Should you be an Authentic Leader? Maybe Not.

Folks, I have a new favorite piece of literature! Jon Billsberry has written an amazing paper, and in this blog, I’m going to break down the context of the work, what I learned, and how it impacts me as a leader.

Here is Jon’s Site if you want to know more about the original author. He is one of the legendary few who openly shares PDF access to his library of first-author publications. This makes Jon epically punk rock, instantly makes him my hero, and I will be working my way through his library. If you like Jon’s writing as much as I do, you should too. You can find the original article linked off his site here.

This is Sage. She agrees with me, btw. Anyways. Read on sojourner of leadership!

Intro Lore

Authentic Leadership is one of many leadership constructions created and studied over the past decades. It is a relationship-focused approach centered on genuine, ethical behavior, self-awareness, and transparency, rather than just authority or hierarchy. An authentic leader fosters high-performing, engaged teams by aligning their actions with core values, demonstrating vulnerability, and building trust through open, consistent communication.

To explain Authentic Leadership in a broader context, I’ll have future blogs out on the history and evolution of leadership theory and how it stitches into the conceptual fabric. The framework has received critique in the literature, and those critiques were often not addressed in follow-on papers. Therefore, Billsberry has written a paper as a sort of “come together” for the field, setting the stage for interesting future discourse (Billsberry, 2024).

Previous reviews of the Authentic Leadership framework have positive results to share:

• Authentic leaders make ethical decisions, have high psychological well-being, and role model positive behaviors.
• Followers feel empowered, identify with their leader, and report higher job performance, satisfaction, trust, and engagement.
• Organizations see strong financial performance, an ethical climate, and higher psychological safety.

Keep in mind that putting numbers to abstract organizational outcomes is very difficult. Minute changes in definition can make two data sets incomparable.

The Critique: The “True Self” Trap

Authentic Leadership asks you to be vulnerable and be your “True Self.” You are told to find your beliefs and core values and bring them to the surface of your professional interactions.

The issue is that if you’re not the archetypal picture of a corporate leader, a cisgender white male from an elite education and a privileged background, then your core values and personal beliefs aren’t likely in perfect alignment with the organization.

The “Great Man Theory” tells us leaders have innate qualities that make them morally superior. While we moved away from that with modern psychology, focusing instead on how leaders impact those around them (like transformational or situational leadership), Authentic Leadership risks sliding back.

Broadening the implications, we inadvertently suggest that authentic leaders are morally and ethically superior. I’m paraphrasing Billsberry here, but this is imperative to spread: for anyone who isn’t the typical white, cisgender male leader, being “real” can cost you credibility. A study of LGBTQ leaders showed how expecting them to be “authentic” was often exhausting, invasive, and coercive (O’Rourke, 2024).

Atypical leaders often end up feeling pressured to wear a costume. You perform “leader” in a way that reads as acceptable. You’re allowed to be vulnerable, but only if it doesn’t make you seem weak. Instead of liberating the self, “authenticity” can become another form of control, binding people even tighter to emotional labor.

Authenticity as a Label, Not a Trait

Billsberry discusses these unresolved critiques and calls for the field to move forward. One of the suggestions, and I agree with this, is to look at authenticity as a follower label put onto the leader, not a style a leader can embody through personal decision.

Think about it this way: if someone says, “I’m cool,” that instantly makes them uncool. Coolness is a trait decided by the onlooker; authenticity is in the eye of the beholder.

When a follower describes a leader as authentic, they are expressing comfort, trust, and alignment. A lack of authenticity is related to feelings of betrayal or unmet expectations. Authentic leadership is not a style per se, but a cultural idiom followers use to judge moral legitimacy.

Personal Thoughts on Corporate Authenticity

If I came to work and was my “true self” in any of my past roles, I’d likely have been fired from all of them. I have grown into a very direct person, but I put on a veil of manners, restraint, patience, and the physical uniform of a corporate professional.Professionalism is a construct, a mask we wear. It is not always inclusive or innately diverse. It is often a performative ritual. I make a pledge to atypical leaders, or those aspiring to be: I will acknowledge my own privilege and spread more research about the intersection of leadership and being a real human who is not a white, cisgender, neurotypical male.

Actionable Steps for Leaders

Here are some thoughts on how to embrace the benefits of authenticity without making it about “yourself”:

1. Share your intent out loud. 

> “My intent here is X (protect the team / be transparent). What I’m optimizing for is Y.”

2. Tell the truth about constraints.
   > “We’re making this decision because we have a resource constraint. As soon as this is resolved, we will go back to the status quo. Does anyone have questions?”
3. Use a visible fairness process. Apply rules equally across the team and give everyone the same resources for success.
4. Share credit in public; take heat in public. You are the umbrella when things go wrong and the focusing lens when kudos are in order.

