There’s a fundamental tension at the heart of business leadership that few people talk about openly: the collision between authenticity and performance. Every interaction in the corporate world is, to some degree, a performance where everyone plays their role to get what they want. But what happens when you’re someone who values authentic interactions, and you find yourself thrust into a leadership position where every word carries outsised weight?
The Authenticity Trap
I’ve always tried to be genuine in my interactions with people. There’s something deeply uncomfortable about putting on a facade, about calculating every response for maximum strategic impact. This authenticity served me well in my early career—people trusted me, collaborations felt natural, and relationships developed organically.
But as I climbed the corporate ladder and found myself in leadership positions, this same authenticity became a double-edged sword. The higher I rose, the more I realised that leadership in large organisations isn’t just about being yourself—it’s about managing the performance of being yourself while understanding that your audience is constantly reading between the lines.
The Burden of Interpretation
The stress of executive leadership isn’t just about making big decisions or managing complex operations. It’s about the constant vigilance required when you realize that everyone around you has an agenda, and your job is to decode what people really want when they approach you.
Someone would pitch an idea, and I’d respond with what felt like a casual, “That sounds very promising.” Next thing I knew, this had become a full-fledged program, with teams allocated, budgets assigned, and timelines established—all based on my offhand comment that I thought was just polite encouragement.
This taught me a harsh lesson: when you’re in a position of authority, there’s no such thing as casual conversation. Every utterance is weighted, analysed, and often transformed into action by well-meaning subordinates who are trying to align with what they perceive as your vision.
The CEO’s Dilemma: Accidental Strategy
I first witnessed this phenomenon while working at one of the major banks. I watched in fascination as entire divisions would pivot based on a few sentences the CEO had spoken in an internal forum or public interview. Teams would mobilize, strategies would shift, and resources would be reallocated—all because someone was trying to align with what they thought the CEO wanted.
At first, this struck me as absurd. How could such massive organisational changes stem from what seemed like casual remarks? But as I progressed in my own leadership journey and eventually became a CEO myself, I realised this wasn’t a bug in the system—it was a feature.
Successful CEOs understand that this amplification effect exists, and they use it strategically. Every speech, every interview, every seemingly casual comment becomes an opportunity to nudge the organisation towards longer-term strategic goals. It’s like an early, albeit imperfect, version of what we now call OKRs (Objectives and Key Results)—a way to cascade high-level strategy down through the organisation to drive specific initiatives.
The Performance of Leadership
This realization was both liberating and troubling. Liberating because it helped me understand that the weight of my words wasn’t a burden to fight against, but a tool to wield purposefully. Troubling because it meant accepting that authentic leadership, at least in large corporate environments, required a level of performance that felt fundamentally at odds with my natural instincts.
The most effective leaders I observed had learned to be consistently “on message.” They understood that their role wasn’t just to make decisions in board rooms, but to embody the organization’s direction in every interaction. This meant calculating not just what they wanted to say, but how it would be interpreted, amplified, and acted upon by dozens or hundreds of people downstream.
The Cost of Constant Performance
While this approach can be effective for organizational alignment, it comes with a personal cost. The need to be perpetually guarded about what you say, to constantly assess the underlying agendas of those around you, creates a kind of psychological isolation. You begin to second-guess not just others’ motivations, but your own responses to them.
It’s exhausting to live in a state where no conversation is simple, where every request comes with layers of subtext, and where your authentic reactions must be filtered through a strategic lens before they can be expressed.
A Better Way Forward
While I learned to navigate this reality, I never fully embraced it. The need for this kind of performance-based leadership highlighted what I saw as a fundamental flaw in how many large organizations operate. The fact that people had to decode leadership intentions rather than receiving clear, direct communication seemed inefficient and unnecessarily complex.
This is why I believe approaches like OKRs represent such an improvement. They provide a structured, transparent way to align organizational efforts with strategic goals without requiring employees to become amateur psychologists, parsing every leadership utterance for hidden meaning.
Lessons for Authentic Leaders
For those who, like me, value authenticity but find themselves in leadership positions, the challenge isn’t to abandon your genuine nature—it’s to find ways to be strategically authentic. This means:
- Recognizing the weight of your words and accepting that casual comments don’t exist at senior levels
- Being intentional about your messaging while remaining true to your core values
- Creating systems for clear communication that don’t rely on interpretation
- Building trusted relationships where you can occasionally let your guard down
- Remembering that leadership is service, not just performance
The Uncomfortable Truth
The uncomfortable reality is that business leadership in large organisations requires a level of performance that can feel inauthentic. The key is learning to perform authentically—to be genuine within the constraints of your role while understanding that your audience will always be looking for more than what you’re saying on the surface.
It’s one of the aspects of corporate leadership that I never fully made peace with, but learning to navigate it made me a more effective leader and, ultimately, led me to seek environments where authentic communication could flourish alongside strategic clarity.
The goal isn’t to eliminate the performance aspect of leadership—it’s to find ways to perform that honor both your authentic self and the needs of the organisation you serve.
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