"Be yourself": the advice sounds appealing. Yet in working life, following your spontaneous reactions every time is not always the same thing as being effective, content or successful.
This article explores an idea that matters greatly for leadership development and talent management: our most authentic behaviour is not necessarily our most effective. Research in personality assessment shows, on the contrary, that understanding your natural tendencies, anticipating how they are perceived and consciously adapting your behaviour is a powerful lever for development.
You will find why authenticity becomes a problem once it turns into an absence of self-regulation, how social desirability shapes our sense of authenticity and wellbeing, and why strategic self-awareness is a more useful approach for building a durable career, improving working relationships and developing leadership potential.
Here is the trouble with the commonly accepted advice to "just be yourself".
Although many people like to think they are at their best when fully authentic, that is simply not always true. And where career development is concerned, authenticity can even become a problem.
Our supposedly "authentic" impulses include behaviours we resist, often for very good reasons.
Imagine expressing absolutely every emotion in front of every colleague, your own management included. Sounds like a nightmare? That is exactly the problem.
Authenticity at work can derail your career.
In episode 125 of the podcast The Science of Personality, co-hosts Ryne Sherman, PhD, and Blake Loepp looked at career development through the lens of authenticity at work, and at the advantages of sometimes acting against your instincts.
"Bringing your authentic self to work could land you in trouble," Ryne explains.
But it does not have to.
According to Robert Hogan, PhD, founder and president of Hogan Assessments, "authenticity is a myth".
In popular culture, the notion of authenticity tends to be associated with expressing your real emotions or showing your "true self". On that definition, only infants would be genuinely authentic: they act exactly according to what they feel.
As we grow up, by contrast, we learn not to let our emotions control our behaviour every time. Put another way, we learn to be less authentic.
Suppose you are angry at work. You could shout, stamp your foot or send a client a particularly aggressive email. Such behaviour could certainly be called authentic, but it would hardly be advisable.
"When we stop ourselves doing that sort of thing, we are being inauthentic in a way," Ryne explains. "We are not reacting in a way that lines up perfectly with what we actually feel."
And that is a good thing.
If authenticity is not always as beneficial as claimed, why do so many people think it makes us happier?
The available data does not really bear that assumption out.
Ryne Sherman ran a study using data from personality inventories in order to analyse the relationship between how people behaved and how happy and authentic they felt.
"The hypothesis was that if you behaved in line with your personality, you should report feeling more authentic," he explains.
That is not what happened.
Ryne says: "There was no association between acting in line with your personality and feeling happy. When people behaved most in keeping with their usual way of being, they did not report feeling more authentic at all."
So when did the study's participants say they felt both most authentic and most happy?
When they behaved in ways regarded as socially desirable: being friendly, accommodating, productive, creative and attentive to others.
"They were behaving in a way they considered their 'best' way of acting, but not necessarily the way they usually behaved," Ryne explains.
The distinction is fundamental to understanding skills and leadership development: our best professional self does not necessarily match our most spontaneous behaviour.
The usual advice about authenticity does not always serve career development.
In a job interview, for instance, simply "being yourself" is not necessarily wise. You may be in the habit of making self-deprecating jokes, but they are unlikely to work in your favour in that setting.
Rather than trying to show your "true self" at all costs, aim to express your best professional self.
Ryne identifies three areas in which authenticity at work can become a source of difficulty:
When people stop monitoring or regulating their behaviour, their potentially negative tendencies are more likely to surface.
Someone under stress or heavy pressure, or feeling bored and too comfortable in their environment, may start behaving more "authentically" than they should.
Every HR leader has heard inappropriate behaviour justified with lines such as "I was just being myself" or "That is just how I am".
But letting your professionalism slip can have significant consequences for career success and leadership potential.
Authenticity at work can also generate perfectly avoidable personal conflict.
In theory, a fully authentic person would always say and do whatever their emotions dictated.
But complaining constantly, insulting others or adopting other immature behaviours rarely helps build harmonious working relationships.
It can, on the other hand, easily derail a team.
Within sustainable management, team transformation and organisational culture, then, the ability to regulate your reactions is essential.
"Our authentic way of behaving can lead us astray," Ryne explains.