We discussed authentic leadership, powerful critiques of the framework, and professionalism as a construct. We learned how to bring aspects of authenticity into our practice without succumbing to the pitfalls of the “True Self” trap.

Until next time, Dan

References

Billsberry, Jon. “Authentic Leadership: A Critical Review and Strategies for the Future.” Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies (2024). [Note: Assuming 2024 based on the “New favorite” context; please verify year if different.]

O’Rourke, S. “What we ask of authenticity: How LGBQ experiences illuminate the possibilities, constraints, and expectations of being an authentic leader.” Leadership 20, no. 5 (2024): 279-288.

Sinek, Simon. Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action. New York: Portfolio, 2009.

Three Thoughts on Bolstering Transparent Communication

Don’t Think For Your Team – Training Critical Thinking

Learn more about me at www.dankours.com

Learn more about my project at www.kestryledge.com

Employees who feel connected have 56% higher in-role performance.

This is one of my favorite papers I’ve read in 2026.

It was published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health in 2023. The reference frame of the paper is the global attention to the workplace, burnout, “quiet quitting,” and the tide of discontented and cynical workers.

The pandemic woke people up to their mental health conditions, and researchers wrote papers about how we can do better. Learning about how we can do better and improve is one silver lining from the tragedy. Mental health at work determines safety, productivity, and error precursors.

The paper highlights a known truth: as leaders, we have the largest influence on the experience of our employees. Two terms are made distinct in the paper: “Workplace Disconnectedness” and “Work Cynicism.”

Workplace Disconnectedness

Disconnectedness comes from an unfulfilled desire to belong. It is when an employee feels a lack of unity and connectedness with their organizational community. This involves not feeling understood, feeling different and distant from other people, and struggling to fit in.

Work Cynicism

Cynicism is a self-protection method against further harm. It is a state of psychological detachment and a negative attitude about one’s workplace. When overwhelming demands become chronic, it depletes emotional resources. Cynicism is a negative reaction to the stressors of work.

I appreciated the distinction between disconnectedness and cynicism and also how cynicism is a protection mechanism from toxic work elements and burnout. The mechanism is explained like this: As one becomes burned out over time, they get worn down. If no leader is there to protect their health, then they will subconsciously begin to develop protection in the form of detachment, cognitive and emotional distancing, and eventually cynicism.

The data was gathered from 204 Italian organizations polling over 1,066 individuals. There were many findings explored in the paper, and the paper is worth reading, but one of the key findings I’ll share is that workplace disconnectedness is correlated with cynicism. The reciprocal was also found true.

Why does this matter to us as leaders and managers?

There are real and toxic effects of workplace disconnectedness that are detrimental to performance, safety, and error reduction. As leaders, it is our job to ensure people get home safe. We must ensure they can work in an environment that supports minimizing error precursors while supporting their performance.

• Performance is 56% higher: When employees are filled with connectedness, performance is 56% higher. Here is a real number for the results-oriented leaders out there. Listen up! How your people are at work affects their performance. Ensure a connected culture and thereby ensure results.
• Employer promoter score is 167% higher: The promoter score is positive employee referrals. If your employees feel connected, then you get promoted much more strongly than if people are disconnected. You want to be known as a good place to work; it is critical to business.
• Cynicism is shown to spread: It spreads top-down quickly and laterally slower. This is important because if you, as a leader, are burnt out, your entire team is likely going to be affected by your resulting mental and emotional decline.

You need to be on top of how you are doing and build systems and habits that support your long-term health. You also need to be humble enough to be able to pull the eject button if you need to take time to recuperate. Being gone for a week is better than dragging your team down into a spiral of negativity. Furthermore, help your team do the same.

Would you let yourself come into work sick, coughing uncontrollably, sneezing everywhere, feverish, and miserable? This is the same; we just can’t always see it. Stay tuned for some future writing on this. I’m working on a scientific compilation of the negative health effects of being in a toxic work environment.

Where do we go from here?

An authentic, transformational, or servant leadership style has positive effects on employees’ psychological resources and is related to lower burnout levels. (Petitta et al. 2019) If you don’t know what those are, check out my reading list and get going. Or, cut to the front of the learning line by reaching out to us at Kestryl Edge.

Leadership performance and behaviors should be regularly evaluated so that potentially adverse aspects may be identified in a timely manner. (Molero et al. 2019) Know thyself! Take care of yourself. If you can’t be there for yourself, you can’t be there for others. Get some trusted advisors to check you on your work and let you know when you’re slipping off the rails. Then listen and act.

Leaders need to prioritize activities that boost interconnectedness and inclusivity:

• Social occasions with coworkers.
• Be mindful of your team by asking questions, making small talk, self-disclosing, and active listening.
• Practicing acceptance by acknowledging that coworkers are different than oneself and focusing on similarities and desired shared outcomes.
• Appreciating coworkers’ efforts to seek contact that helps in building the sense of connectedness.

