Seeing the Multiple Choice Questions

Neither of the situations that I have just described seems that consequential when looked at in isolation. So you don't tell your boss that you won't help Bob. Big deal. Not helping Bob is one choice. Though the situation with Bob appears to be a yes or no situation, it's really a case of multiple choice.

You could help Bob or you could not help Bob—but you also have the choice to reevaluate your opinion of Bob. You don't really know all the pressures that Bob was under two years ago. You could choose to give Bob the benefit of the doubt. And look at your own life—you've probably learned and grown over the past two years. He might have changed and evolved as well. You also have the choice to overtly welcome Bob and watch him carefully at the same time. Remember the old adage keep your friends close and your enemies closer. The choices go on and on. You could also choose to say yes to helping and openly acknowledge that you have reservations about Bob.

In this less hierarchical digital age, most of us get caught up in our patterns and only see one or two choices when workplace situations are most often multiple choice. Practicing the art of authenticity in the real world requires us to see the multiple choices as opposed to being locked into an either-or reality. Jim Collins coined the phrase “the genius of the and” in 1994.³ Collins argued that companies that are built to last do not get caught up in the “tyranny of the or” but lean into the “genius of the and.” In order to practice the art of authenticity, you have to see the ands. When clients get caught up in either/or, black-and-white thinking, I irritate them by asking “what else?” They come up with something, then I say “what else?” If they are totally mystified and stuck in the either/or space, I will say I had a client who did not do either one of those in a similar situation. He did x.

As for my lie in which I present myself as the consummate intellectual who has read everything in The New York Times, you can look at that from a strict right/wrong point of view and say Karissa lied. That is wrong. Give her demerits. She is not authentic. But what is the rest of the story? How does my own lie impact me? As a result, do I continue to erect barriers that keep people from knowing and understanding me as I really am because of my need to appear like I have it all together? Is my need for people to view me as smart keeping people from really knowing me? Who is suffering as a result of that lie? Is it me, or the person I say that to?

The questions and issues that we must deal with in both our personal and work lives regarding truth, lies, and authenticity are rarely simple yes-or-no questions. The questions are multiple choice and often require an essay to navigate skillfully. In order to navigate skillfully, we have to embrace a bigger, broader, more pragmatic view of truth, lies, and authenticity. That is what this chapter is all about.

Killing the Dead Bug View of Truth

Authentic people tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. The fakers are the liars. If only it were that simple. We cannot separate the art and the science of authenticity from the gritty realities of truth and lies. However, the relationship is not as clear-cut as we would like to think. In our own minds, we are often operating with what Joseph Badaracco, Jr. of Harvard Business School refers to as “the dead bug view of truth” in situations that are actually far more complicated and consequential.⁴ The dead bug view is straightforward and simple. You walk along and see a dead bug on the floor. You say the bug is dead. Or alternatively, you are walking along and your clothes are getting wet and drops are falling from the sky and you hear thunder. It is an easily observable fact that it is raining or that a bug is dead. Real-world dilemmas and interactions are not quite that simple.

If you were going to apply the dead bug view of truth to the situation described earlier with Bob joining your team, you would simply say to your boss: “I really don't want Bob on the team. I don't like him because he undermined me two years ago. So no, boss, I will not be welcoming him and/or easing his transition.” We all know saying that to your boss in that situation is absurd and naive. However, most of us are not sure what else to do as we think about the relationship between truth and authenticity. We don't say that, but we also don't think too much about what we said or did not say either. The boss will likely forget anyway as he or she has a lot going on. So, we sweep that little day-to-day stuff under the rug and don't really think about it too much. We save up all our energy and genuine head-scratching for the big stuff.

For those on the path to authenticity, it is time to kill the dead bug view of truth and invest more energy in day-to-day choices. If you are careful in the small stuff and are tuning in to yourself, you are more likely to skillfully and authentically handle the big things, like whether to relate sensitive information to a friend who is about to be downsized. You have trained your brain to see the multiple choices and, as you will learn throughout the book, how your unique experiences affect the way you see everyday situations.

Countless times during the past 15 years, I have sat with a leader who had the unpleasant task of eliminating jobs. Often, that involves making and/or implementing a decision that will impact the lives of friends you have known for many years. I sat with one manager named Renee as she sorted through her own feelings about implementing a decision that would result in the loss of hundreds of jobs (on Good Friday of all days). From her point of view, the decision was absolutely the right thing for the business, as new technology had essentially made several jobs unnecessary and the operation could function at much lower costs. However, a close friend she had known for more than 20 years would be out of a job within the next six months. Their families were close. She agonized over what it would be like to spend time with her friend over the next six months and be unable to discuss the situation.

