bridges some kind wellbeing work-life balance gurus and transformational leaders.
Before any polar descriptions, or rapture-eque event separates the good leadership from the bad…it has made me reflect on my own principles till the small hours, and before we could possibly dive into an R rated minefield, it would be wise to define authenticity, the self and leadership.
The Self
The idea of the self has fascinated thinkers for centuries, and it remains just as relevant in conversations about leadership today. Carl Jung spoke of the self as the process of individuation, the lifelong journey of integrating the conscious and unconscious parts of who we are.
For Jung, authenticity was not about broadcasting personality, but about becoming whole and aligned internally. Philosophers long before him, from Socrates urging us to “know thyself” to existentialists like Sartre emphasising responsibility for one’s choices, framed the self as something to be examined, shaped, and consciously lived rather than passively performed.
Terence McKenna, by contrast, explored the self as something more fluid and experiential, shaped by consciousness, culture, and perception. His ideas suggest that identity is not fixed but emergent, influenced by narrative, environment, and exploration. In this view, authenticity becomes less about uncovering a stable inner core and more about navigating and expressing evolving states of being. The self is not a static truth waiting to be revealed, but something unfolding in context.
Fast forward to today, and the concept of the self has shifted again. There is a trend to perceive identity as something curated and shared, shaped within digital platforms, communities, and cultural trends. Running is an identity as much as a habit and self care tool, for example, and profitable in the hands of a creative with a moble phone.
What i’m getting at is that there is a strong cultural drive towards being authentic, and simultaneously there is an intergration, and the occasional crobar, of this into the workplace. Authenticity is seen as cool, desirable, even marketable. Yet authenticity itself can sit within a social construct where what is perceived as genuine is also influenced by what is popular or rewarded socially. The performance of authenticity can sometimes blur with the reality of it.
In leadership, this creates an important distinction. Being authentic does not automatically equate to being capable, accountable, or strategically effective. Authenticity alone does not guarantee sound judgement, resilience, or competence. However, it does embody something foundational: integrity and a commitment to honesty. Leaders who are self-aware and who understand their values and act consistently with them, create trust. They can rally and transform perceptions of those surrounding them through charisma, and providing there is are other components that are capabilities, this is a substantial recipe for credible leadership.
Leadership
To be forthcoming, earlier in my career I had an impression leadership was something quite different to what I think now. At the time, it seemed tangible and almost visible. It looked like authority, confidence, decisiveness. If I am honest, it was often easier to describe what leadership was not than what it actually was.
If you look for the definition of Leadership, you’ll quickly find a number of definitions, Cambridge dictionary defines it as:
1) the set of characteristics that make a good leader:
2) the position or fact of being the leader:
3) the person or people in charge of an organization:
McKinsey offers something more behavioural, defining leadership as: a set of mindsets and behaviors that aligns people in a collective direction, enables them to work together and accomplish shared goals, and helps them adjust to changing environments.
Earlier in my career, I strongly associated leadership with accountability. Being responsible for others like the chieftain of a tribe in a way, and I’ve watched enough Viking documentaries and shows to know what happens with the ones that aren’t good enough.
Being accountable for outputs, performance, efficiencies and results, and also morale, motivation and satisfaction are all pendulums swinging at all times, and what I have come to realise is that much of what I once labelled as leadership was, in fact, management. Managing myself. Managing others. Managing delivery. Management is vital. It is disciplined, structured and measurable. But leadership operates in a more complex space and there is a large part of it that revolves around impact and the unseen politics that shape other peoples perceptions of you too, as well as your own understanding of how you are perceived which endangers the hubris and ‘self’.
That space can feel like a treacherous battleground because it is harder to define and even harder to enact consistently, and does not exist in isolation from culture, environment, or context. The surrounding ecosystem of the company matters just as much as the individual at the helm, and your team and the teams that they interact with and discuss or enact your leadership instruction continually shape perceptions of your vision, strategy, capability, and ability to communicate and maintain morale and motivation with your reports too.