Remember, your employees’ actions are theirs to own. But the environment they have to work in, the support they have to do the right thing, and the foundations of the culture they have to build upon are all in the hands of their leadership.

9.6/10 Great Read.

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Cheers all,

Dan

Be a part of the solution: www.kestryledge.com

Learn more about Dan: www.dankorus.com

References

Molero, F., M. Mikulincer, P. R. Shaver, A. Laguía, and J. A. Moriano. “The Development and Validation of the Leader as Security Provider Scale.” Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology 35, no. 3 (2019): 183–193.

Petitta, L., T. M. Probst, V. Ghezzi, and C. Barbaranelli. “Cognitive Failures in Response to Emotional Contagion: Their Effects on Workplace Accidents.” Accident Analysis & Prevention 125 (2019): 165–173.

Managing my biggest weakness into being a better leader.

A high performance team is one where things go right. There’s a strong culture and a unified vision.

I think all of us have different criteria but the feeling we experience when on a high performance team is the same.

It’s electric and invigorating. I feel like I’m tapped into some current of energy bigger than myself.

Problems get solved rapidly. People know how to find issues and resolve them.

You feel like you can walk away from an issue and you TRUST that it the team will have it.

This is the Aurora in Bellingham, Washington. Bellingham is where I went to college and it’s a reminder for me of the power of getting the reps in.

If reps are there THEN positive results aren’t a surprise, they are a natural consequence of our efforts.

Ten Years Ago

I’ve been getting the feedback that I am an intense person for my entire adulthood.

I got blessed with an angular features and I grew up in a loud and boisterous family. Volume and self expression was a necessary tool for being heard.

Additionally, I am in tune with my emotions and I am quick to act on them. One of my mentors and I call this our Emotional Impulse Control.

The journey I want to write about today is my progress over the last ten years working on this impulse control and intensity as a leader.

Ten years ago I would react and leverage my volume and words to be heard. If I felt an injustice served I would act and ensure people knew where I was at.

Machiavelli’s The Prince notes about how it’s better to be Feared than Loved if you can’t have both. I think if you’re a poor leader this is true, and unfortunately it works. Poor quality leaders can gain massive success using unethical and emotionally violent tools.

A decade ago I was leveraging my reactivity and intensity to express my vision and propel teams forward.

I would blame, call out less than ideal behaviors, I would use my frustrations to make people feel bad about their actions!

I still have memories of times I raised my voice or said things that I now regret.

Our summer camp director Bucky would always say “words are like a tube of toothpaste. It’s easy to say them and really hard to take them back.”

So ten years ago I did my fair share of squeezing toothpaste and learning that lesson the hard way. Some of this was lack of knowing another way. Some of this was learned behavior from mentors I shouldn’t have looked up to.

In my journey I read books (link book list) and evolved my sense of right and wrong. I learned from better mentors and began to realize that some of t he examples in my life were ones I shouldn’t emulate.

I did years of self work. I built habits. I invested in myself. Over the ten years I spent 6 of them regularly doing therapy and counseling. There was only one year I wasn’t working out consistently. I learned how to regulate my fire. I learned how to name and control my emotions and I learned how to listen.

I met my partner for life! She has taught me more than anyone about emotional control and has been by my side for the last six years.

I trained EQ and Empathy. I built the skills that I am now founding a company around. www.Kestryledge.com.

I learned too much to put in one blog post! Simply, though, I learned how to channel my intensity into being a people-first leader.

I trained my biggest liability and leveraged it into a personal strength that has defined who I am as a leader and made me a respected and reputable manager and leader of high performance teams.

Today

I use my intensity to stand up for my people. I use it to explain the importance of culture, safety, and being there for each other.

It’s not a tool for me it’s a shield and umbrella for my team.

I’m more calm, I can regulate and analyze my reactions and see them for what they are.

I use my communicational skills and emotional awareness to be able to say things that are direct, honest, and caring and I can say them in a way that builds the relationship.

I am a great listener. I can talk to anyone.

People know me as a caring leader who puts the people first over all else.

I channel my intensity to make the work and the lives of my people better.

I am an advocate for improving the systems around the person and can support them to be better than they were yesterday.

The Difference and Training

The difference can be boiled down to emotional regulation and leadership maturity.

Knowing the styles of leadership, their history, and when to use each has been huge.

Knowing my weaknesses as a leader and working on them by training emotional intelligence has been the biggest differentiator of my success in all my roles.

I want more people to be able to leverage the power of emotional intelligence and intentional leadership.

This is a big motivator for why I founded Kestryl Edge.

If you are ready to start your journey, or if you’re on your journey and you’re ready to share it with your team, reach out to us at www.KestrylEdge.com.