The management committee had been clear that it was in the best interest of the entire organization not to discuss the layoffs until everything was finalized. The CEO had gone around the room and asked each individual if they could commit as an officer of the company to not discussing the issue with anyone outside that closed circle. From an ethical point of view, the expectation was clear that everyone who knew what was going to come down had to be silent until the formal announcement. How would Renee's friend feel when the news came down within the next six months? How would their relationship be impacted? Should she give her friend a heads-up? Her friend was obviously going to have an emotional reaction. Although she trusted her friend, could she trust him to be quiet if she did let him know?

Renee was in a bind between two deeply held personal values. She valued her role as an officer of her company and was loyal to the organization. She also had a great deal of respect and believed that the right thing to do for the good of the organization was to honor her word to her superiors and not tell her friend. In contrast, she also cared deeply about her friend and wanted to warn him. Her lifelong friend would be out of a job, which could affect his entire family—including his children who went to school with her children.

This type of dilemma is common and is indicative of what Joseph Badaracco called a choice between right and right. Bill George clarified the importance of authentic leaders doing the work to be in tune with their values and knowing their own personal true north.⁵ In this case, Renee was well aware of her own values and was clearly a values-centered leader. She knew her true north. What tools are of use for authentic leaders in these right vs. right dilemmas?

The first step for authentic leaders in these messy situations is to sort out their own feelings. This sounds a lot easier than it actually is. With a little persistence, I can usually get my clients there. I start with innocuous questions like, “What is this like for you to know that your friend is going to lose her job?” Some of the feelings that managers have in these complicated situations are predictable, and we would hope that everyone would experience them. For example, we would hope that every manager would have some level of empathy for a friend who is losing a job. The particular flavor, tone, and intensity of that empathy varies from individual to individual. Many of the specific feelings below the surface level of analysis in these situations are idiosyncratic to the individual leader and are based on life experiences.

Boas Shamir and Galit Eilam from Hebrew University in Jerusalem argue that the essence of authentic leadership development is in the articulation of the leader's life story.⁶ Foundational research has indicated that successful executives learn through experience.⁷ Classic methodology involved qualitative interviews in which successful executives told stories in retrospect after they had already made it to the senior level. Through crafting their life stories, leaders come to a deeper understanding of what is meaningful and important to them. This exercise of crafting and making sense of one's experiences or story is ongoing, as one's story is ongoing and never static. If you're an American executive who successfully turns around a business with a diverse team in Europe, you return to the United States a different executive with an important new chapter in your story. Leadership development through understanding your story is highly personal, and not likely to happen in an intense weeklong off-site in which you take in a lot of information, including psychological data.

As an advisor, my role is to ignite authentic leadership development through bringing out the stories in the middle of the action and connecting the story to the here-and-now dilemmas. On a practical level, I am constantly getting my clients to tell me their stories. This is not like lying on a couch for psychoanalysis—though my clients do all like to joke about Freud and couches. That process of connecting the dots between who they are as unique individuals and the current situation is the essence of authentic leadership development.

In this case, I knew Renee well and had a few working hypotheses about what might be working her up in this situation that were unique to her. Renee's earliest ambitions in life had been toward helping others, and she currently served on countless nonprofit boards that served vulnerable people. As we talked, it became clear that the idea that a skillset was outdated struck her as making her friend particularly vulnerable and seemed unfair. She herself was first-generation college educated and was not a stranger to hard times. As we delved deeper, it became clear that she believed that if this could happen to her friend, it could also happen to her. And perhaps it could. All of these emotions were unique to Renee. Other clients from different backgrounds would have had a whole different collection of below-the-surface emotions.

The art of authenticity requires emotional archaeological digs that go below the pop psychology surface. In Renee's unique emotional calculus, not telling her friend somehow equated to not helping someone who was vulnerable. Not okay in the unique system of Renee's moral identity. Yet as an officer of the company, she could be fired on ethical grounds for giving her friend the heads-up. Welcome to the real world.

In our discussion, we began to explore how Renee could live out her value of helping vulnerable people in this situation. Renee was obsessively focused on getting through the next six months of family outings with her friend. I asked her a question that opened up a new frontier in our discussion: “What happens after the layoff?” Had the company discussed providing transition services and, if so, what kind? People are most vulnerable in the first six months after a layoff.