You can attempt to enact “good leadership” behaviours, but if the environment or your actions do not support openness, trust, or accountability, those behaviours struggle to take root. Conversely, strong cultures can elevate emerging leaders who are still finding their voice and create fertile pathways for mentoring relationships or collaboration with others enacting leadership, and enables standing on the shoulders of giants.
What has remained constant in my understanding is the connection between leadership and accountability, but not simply in the sense of output or performance metrics to senior leadership. It is accountability for influence. Accountability for tone. Accountability for the mistakes that you and your team make. Accountability for the invisible signals you send through behaviour, and accountability for the way you speak about other colleagues, departments, organisations, and beyond.
Over time, I have observed that the authentic self often reveals itself not in grand speeches or strategic statements, but through integrity and consistency. Values and principles become visible through patterns of action, and often this manifests in the mission and vision of the company which leadership drives.
Authenticity on its own does not guarantee capability. But when authenticity is grounded in integrity and reinforced by consistent behaviour, it becomes a powerful foundation for leadership. It moves beyond performance and into trust. And trust, more than title or definition, is where leadership truly begins.
A Culture of Connection
In recent months I have spoken with a wide range of leaders across the education and government sectors in both the UK and China, and one theme keeps surfacing: connection. Not networking in the transactional sense, but genuine relational continuity. The kind of connection that shapes how decisions are interpreted, how feedback is received, and how leadership is trusted or questioned.
Consistency plays a central role here and when a leader behaves consistentl and thereby reliably,, people begin to understand what to expect. That predictability can build psychological safety. Yet consistency is not always positive and patterns of behaviour can just as easily reinforce negative expectations and gossip.
If someone consistently shuts down challenge, avoids difficult conversations, or responds defensively to certain themes, those behaviours become anticipated. On long email threads with the full array of ‘backup’ enterage copied into the email for support, or in the boardroom where we anticipate the impending urgencies of specific themes and needs. Over time, people adapt around them. They either withdraw, mirror the behaviour, or work around it.
There is also a subtle interplay between a leader’s disposition towards a particular theme and their disposition towards a particular person too. The same issue raised by two different individuals can evoke two different responses. This is where self awareness and authenticity intersect with leadership maturity. It is not enough to believe we are fair or open and we must notice our patterns and question whether our consistency is serving the culture we are trying to build.
GuanXi (关系)
China provides a compelling lens for understanding this relational dynamic.
The concept of 关系, Guanxi, loosely translated as connection or relationship, is embedded deeply within day to day culture. It reflects a network of reciprocal relationships built over time through trust, reliability, and shared experience. Closely connected to this is the idea of 脸, Lian, or face. In English we speak of saving face or showing face, and the meaning is not entirely dissimilar. Our reputation, credibility, and standing are shaped by actions within a social circle. They are measured not just by what is said, but by what is consistently done, and has explicit ties to an individuals integrity.
What fascinates me is how these concepts elevate continuity. Guanxi is not built through a single impressive gesture. It is built through repeated, reliable behaviours and honour. Through showing up, following through, honouring commitments, knowing the right people in the right places, and just as importantly, through how you speak about others when they are not present. Support offered behind closed doors often carries more weight than praise offered publicly.
For me, this is a golden thread of ancient wisdom that constitutes leadership. It is the art of continuity and integrity.
A culture of connection does not emerge by accident, and there is a reason that GuanXi exists and remains embeded in Chinese working culture. It requires everyone from networkers to leaders to understand that trust accumulates slowly and erodes quickly. It requires attention to relationships, not as a soft extra, but as a strategic foundation. In this regard it acknowledges that even if a person may perceive that a relationship may be unfruitful in some ways, their ‘face’ is still perceved by those individuals, and also has the opportunity to be shaped positively or negatively from those interactions.
In that sense, authenticity becomes less about self expression and more about relational reliability. Leadership, at its core, is enacted in those ongoing, often unseen interactions that define whether people feel respected, supported, and connected to something larger than themselves.
