There Is Nothing Authentic About Authentic Leadership?

“There is nothing authentic about authentic leadership,” writes Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic in his recent Forbes article. It’s a provocative headline, and deliberately so. His point is not that authenticity has no place in leadership, but that the concept has been romanticised to the point of distortion. Too often, “be yourself” becomes an excuse for rigidity, self-absorption, or an unwillingness to adapt. Authenticity, Chamorro-Premuzic suggests, only has meaning when it operates in relation to context — when it’s enacted intelligently, not proclaimed absolutely.

That argument resonates strongly with my own research on leadership. In my PhD, I explored how the modern image of leadership has been shaped by the artistic and cultural revolutions of the mid-20th century. Values such as freedom, authenticity, and self-actualization — once the language of artistic rebellion in the 1950s avant-garde and the counterculture of the 1960s — have become central to how we imagine effective leadership today. What began as a critique of authority and convention has, over time, been absorbed into the very discourse of organisational life.

Through this lens, I developed the concepts of staged authenticity and organisational theatre to describe how leaders navigate the tension between personal conviction and organisational expectation. Leadership, I argue, is not the opposite of performance — it is performance with awareness. Just as avant-garde artists used the stage to explore truth through expression, leaders operate on the organisational stage, continuously translating who they are into what the moment requires.

This doesn’t mean leadership is insincere. Quite the contrary. Authenticity becomes meaningful precisely because it is enacted — because it involves conscious choices about how to express one’s values, beliefs, and purpose in complex, shifting contexts. It’s not about removing the stage but learning how to stand on it with integrity.

Here the connection with John Mattone’s Intelligent Leadership framework becomes evident. In that model, the inner-core represents the foundation of who a leader is: their character, beliefs, and purpose. The outer-core reflects how that foundation takes shape in behaviour, communication, and impact. Authentic leadership, then, is not simply the alignment between the two — it’s the art of translating the inner-core into an outer-core that is contextually alive and effective.

When we see leadership through this lens, Chamorro-Premuzic’s provocation becomes clarifying rather than contradictory. He is not rejecting authenticity; he is challenging its simplification. The “authentic” leader is not the one who refuses to adapt but the one who can bring their inner convictions into dialogue with the world around them. Authenticity detached from performance becomes isolation; performance detached from conviction becomes manipulation. Real leadership lies in the tension between the two — in the ability to perform with integrity.

This understanding also speaks to the cultural transformation of leadership ideals over the past seventy years. The post-war artists and thinkers who first championed authenticity as rebellion sought to liberate the self from institutional constraint. In our time, leaders face the opposite challenge: how to remain authentic within institutions that expect visibility, adaptability, and emotional intelligence. The stage is still there, but its audience has changed.

In that sense, the call for authenticity in leadership should not be about purity or transparency. It should be about coherence — the ongoing work of aligning one’s core purpose with one’s expression. Authenticity is not a state to be achieved once and for all; it is a practice, continuously reinterpreted through context and relationship.

Leadership, at its best, is therefore both ethical and creative. It demands clarity of purpose, but also imagination in how that purpose is brought to life. The leader who understands this does not fear the stage but inhabits it consciously — aware that every act of leadership is both real and performed, both grounded and adaptive.

So perhaps Chamorro-Premuzic is right: there is nothing inherently authentic about authentic leadership — unless we make it so. The question is not whether we should be authentic, but how we give authenticity form in the shifting theatre of organisational life. How do you perform your values in ways that remain both true to your core and responsive to your world?