Ultimately, Renee took the lead in pushing for robust services to help people land on their feet after the layoff. She was successful in that quest and was deeply proud of her action. The next six months of interacting with her friend were not the easiest for Renee, but the friendship survived the layoff and Renee grew as an authentic leader. The action that she took in that situation is indicative of what I call the Reinhold Niebuhr rule. Reinhold Niebuhr was a twentieth-century American theologian often credited with the Serenity Prayer, which reads:

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

Courage to change the things I can,

And wisdom to know the difference.

Renee could not change the fact that shifts in the marketplace demanded layoffs. Nor could she change the fact that one of her oldest friends was caught in the vortex. However, she did have the power to impact the way the whole thing came down for everyone in the company, not just her friend. The company responded and provided help to former employees who were now vulnerable in a rough job market. For Renee, she was practicing authenticity and coming from her own values. Throughout the experience, Renee saw multiple choices and understood that being true to your values was not always about telling everything that you know. The dead bug view of truth was dead for Renee.

Big Fat Whoppers and Sweet Little Lies

The notion of being honest is always linked with authenticity. It is seductive to do so and to think there are two types of people: authentic people with integrity and liars without integrity. However, both common sense and research have made it clear that lying is a part of everyday human interaction. Lying often functions as a kind of social lubricant. Too much truth can certainly disrupt the peace in everyday social interactions. In the 1997 movie Liar Liar, Jim Carrey portrays a duplicitous lawyer who is struck by a curse that has made it impossible for him to lie for 24 hours.⁸ He speaks the whole truth and nothing but the truth for 24 hours. What would happen in your life at work or home if someone cast such a spell on you?

Leading social psychologist Bella DePaulo has been studying lying for more than three decades.⁹ Her key findings include that we humans are quite aware of the lies that we are telling when we take the time to stop and think about them. DePaulo's pioneering studies in the 1990s required two separate groups to keep journals for a week and log every time they lied. One group consisted of college students, and the other group was a random sample from the community that varied in basic demographic variables such as age, income, and so on. The journals were confidential, and even the researchers knew the subjects only by assigned confidential numbers. The college students told two lies per day on average, and the group from the larger community told at least one lie per day on average. DePaulo made it clear that average people in her studies, including the college students, do not typically feel good about their lies.

Most everyday lies fall into one of two categories. The first type of lie is called a self-centered lie, and those are the lies we tell to make ourselves look good. Even with self-centered lies, things are not always what they seem. A lie may not just be a lie. One of my recent clients named Catherine was really struggling with the workload in a new job. Her boss had a gut sense that something was wrong. He kept asking Catherine how her transition was going and if he could help. She repeatedly assured him that things were going well and that she was coming up to speed, when in fact she was drowning and beginning to miss deadlines. Her boss became increasingly frustrated with her unwillingness to admit that she was struggling. She was afraid to admit any weakness, and he was quickly losing faith in her ability to do the new job. Telling the lie to make herself look good was actually making her look bad.

My assignment was to assess Catherine and offer advice to her frustrated boss. Things were not nearly as bad as he had imagined. As I began to get to know her, I asked her to tell me about a time when she had helped someone else be successful. A lot of stories came out in response to that question. Then, I asked her to tell me about a time when someone else really helped her be successful. A blank look came across her face. She could not come up with a single time. She was in a highly technical area, and most of her assignments had been as an individual contributor. Even her preferred sports as a kid were primarily individual sports. She loved tennis and horseback riding and had excelled in both. It became clear in our conversation that in her mind, accepting her boss's help meant that she was not competent to do her job.

We all have our own meaning-making systems in our heads, and they are a part of our authentic selves. They are unique to us as individuals and are based in our backgrounds. Sometimes, they are productive and helpful and sometimes they're not.

Looking at Catherine's behavior in terms of absolute truths and lies, she was lying to her boss. But through self-exploration and figuring out that growth at this stage in her career meant learning to rely on others, she began to question and update her own meaning-making system. She ultimately was candid with her boss and said, “You're right, I am struggling. I want to get better at relying on other people to get things done so that I can be a more effective leader.” This became a defining moment in which she learned how to operate more effectively at a higher level not in the abstract but in the real world. The deeper truth in her situation was that she needed to revise her view of what it meant to be competent in her new job. If her boss had decided that she was dishonest and played by the black-and-white rules, she would not have had the opportunity to learn and grow. She actually became more authentic in terms of having a higher level of real practical self-awareness.

