Doing Your Best As An Effective Leader Means Occasionally Deceiving Other People (Sorry!)

Quick: think of the best leader you ever had. [Take a moment to reflect...] What did that leader say or do that made that person the best leader you ever had?

Chances are you didn't include "lying" in that reflection.

Yet there it is. Our friend Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is out again in Forbes discussing effective leadership.

In this piece he discusses what "authentic leadership" is. TL;DR: "the best leaders are versatile and able to broaden their span in order to better adapt to new challenges and avoid becoming a more narrow, limited, or predictable version of themselves."

Here is Tomas, quoted at length:

Interestingly, a recent meta-analysis shows that effective leaders score significantly higher on impression management, the tendency to adjust and adapt one’s behavior to the specific demands of each situation - think of it as a sort of interpersonal flexibility or social chameleon. Furthermore, contrary to popular belief, the relationship between impression management and authentic leadership is positive rather than negative. That is, as it turns out, authentic leaders do not resist external pressures to conform or performative motives to come across positively; instead, they curate a professional self that matches the demands and expectations of others, being more like skilled method actors than radically transparent or unfiltered communicator. As Jeffrey Pfeffer points out in his excellent book Leadership BS, "Leaders don’t need to be true to themselves; in fact, being authentic is the opposite of what they should do.”

As a cybersecurity leader, you manage a group of technologists who are focused on tasks and schedules and goals. Most likely, these are not people who see being interpersonally flexible as a virtue. Yet as a leader, that's exactly how you will become successful: not by being dishonest -- that NEVER works -- but through flexing your styles and goals and behaviors to be attuned to what others need from you.

Let's run over that again: don't be dishonest, but don't be the "real you" either.

We at Pythia believe in data. So, what do behavioral science data reveal about successful leaders?

Quoting Tomas:

When people rate their leaders as transparent, they’re not conducting an audit of information flow; they’re expressing how much they like, trust, or identify with them. Moreover, while transparency is fashionable, unfiltered honesty is rarely functional in leadership. Leaders who overshare or confuse confession with communication don’t strengthen trust — they undermine it. The reality is that effective leaders disclose strategically, revealing just enough to appear genuine while preserving confidence and authority. In other words, transparency is a performance, and those who perform it well are usually better at managing impressions than at “being themselves.” Once again, what followers experience as authenticity is often just skillful curation —proof that in leadership, as in life, what feels most real is often what’s best rehearsed.

Leadership is hard. Not everyone should be a leader. I get that the money and perks are nice, but if you fail as a leader because you insist you need to be your authentic self, or you are unable to build an effective team, eventually you will be fired -- possibly after you drive the business unit into the ground.

One important reason leadership is hard is that you need to play to multiple audiences -- your team, your peers, your bosses. Being yourself is a sure recipe for disaster. Here is Tomas to explain why:

Even if authentic leadership was conceived with good intentions, it perpetuates the childish, romantic, and ultimately toxic idea that anyone can lead simply by “being themselves.” That may sound liberating, but it’s as naïve as believing that you can become a concert pianist by banging the keys with feeling. Leadership, like music, requires skill, practice, and the ability to perform — not self-expression, but self-control. The irony is that the more obsessed we become with “authenticity,” the further we drift from what leadership actually demands: the capacity to adapt, to manage appearances, and to get the best out of others, even when it means pretending.

Ask us how you can honestly achieve and maintain your best self as a leader.