Which means we should not necessarily voice every outlandish idea that crosses our mind, ignore situations of conflict or make a show of our bad mood.
Blake tells the true story of a person whose authenticity was holding back their career.
This person had a communication style that was both direct and reserved. They received the following feedback: coming across as less blunt, more collaborative and more accommodating would improve their performance.
Note that the proposed changes corresponded exactly to socially desirable behaviours.
After a year of consistent, deliberate effort to change their behaviour, this person received a particularly positive review along with a pay rise.
They also reported feeling happier across every area of their life.
The lesson?
Being pleasant with others, even when it does not feel perfectly "authentic", can have a considerable impact on your career development.
On Hogan's view, one notion matters particularly: strategic self-awareness, which stands in part against this simplistic conception of authenticity.
How well do we grasp our strengths and our limits, and how others read us, in any situation where performance or competition is at stake? That degree of understanding is what strategic self-awareness measures.
When we change our behaviour in order to be more effective at work, we are neither lying nor playing a part.
We are developing.
We are making progress.
"Think about how you want to be perceived," Ryne explains. "Think about the appropriate behaviour given the professional circumstances. Then adapt to what the environment you are in expects."
Being authentic at work in the most absolute sense would mean doing whatever you like, with no regard for anyone else.
That is obviously not desirable.
Showing strategic self-awareness means acting, instead, for the shared benefit of yourself, of the people you work with and of the organisation.
There is no need to present a false image of yourself or to give up your core convictions. The aim is rather to adopt professional behaviour suited to the context.
This capacity to adapt sits at the heart of skills development, of coaching and of an HR strategy aimed at building more sustainable leadership.
It is hard to stop sabotaging your own professional development when you do not understand what you are doing wrong.
"Personality inventories can help you understand how certain behaviours can have a negative impact on your reputation," Ryne explains.
Hogan Assessments measures personality through three complementary inventories.
The Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI) covers the bright side of personality, meaning how we tend to behave when we are at our best.
The Hogan Development Survey (HDS) covers the dark side, meaning how we tend to behave once we stop monitoring and regulating ourselves sufficiently.
The Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory (MVPI) measures the inner dimension of personality: the values and convictions that motivate and guide our habitual behaviour.
Authenticity is often what allows dark-side behaviours to surface.
Knowing these tendencies better lets you learn to recognise them and to handle how they show up.
You may not even be aware of what sets your dark side off.
To begin with, look closely at the data about your reputation. Ask a certified Hogan practitioner for feedback and then, crucially, genuinely accept that feedback.
"Learn to intervene on your own behaviour and say to yourself: 'Hold on. I am not going to do what I always do in this situation. This time I am going to do something different'," Ryne explains.
This is precisely where personality assessment proves its worth: it does not try to lock a person into a fixed definition of what they "are". It supplies instead the material for understanding behavioural tendencies, reputation and the risks liable to appear under pressure.
Within an assessment and development approach, that knowledge turns awareness into concrete action and into sustainable leadership development.
The point, then, is not to become artificial or to give up what defines us.
It is to learn to tell authenticity, impulsiveness and professional effectiveness apart.
Professional maturity means, among other things, knowing how to choose the most suitable behaviour for the situation, rather than being guided by habitual reactions every time.
For executives, heads of talent management and HR professionals, this perspective matters especially. Knowing personality better makes it possible to support people in building strategic self-awareness, to improve the quality of interactions and to limit the behaviours liable to derail a career, a team or a collective dynamic.
Personality assessment is not only about understanding who we are. Its real value lies in the capacity to understand how we are perceived and how our behaviour affects others.
Developing leadership potential over the long term therefore takes more than being "authentic". It takes the ability to identify your strengths, your limits and the behaviours that can emerge when pressure rises or self-regulation drops.
That strategic self-awareness is a major lever for talent management, for team development and for a sustainable HR strategy. It turns self-knowledge into more effective behavioural choices, serving individual performance, organisational culture and collective success.
At Authentic Talent, we believe that objective assessment of talent and potential within organisations is a decisive factor in their future success. If you would like to discuss it with us, let's talk!
This article draws on an article published on the Hogan Assessments website: Why Authenticity at Work Will Derail Your Career