The second most common type of lie according to DePaulo's research is an other-centered lie. These are the lies we tell to protect the feelings of someone else. In the workplace, these lies take many forms. One of the more common forms is soft-pedaling performance feedback.

Here is what happens in Act One of this typical workplace drama of duplicity. A manager calls me and says that one of his new direct reports named Thomas has awful communication skills. The manager attended Thomas's all-employee meeting the week before and felt appalled. The first thing I ask the manager is if he gave his new direct report feedback on this subject. The manager on the other end of the phone says, “Yes, and I told him I had a great resource for him named Karissa.”

Act Two. I meet with Thomas, who has supposedly been told that his communication skills are awful. As we are getting acquainted, I begin to process that he has absolutely no idea why he is meeting with an organizational psychologist and is concerned that something is terribly wrong. His boss perceived that he had been clear and directly pointed out that Thomas's communication needed to improve drastically. I have often been tempted to ask for iPhone videos of these supposedly direct feedback meetings!

Regardless of what really happened, the message was not received. In the meeting with Thomas, I begin to adjust and ask more general questions and formulate a plan to salvage what could quickly turn into a train wreck of a meeting.

Act Three. I call the manager after the meeting and report that Thomas has no idea that his boss is really worried about his communication skills. The manager stammers and beats around the bush a bit. I cut to the chase and say we need to get Thomas accurate feedback. Let's solve the problem. Do we need to do a formal 360? He says yes and we are off. Was the soft-pedaling manager inauthentic? He definitely told a lie. It became clear that he really was too concerned with Thomas's feelings to tell him the truth about his current level of communication skills. Is it simply a case of the soft-pedaling manager lacking courage? Was he duplicitous by nature? How could this situation be used to develop both the manager and Thomas as more authentic leaders?

Other insights from research on lying include that people clearly discriminate between sweet little lies and serious lies or big fat whoppers. Not surprisingly, people experience much more discomfort over the big fat whoppers like having an affair or lying about money. Some of the people who tell the big fat lies in business get caught and wind up on television. Those are dramatic events that stand out in our memories.

However, the interesting chapters in the development of the vast majority of authentic leaders are much more like the stories of Catherine and the soft-pedaling manager—everyday choices that set in motion relationships with other people that are more or less honest. How the manager in the above example views and relates to himself is also important in the development of authentic leaders. Authentic people are driven by autonomy, connectedness, and competence. Autonomy comes out in the need to express that you are unique and can accomplish things on your own, as in Catherine's story. Most of our lying at work and at home has to do with fear of loss of connection. It is not that we lie to disrespect people. We lie to protect ourselves from the rejection and disapproval of others. The soft-pedaling manager really valued Thomas and feared that giving him difficult feedback would ruin their relationship and Thomas would leave and go to another company.

The closer the relationship, the less likely people are to engage in small lies to make themselves look good. You know that you are building truly collaborative relationships when people begin to let you in on their shortcomings, such as a lack of PowerPoint skill or a bad sense of direction.

People are also much less likely to lie in person than on the phone. It really is more difficult to lie when you are literally looking at people. This has huge implications in our wired world. If we follow the logic of the research, the less distant the type of communication, the less likely we are to fudge the truth.

What impact do big fat whoppers, sweet little lies, and lies of omission have on leaders themselves? Renee's story indicates that not telling the truth to her friend was actually a growth experience for her as an authentic leader. Catherine also really grew from stepping up and telling her boss that she was feeling overwhelmed and really grew as a leader. The soft-pedaling manager's lie was actually motivated by a respect for his employee. We typically think of others as the victims of our lies, but research has made it clear that we are at least equally affected as well by our everyday lies. We know when we are lying. The practice of authenticity requires us to notice our lies and make sense of them. What motivated the lie? Is there a part of our story that needs a revision? Is there a value that we need to figure out how to put into practice in a really awful situation? Are we seeing things as a yes or no and missing the multiple choice questions?

The Truth About Authenticity

The art of authenticity is the process of inventing yourself. It is an active process of experimentation and figuring things out. You trust what you know through your own experiences. Introspection deeper than the pop psychology level becomes a habit of mind. Central to the process of self-invention is the telling, revising, and understanding of your own life experiences and your story.