Here’s to becoming better every day,

Dan

There are trends I’m seeing in the leadership and personal improvement world, and these thoughts guide how I approach my work as a leader, my writing projects, and my work as a co-founder for Kestryl Edge.

Here are the problems I have with the self-help and leadership genre:

1. There’s too much narrative.
2. The narrative is hard to relate to.
3. Not a handy reference.
4. [Usable content] to [Length] ratio is off.
5. Disorganized.
6. Not useful past the first read.
7. Lack of references and research.

Let me color this in and then share some thoughts about what I aspire to provide in these blogs and future projects.

1. There’s too much narrative. & 2. The narrative is hard to relate to.

Humankind are beings of story. We’re all on the same page there. To make a point, your narrative needs to be tight, rooted in the point(s) you’re putting forth, and relatable to the audience. Since most organizations are hierarchical, you will have more team leads and middle management readers than you will CEOs. Your narratives need to be relatable to the aspiring manager and the middle manager. I have read many books where the content ends after the first narrative example. I did not need the three or five examples that came after that to get the singular point that is summarized by the title of the book. What would I want instead of additional narrative? That brings me to my next critique.

3. Not a handy reference. & 4. [Usable content] to [Length] ratio is off. & 5. Disorganized.

Great books, in my humble opinion, are the ones that make you change your mind, feel something, teach you something you can’t learn somewhere else, and maybe distract you from life. And the best books are the well-worn, dog-eared, annotated, sticky-noted, coffee-stained books that survive move after move and job after job but are a fixture on the desk, by the bed, or in the office.

What do these best books have in common? They are good references. They have useful tables. They have well-organized equations. They have a never-ending supply of pithy wisdom and utility.

In the age of AI, you could just go ask the internet to do your thinking for you. But this is no fun and lacks individuality and nuance. Sure, being able to get a good answer is a skill, and AI can take you from point A to B. And understanding, thinking, and being able to engage without needing a robot to do your homework for you is more impressive.

I’ve had a few “best books.” For a while, my Physical Chemistry and Analytical Chemistry textbooks were mainstays. Now I really like my copy of Never Scratch a Tiger with a Short Stick. I bring a quote to my team’s stand-up meetings on light days and we’ll discuss it. Fun and engaging team building. Books that are too heavy on narrative hide the useful and actionable advice between stories and extrapolation. The book is now hard to reference.

6. Not useful past the first read. & 7. Lack of references and research.

This is a personal preference. I prefer books that outlast the first read in their utility. Does that mean that all books need to be useful past the first read? No. But the industry is saturated with low-value, one-time reads. This dilutes customers’ faith that a new book is going to be worth buying.

Part of the issue with leadership as a study is that if we want people to see it as a hard skill, we need to treat it like one (and the same goes for Empathy and EQ). High-quality research and primary source references turn personal stories into valuable resources for the studious audience. A book chock-full of personal narrative only relatable to a select few is not going to end up on my shelf with dog ears, sticky notes, and coffee stains (a love-mark and the highest compliment I can muster).

What next?

As a manager and leader, I find books I like and I buy an extra copy and keep it on a table outside my office. Anyone is welcome to it. I have a small library there of high-quality books on leadership, managing, and building skills that support empathy and EQ in the workplace. This table is the first place I turn people to when they come into my office with desires to move up. Stay tuned for some future posts on the books I keep in my personal library.

As a writer, I strive to engage in the Leadership, Empathy, and EQ literature. There’s a boom in publishing these last couple decades and there are lots of studies worth reading out there. I learned how to read literature when I was in grad school studying chemistry. I didn’t know this skill would pay off years later as I apply the research skills I learned to other domains. I highly recommend people go find some papers every once in a while and read them. The scientific peer-reviewed literature is quite literally where new knowledge appears.

Many teams have regular safety moments or opportunities to present in meetings. A great practice is to find a paper that applies to your work and do a ‘literature review’ for your team. It can be 5 minutes. Include what the paper looked at, how they measured a change, and what their findings are. It’s a healthy way to stay learning and bring new ideas to your teams.

As a co-founder, I’ve taken my own critiques to heart. Kestryl Edge provides retention programs paired with workshops on leadership, empathy, and EQ. Our team has been diligent about including sources and references to our claims. We research ideas before we present them as fact. We find where the knowledge gaps are in the literature and instead of filling them with our own ideas, we embrace the nuance of the field. We present all angles and let our audience apply the knowledge in their own way. As we develop tools and resources, we benchmark them against the industry standard.

We’ve all been to the training or read the book proffered by a person with great tag lines and one-liners, but the material lacks substance and sticking power. I aim to cut through the noise with fact-first insights and scientifically backed methods. I’m proud that instead of offering narrative and platitudes, we bring universal tools and activities that give people actionable skills and practice implementing them.

That’s all for now.

Cheers, Dan