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It ain’t about authenticity, people
Authenticity. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
In fact, I’m pretty sure a lot of us are confusing authenticity with integrity. Or even if we’re not, we’re putting the emphasis on the wrong quality.
Authenticity is about being real. But real-ness isn’t the issue. When we’re going around urging people to be authentic, we’re not asking them to be real. People, and the organizations they run and serve, are real.
We just might not like them or the way they operate very much. In those cases, “be authentic” means “be different”—and therefore, not authentic. You are authentic, no matter what you do. So let’s take that one off the table, shall we?
What about transparency? Transparency itself used to be a choice: you either were or you weren’t transparent. But now the choice is between active and passive transparency: Will you reveal your code of operations, or will it be revealed for you? We may wish for someone (or something) to make a different choice there, but really, that one’s all about making it easier on us.
What I think we really want is for people and organizations to act with integrity. Integrity is about honesty. Or at the very least, it’s about consistently following a (predictable) moral or ethical code.
And that, I think, is what we’re after: we want people and organizations to behave predictably. But the tricky thing is, we want people and organizations to act predictably in a way we agree with. When faced with a code we don’t agree with, it makes us uncomfortable, even angry, and rightly so.
So how do these three interact? I can’t say it better than @SueSpaight already did:
You can be transparent and authentic, and still have no integrity. Integrity is the highest order.
Now the question is, are we comfortable with the judgment that entails?
Categories Outside the Square, Strategy and Management
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I think when we talk about authenticity we are talking about something else entirely- or to quote chris penn from podcamp this weekend – we are talking about fixing what is going on inside our own heads. It is impossible to act with integrity if being what others expect of you to be is so ingrained in your psyche that it becomes a subconscious action…ie.. are you creating content that truly expresses you, or are you creating content that will be deemed fascinating, acceptable, pc, sensitive, intelligent by the community/bubble at large. Are you creating entirely self-serving content in the guise of listening to others?
There is such an emphasis on “being interesting” and following the “rules”- that authenticity, and of course transitively, integrity, sometimes seems entirely elusive.
You’ve gotten directly to to the heart of it, Kathryn: there is often great tension between what we are and what we want to be. And that fact gets infinitely more complicated the moment we introduce others’ expectations into the mix.
So much of the conversation around authenticity and integrity seems, at root, to be about us projecting our own codes of behavior onto others. The most heated conversations seem to spring from a disconnect between two of those codes: I follow one, you follow another, now let’s see who’s “right.” But “right” is an ephemeral concept, entirely relative, and–perhaps–irrelevant, except for reasons of self-esteem. Our sense of truth is based on our experience. Different experience = different truths, which is why (to my mind) there is no one “right” way to do any of this.
Authenticity is easy. You don’t have to do anything to be authentic. The reason integrity is elusive is because we have to do the hard work of figuring out what we stand for, and be willing to stand for it in the face of others who disagree.
I completely agree with what you’ve said. However, I think a lot of us make the mistake of giving the same advice — in the same words — for people representing themselves and for people representing their jobs/companies.
Of course for many of us the utopian ideal of capitalism is for companies to make quality, remarkable products that enable and empower consumers, and to close the feedback loop publicly when it comes to customer service, encouraging evangelism and making the market part of the creative process.
So many companies..+so many companies+ are +SO+ far from this, and organizational momentum continues to carry them in the wrong direction, even when internal evangelists and people who ‘get it’ are trying to push. My beef with a lot of Social Media folks is that their advice is basically “be authentic, create value, talk to your people”, as if suddenly all those things can just be flipped on like a light switch.
The diseases of poor communication flow, corporate paranoia and tradition/habit eat away at even the ‘best’ companies (see: Apple and @JasonCalicanis’ spot-on post). Companies need to learn how to get their house in order before even thinking about trying to be an effective presence on the social web.
The first step is listening. I wish more bloggers/consultants/people with books about this stuff would focus more heavily on the ‘heres how you figure out how your company is perceived, and what people are saying or not saying’ part of things.
Well said, Jeremy. In the wise and (paraphrased words) of the Cheshire Cat, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.” In other words, if you don’t know what your own code is, it’s easy to justify just about anything…and that, of course, leads very quickly to brand diffusion and calls of “inauthenticity.” There’s not nearly enough attention paid to helping companies (and people, for that matter) figure out what they stand for, which is the first step in determining what value you do or don’t have in the marketplace.
It’s hard to listen if you don’t know what you’re listening for.
It’s a new day. The bar has been raised. The tolerance for b.s. is very low.
So I think what we really mean is:
1. Be good
(offer good products/services/information/sharing)
2. Be real
(make sure your words & actions match up…)
3. Be nice
(be someone/some company that is generous, helpful, positive, etc.)
If you’re not those things, get crackin’. If you are, your integrity will shine through.
Great post, Tamsen. It needs to be said.
I love it, Kat! My personal mantra is: “Be useful, be passionate, be thoughtful, be kind.” I guess I split #2 in two!
Thanks for the credit, Tamsen but I was really just building on what you said first – that you can be a total d-bag, and still be authentic. (And who among us does not know one or two authentic d-bags?)
I especially like your point about how we expect every company to “act predictably in a way that we agree with”. That, of course, being a total impossibility, since we will all never agree on exactly how any one company should act. How fortunate then that we can vote with our words and our dollars.
Your post is incredibly well-thought and articulate. And I love the way that Kat sums it up in her comment, too. What client can’t understand “Be good, be real, be nice?”
And finally, I think the best outcome of this post is an awareness that — while sometimes frankly the semantic debates can get tiresome — we do need to actually think about our words and choose them with intention, instead of just parroting “authenticity” over and over again because it appeared in a great article in Fast Company a few years ago.
I can’t help but think that the parroting of “authenticity” is less about the value of authenticity and more about the damage of those who are inauthentic. Let’s face it, an authentic jerk is much MUCH better than a deceptive jerk being in-authentically kind; a wolf in sheep’s clothing, if you will. In that sense, there is an inherent value to authenticity that is separate from integrity. If a corporation wears its heart on its sleeve, it has more incentive to change if consumers are aware of all it’s doing wrong.
Or if Nike could change its slogan from “Just Do It!”(tm) to “We use cheap labor in China so we can price gouge you!” then maybe they’d lose some of their market share.
The tricky thing about both authenticity and integrity is that we bring our own biases to it. There is no single form of “authenticity,” nor of “integrity.” Nike is authentic, cheap outsourced labor and all. And they have perfect integrity with their own corporate values, which may include finding the cheapest way to make their product to their standards. We may not agree with it–and I do not–but since Nike does not promote fair labor practices as one of its core values, I don’t see them as being inauthetic…I just don’t like them very much.
You raise an excellent point: the damage comes when there’s a disconnect between what a company says it stands for and what it actually does. At that point we actually introduce a fourth concept into the discussion: credibility.
Yes, a lot of times people use the word authenticity when they mean transparency or integrity. I tend to they don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
Authenticity is such a broad word that it can mean different things to different people. To me, when I use the word authentic I mean “staying true to yourself,” “not behaving with hidden intentions,” and “having honest communication.” I think integrity is an internalized version of the same concept, while authenticity is external.