Radical Authenticity

I continue to process my takeaways from a thought-provoking episode of the In-Depth podcast, featuring Rippling COO, Matt MacInnis . There's one idea among many I'm still grabbling with, and it's the idea of radical authenticity (my term, not his).

The idea appears to stem from MacInnis's own coming-of-age moment, somewhere around age 30, when he came to see the futility of trying to be someone other than himself. He had grown up in a dull, dreary, dream-crushing expanse of northern Ontario, Canada. As a gay man, he felt obliged to conceal a core aspect of his identity. For years, he disliked and repudiated the person he saw in the mirror, and he struggled to fabricate a more socially desirable persona.

Eventually he saw how draining and counterproductive these efforts had become. He could no longer sustain the arduous pretense, so he decided to embrace his true self. That was the point at which he finally started to do his best work.

You can detect these biographical details behind his take on what constitutes effective leadership. According to him, the best leaders go all-in on their distinctive strengths, consciously disregarding the fall-out. They recognize the potential for collateral damage, but they believe the net benefits are worth it. This is what I'm labelling 'radical authenticity'.

There are many things I love about this perspective. First, it seems obviously better to be definitively oneself all the time. Second, leaders certainly should be more interested in what it takes to win, not on how they are perceived. Third, radical authenticity seems like the most sustainable way to find energy and fulfillment over the long run.

And yet the idea gives me pause. It reminds me of the socially awkward uncle who justifies his off-color remarks by saying he's simply being honest. It seems to minimize a sense of social responsibility, and to ignore the fact that in the most functional communities people are mindful of group norms and individual perceptions. It appears to take for granted that someone else can bloody well pick up the pieces. It feels gratuitously self-indulgent.

There are obvious costs to radical authenticity: an emotional blast radius that scars and unsettles some of those affected. And there are equally obvious costs to a more solicitous approach: lowering a leader's intensity can invite organizational drift and entropy.

I'm reminded of the great economist and political commentator, Thomas Sowell, who famously observed that in any complex domain "there are no solutions, only trade-offs." Each of us has to embrace the consequences we're comfortable with.