Are you an authentic leader?

'The one essential quality you must have to lead is to be your own person, authentic in every regard.'

These are the words of Bill George, former CEO of Medtronic, and author of Authentic Leadership: Rediscovering the Secrets of Creating Lasting Value. Published in 2004, it's a book that really marks an interesting shift in the way we look at leadership and the qualities required to become a successful leader. What's authentic leadership all about? And what does it mean for HR?

As the quote above suggests, Bill George believes successful leadership is more about attitude than the trainable skills you've picked up on the way. Its about leading with your heart and demonstrating self-discipline.

So what makes an authentic HR leader?

1. Moral principles
Of course principles, like a belief in honesty, equality, integrity and a consistent treatment of colleagues are essential for effective leadership in the workplace. They're the kind of core values that everyone should uphold and most certainly people in HR.

2. Professional values
The recent research we've done at HR With Guts into successful HR Business Partners (research which you might have read about in our previous newsletter) suggests there are other specific beliefs shared by successful HR people that help make them more effective leaders. More precisely, they believe in:

• the relevance of their role and their ability to make a positive impact, not just within HR, but on the business as a whole
• the importance of understanding a client's business, working in their way, speaking in their language
• building strong relationships throughout the business, not just with important contacts.

What's more, the results agree with Bill George's theory of authentic leadership, as person after person we talked to demonstrated that it was in fact these values, not procedural skills, that marked out the most successful HR leaders.

3. The ability to turn these into action
Principles and values will only help a leader become authentic if these guide their actions. And, since part of authentic leadership is about consistency, that means all the time. So the first challenge is to believe in your principles and professional values. And that means really believe. Otherwise, when the going gets tough, different pressures - managerial, time, emotional - will too easily get in the way of an objective judgement, and make leadership inconsistent and subjective, rather than authentic.

It's relatively easy to imagine how our moral principles guide our actions - it's happening all the time. But what about the three HR professional values we've mentioned above? How should they affect our actions? Well, the list is endless. As a leader, you're making decisions all the time - decisions that call on a combination of all sorts of principles and beliefs. But there are specific types of situation where using these three beliefs to guide your actions will really help. Here are some hypothetical examples:

A senior manager wants to sack someone who they don't get on with and asks HR to start the process for doing so. Some leaders might decide to provide what the client wants - in this case, grounds for that person to be removed. Happy client, job done. But an authentic leader who believes in his or her role as a developer of people would make a priority of questioning those grounds for removal rather than pleasing a senior client and suggest ways of improving performance, or finding another role for that person, rather than resorting to making them redundant.

A client business wants to run a talent management scheme but they're only doing it because other companies are and in their case it would be a waste of money. Some leaders might agree on principle; it's what senior management wants, after all. An authentic leader who believed in understanding their client's business in order to improve it, would consider the benefit to the company before the natural willingness to please a client, and would explain the steps the company needed to go through before talent management made sense for them.

An HR Manager is under pressure to disclose an employee's performance in a training session to their line manager. Rather than do it to improve their relations with a senior client, an authentic leader who believes in the importance of developing good relations with all company employees, would point out that breaking an employee's confidence is just as serious as breaking that of a senior manager, and would refuse to divulge this information.

Isn't this all just 'good' leadership?
Yes, pretty much. In all three cases above, the 'authentic' solution is the right one. And with the benefit of no emotional involvement, these solutions seem very obvious. That's the point. Authentic leadership's strength is that, as long as the values you believe in are the right ones, the conviction you have in them can make 'doing the right thing' much easier - particularly in confrontational situations such as the three examples above.

Doing the right thing itself can bring huge personal benefits - satisfaction in your job and respect from your HR colleagues to name just two. But authentically using the three HR professional values listed above can make a real difference to your standing with your client business: tenacious belief in your role will make them treat HR as a strategic partner, rather than a transactional function. A belief in the importance of building relationships right across the business will raise your profile and respect. And a commitment to understanding your client business needs will result in better long-term achievements, for the business and for you.

Becoming more authentic
If you're looking to develop a more authentic leadership style, or trying to develop it in others, one of the first bridges to cross is pinpointing what values are important, which ones perhaps need to be developed, and what they mean in terms of action.