We use the term invent more often in relation to inventing a new machine or object. Gutenberg's invention of the printing press changed the world. So did the invention of Martin Luther King, Jr., courageous civil rights leader, by Martin Luther King, Jr. the man. He responded to the forces of history and invented himself, to use Warren Bennis's term. The principal definition of invent literally means to create or design something that has not existed before. You take all of the elements, including your history, thought patterns, emotions, values, and motivations, and combine them into an integrated, adaptable, whole operating system that is uniquely you. Authentic leaders are self-inventors. Warren Bennis wrote in his classic On Becoming a Leader: “Until you make your life your own, you're walking around in borrowed clothes. Leaders, whatever their field, are made up as much of their experiences as their skills, like everyone else. Unlike everyone else, they use their experience rather than being used by it. What distinguishes the leader from everyone else is that he or she takes all of that and creates a new, unique self.”¹⁰

As we have discussed in this chapter, the practice of authenticity requires a willful, proactive struggle to behave in alignment with multiple and conflicting values. One of the bedrock values of authentic leaders is truth-seeking. Seeking the truth is a choice that one makes to face reality about oneself, one's situation, or one's business in as direct a manner as is possible. Truth-seeking is a bigger concept than honesty or lying. Leaders who are authentic and truth-seeking set up conditions for multiple and ongoing honest conversations. They pursue the goal of knowing and dealing in the truth with the awareness that there are always multiple sides of an issue and that it is not always easy to face situations head-on. Said in Emerson's more poetic terms, authentic leaders view themselves as being apprentices to the truth. Authentic action is intentional and carefully chosen to express what is most important or what is valuable in particular situations. Authenticity, in psychological terms, is not an either/or. Authenticity is a continuum, like most other psychological traits. Think about the more familiar introversion vs. extroversion. No one is purely introverted or extroverted. No one is totally authentic or not.

Does authenticity work? Will being authentic make you a more effective leader in your world? Let me tell you a story about Domino's Pizza and a CEO named J. Patrick Doyle. Wall Street Journal reporter Stephen Moore visited Doyle at company headquarters in Ann Arbor, Michigan.¹¹ In Doyle's five years as CEO, annual sales have increased to $9 billion from $2 billion. In 2015, the stock price of Domino's hovers around $100, up from a low of $13 in 2010. Early on in his tenure, Doyle learned through focus groups that consumers thought the pizza tasted awful. His extraordinary out-of-the-box approach was to sign off on an ad campaign that showed consumers declaring that the pizza was awful. To top it all off, he appeared in each commercial and said, “We hear you, America. Give us another chance.” Sales went through the roof as consumers gave Domino's another try. The cold, hard, unvarnished truth worked. Doyle is not following anyone else's playbook. He is a self-inventor and has reinvented the entire company.

The relationship between truth, lies, and authenticity is not a straightforward, linear path of clear rules. You have to be willing to adapt and build your own playbook like J. Patrick Doyle. To be sure, it is not always as easy to link the truth or the lie as directly to the success or failure as in the Domino's story.

In aggregate, simple choices and habits shape who we are becoming. Are we becoming more or less authentic? Our choices about telling the truth, outright lying, or fudging the truth affect not just other people. Our choices deeply affect us and are the turning points in our stories. Our choices to accept the ambiguity and complexity inherent in the messy world of leading and making decisions—and not settling for the easiest, least painful course of action—are what define us. All of our choices determine whether we are inventing ourselves and being authentic or going with the flow and not having the courage to figure out and express who we are and who we are becoming. The process of becoming more authentic amid the pressures of everyday organizational life and life in general requires inquiry, deep introspection, and most important, placing a value on self-invention.

The Workouts

• Think of someone you know and really respect as a leader. In this experiment, you get to do what I get to do every day! Ask them the following question: “When you think about the process of becoming the leader that you are today, what experiences stand out for you as turning points?” Listen carefully.
• Go on a multiple choice expedition next Thursday. Identify three situations that you would normally see as simple yes-or-no situations and reframe them as multiple choice issues. They can be important or simple. “Shall I go to the gym or not” could turn into shall I:
  1. go to the gym
  2. avoid exercising at all costs
  3. go to the movies
  4. take a walk
  5. both c and d
• Keep a log of your lies for a week just as the participants in DePaulo's original study did. Keep a journal and write down every lie that you tell with a brief description of the situation. Are you above average in your frequency? Do you most often tell lies to protect yourself, or are most of your lies other-centered?