Mirroring
One thing I notice more and more, perhaps because It was a trait i used to do it myself, is how easily we subconsciously and consciously mirror the behaviours of leaders around us. It often happens unconsciously, and we pick up the way they answer questions, how they hold silence, how they negotiate tension. We observe whether they absorb accountability or deflect it. We study how they assert authority, to whom, in what moments, and with what tone. Equally in conscious ways, there may be phrases, verbiage, posture or methods that you learn to use because you have seen their effect.
Early in our careers, this mirroring can feel like learning the craft and we look upwards for mentorship through the lenses of management and assume that what we see is what leadership looks like. Clearly if you are still reading there is much more to it than management (more on that in other posts!), and if for example, a senior leader responds sharply to challenge we might internalise that sharpness as decisiveness. Whereas if it was in a management context it may be that there could be a lack of control, frustration, or poor management practice. If a leader dominates a room, we may interpret that as confidence, or If they take responsibility publicly for something that their team has done wrong even for things outside their control, we might begin to understand that as strength when others externaly perceive the company as in a time of weakness.
In many ways, this is how professional identity forms as we test and prove our own behaviour, and separate the wheat from the chaff.
Self Preservation and Defamation
However, not all mirrored behaviours serve us or the cultures we lead within. One pattern I have observed is a form of leadership that relies on maintaining a physical or emotional stronghold over a team. This is where authority is asserted through control, volume, intensity, or pressure. In some environments, this can appear as a powerful form of delegation and ‘busyness’, however, for other leaders there is often the ability to see through this veil because there is a knowing of the other organisational themes occurring at that level, and exposes their skills and weaknesses.
You can see the cracks when meetings go sour, when deadlines are missed or put on the reports urgently (admittedly, not always), or when accountability becomes emotive and a game of deflection. Conversations become defensive in meetings and fingers get pointed. Energy is spent on self preservation and moving away from the limelight, despite the original methodology being enacted to achieve limelight in positive ways.
Stoicism in Leadership
The stronghold approach previously described is almost the opposite of a stoic leader. Stoicism, at its core, is about emotional regulation, clarity of judgement, and steadiness under pressure. And it can resemble the energy of a physical training ground, motivating through struggle, intensity, and endurance. That style may have its place on a sports field or in moments of crisis, but in the meeting room, where collaboration and psychological safety are essential, it often undermines the very outcomes it seeks to drive.
A stark realisation is that strong leadership requires less authority in this regard (though delegation and distributed leadership are effective means of leadership), but leadership does require a different expression of calm consistency. Less is more, as they say, and accountability and action, confidence to commit to certain decisions or types of advice can carry more weight. When leaders remain measured in the face of challenge, they create space for others to contribute rather than retreat, and there isn’t the same kind of bite when decisions are challenged.
Mirroring will always be part of leadership development. We learn through observation. The key for me is in the doing and the not doing. And to demystify that, i mean that with integrity there are things that you will do consistently and without fail, and there are things that you will not do or be corrupted by.
With those things in mind, Leadership becomes less about projecting strength and more about cultivating steadiness and gradual improvement which is change management. Less about control and more about influence. And perhaps most importantly, less about holding power tightly and more about using it wisely.
Authentic Leadership
Authentic leadership, for me, sits somewhere between self awareness and responsibility. It draws from understanding your values, as thinkers like Jung suggested, but it is tested in the lived reality of decisions, consequences, and consistency. Authenticity without capability is just your personality coming to work. Authenticity without accountability or conviction is just your preference. Authenticity without integrity is performance.
Real leadership shows up in how decisions are made when the stakes are unclear, how responsibility is carried when things go wrong, and how consistently values are enacted when no one is watching. It is visible in the follow through, in the steadiness under pressure, and in the quiet support offered to others in their absence, your GuanXi and your Face!
There is space for connection, culture, and even a degree of mirroring as we learn. But authentic leadership matures when we get to know our own values when they are put to the test and you have to make unpopular decisions.
If authenticity is cool, then capability, accountability, and integrity are what make it credible. And credibility, thankfully, still outlasts any cool trends.
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