My personal experience as a young woman in the tech sector inspired my academic and now professional interest in examining the issue of authenticity in the workplace, so much so that I conducted an in-depth study titled Gender equality and authenticity: a study of women in IT leadership that dives into how women leaders in tech have managed to be true to themselves and still succeed.
My doctoral dissertation entailed one-on-one interviews with nine senior women leaders at six technology companies about how they confronted the challenge of being authentic on the job. Eight women worked at Fortune 500 companies, ranging from a C-suite executive and six vice presidents to a managing director and a global director. They had served in tech for an average of 26 years.
As it turned out, the findings from my year-long research project uncovered a glaring need for a new understanding of this issue. Indeed, my study proved surprisingly useful, particularly my insights into how a woman can best practice the art of authenticity as if it were a superpower to be harnessed.
My research motivated me to help create a course on Women in Technology and Innovation through Lehigh@NasdaqCenter. In the process, I hosted discussions with female leaders and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley to chart a path for future generations.
My biggest takeaway from combining my original research study with the insights from our university curriculum is that authenticity is essential to success as a leader. Equally important, is that it’s a skill that can be developed.
Here’s what else I’ve learned.
PRESSURE TO CONFORM
It’s no secret, for starters, that it can be difficult for women to face an identity crisis at work, especially if they’re just starting out. Women in predominantly male workplaces often feel pressured to conform to entrenched cultural norms of behavior and gender stereotypes and hide aspects of themselves to try to “act like a man.” “I spent years trying to be a male,” Kathleen Egan, founder and CEO of ecomedes, told our students, “Then one day someone told me, ‘You can come out of the closet and be a female executive.’”
In my case, I often felt self-conscious in my first jobs. I felt fearful of failure, a poor fit for the given organizational cultures, and just plain lost. I had to ask myself, who am I? I had little choice but to try, as the phrase goes, to fake it until I could make it.
For my study, I asked the nine senior women leaders the following questions.
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Do you feel you can be yourself at work?
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Do your actions reflect your feelings and beliefs?
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Should you adapt your behavior and suppress your emotions to come across as more stereotypically male?
My underlying hypothesis was that the more authentic a woman could be at work, the more she could get—and stay—real, and the more likely she would become a successful leader.
My study and the years of conversations with women leaders have led me to five key insights about how women in the workplace can succeed as themselves.
KNOW YOUR PERSONAL VALUES
To become an authentic leader, you should know your values. Personal values are the principles that guide you through life. You should understand what’s most important about how you live and work, and act accordingly. “I started a value chart early on in [my] career,” one C-suite executive revealed to me, “and use the same chart today to explain to people who I am and what I stand for.”
DEVELOP YOUR EQ
Being a successful authentic leader requires a high degree of emotional intelligence. That means balancing your understanding of yourself with your understanding of your audience. Only with this dual perception can you know how best to adjust and adapt suitably to the needs of a given situation. The women in the study reported demonstrating such adaptability. They could communicate in a style tailored to the audience being addressed.
BE YOUR INTEGRATED SELF
Learn to bring your whole self to work. The study participants reported that because they recognized that different authentic versions of themselves existed, they had to apply emotional intelligence to know just how and when to bring forward the version that best fits the occasion. It comes down to sensing intuitively the best circumstances for either getting a little personal or staying strictly professional, or somehow straddling both. True authenticity calls for your professional self and your personal self to co-exist. As one participant recounted, an interviewer once asked Coretta Scott King how she balanced being a mother, a wife, and a civil rights leader. “I don’t look at these as three separate things,” she answered. “They make up all of me.”
My father epitomized this concept of an integrated self. He was the dean of the graduate college at the University of Oklahoma. As such, and true to form, he often wore a suit and tie and acted every inch the scholar. But the college website showed another side of him. His cover photo depicted him as an avid dirt bike rider, complete with mud spattered all over his face. In so doing, he set an example showing that personality is multi-dimensional.
FIND PEOPLE WHO WILL HELP YOU ACHIEVE
Study participants consistently mentioned “coaches” and “sponsors” and reported that having access to a network of mentors and role models, whether bosses, peers, or supportive family members, helped spur success as leaders. They reported that nothing better reinforces individual authenticity than, in effect, building a personal board of directors, otherwise known as the people who can best help you embrace what makes you, you.
BRING YOUR UNIQUE STRENGTHS
The women I interviewed reported feeling that being female actually brought certain advantages. They believed that they could stand out favorably in the workplace, provided they played to their unique strengths.
Research shows, for example, that women, compared to men, tend to be more collaborative and empathetic than directive or autocratic. True, some of the women in my study reported feeling the need to downplay traits perceived as stereotypically female, such as being too emotional or too talkative. However, eight of the nine indicated that by freely expressing ideas and opinions, they had positive experiences in the tech industry and were ultimately able to get ahead.
“I’m aware that women communicate and look and act differently,” one woman leader told me. “What I’ve learned is to use that to your advantage, in that we are great collaborators and pull people in and along. I’ve been pretty conscious of using those skills in a way that makes people feel part of the process.”
In the end, most reported that they were now generally able to be themselves. That’s chiefly because they now understand themselves better, know what they believe and value at work, and feel free, in general, to say and do exactly what they want to say and do.
As Amy Weaver, president and chief financial officer of Salesforce, told our Women in Tech class,
“I spent too much time early in my early career trying to emulate the leadership styles of the men I was working with and, frankly, not doing it very well. It took me a long time to realize that I was never going to be mistaken for ‘one of the guys’—especially because I was pregnant half the time! I had to figure out my own style and what was going to work for me.”
Applying these learnings to my life helped spark an a-ha moment. I decided to get real. I discovered that the better I understood myself, the better I would perform. The more my behavior stayed true to what I value in life, the happier and more productive—and authentic—I would be, and the more likely someday to become a leader.
Today, in a curriculum I’ve helped to design, I leverage my learnings about authenticity, knowing your values, developing emotional intelligence, building a network of mentors, and bringing your whole self to work. I teach the importance of developing and cultivating an entrepreneurial mindset to current and aspiring entrepreneurs.
If you always stay true to who you are, I realized, you’ll almost certainly end up where you’re supposed to be.