To help, in our next newsletter we'll look at different ways to become more self aware, and discuss tools you might find useful to help put your values or those of your team into practice.

Angry, embarrassed, or just plain hot?

Your client's gone red, but what do you do? Ask them why they're angry? Try and make them feel more comfortable? Open a window?

Much has been written about people's physical reactions and what they mean. You'll probably know that roughly 60 - 70% of communication is non-verbal. It's surprising, then, that people spend so little time training their observation skills to understand these signs.

This is partly because we interact with people all day every day, so many people think it's just a skill, you're either good at or not. But I disagree. In fact, I believe even a small amount of focused attention can make a big difference to your observational skills. For example, it will help you:

Avoid misinterpretations. A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing - particularly when interpreting people's body language. True, a lot of the well-known 'signals' to look out for have some scientific facts behind them (looking bottom left or touching one's nose when you're lying, for example). But they're far from foolproof. And they certainly shouldn't be taken on their own as proof of anything. After all, someone scratching their nose could simply have a cold. Only by learning how these different clues work together can you really use them effectively without reaching the wrong conclusions.

Notice the hidden clues. Conscious behaviours - a big smile or a heavy frown, for example - are all very well. They do tell you something about a person. But only things they want you to know. It's the involuntary, small changes in people's actions or physical appearances- a flicker of a smile, someone's neck changing colour, or their breathing coming from higher in their chest - that tell us how they really feel. But they're small and usually hidden quickly. So they'll only be spotted with practice.

Build an honest relationship. Reading your client's behaviour correctly means you'll understand each other better. For example, noticing a look of disagreement on your client's face means you'll know they don't agree with you, even if they say they do. It'll give you the chance to get to the bottom of it. And since we're all naturally drawn to people who understand us (even if sometimes they understand things that we're actually trying to hide), this can only be a good thing for your working relationship.

Interested in finding ways of improving your observation skills? Check out our 'top tip', or click here to get started.

How to really speak their language

You'll probably have already read about how you can adapt your physical behaviour to complement that of others. An interesting way of taking this topic a step further is to think about how people speak, as well as act.

What you'll find is that people typically fall into one of three categories and that these categories are associated with different types of words used in everyday language - either visual (e.g. I see what you mean), auditory (e.g. I hear what you're saying) or kinaesthetic (e.g. I've grasped your point). What's more, people often find it easier to understand others from the same category.

There are many ways this could be helpful. In one-to-ones with your client, for example, identifying their category will mean you can adapt your words to complement theirs - helping you understand each other better. And in meetings, when two people are saying the same thing, but using words so different they don't actually realise they agree, you'll be able to act as 'translator' - summarising one person's view in the other's language.

The trick, of course, is being able to recognise the different categories. Here's a table that will help:

HR With Guts cards - Build trust by being yourself

New to HR with Guts? Then you won't have heard of our cards. We've got three sets of them. Each card contains a useful tip, and each set helps to develop a particular HR skill.

One of these sets is called 'Building Brilliant Relationships.' It looks at ways to improve client skills and build productive client relationships, by covering four main areas:

• Spades = understanding your client
• Hearts = presenting information to your client
• Diamonds = influencing your client
• Clubs = building a trusting relationship

One of the tips you'll find in this set is about the benefits of being yourself. And since we've been looking at authentic leadership in this issue, we thought it a fitting example to show you.

What's on the cards? - An example

Build trust by being yourself The very best client relationships go beyond a professional understanding. Real trust is developed when the client knows who you really are we often lose sight of this in our attempt to be professional. Whilst there are professional standards that are essential. Being human is one of the keys to deep trusting relationships.

When you want to deepen a relationship try one of the following:

• Reveal something personal about yourself.
• Share some of your struggles and challenges.
• Talk about shared non business interests
• Talk about shared values.
• Get the client talking about what is important to them outside of work
• Use humour

'How well do you know your business?' and 'Self Mastery' sets are also available to help you test what you know and develop your team. For more information on either of them, or to order a set, just click here.