Why Real Authenticity (Not the LinkedIn Version) Is “Messy” [Full Q&A]

Young employees are yearning for realness. The next generation wants more than just polished HR marketing images; they’re looking for employers who practice what they preach and ensure pay transparency.

Leadership coach Valerie Garcia, author of We’re Gonna Need Cake: Celebrating Authentic Leadership in a Messy World, spoke with b. about the difference between a “feel-good” workplace and one that actually feels good.

b.: How can workers adapt to corporate culture while bringing their “true selves” to work?

Garcia: Having worked in corporate for 20 years, I completely understand that push-pull feeling. For me, it really came down to this lie that we’ve been told our whole lives: “Leave your emotions at the door. Fake it ‘til you make it. Show up, hustle, crush it.”

I lived by that for a really long time until I realized that I wasn’t showing up as myself. I was really showing up as this fake, “I’ve got it all together, everything’s buttoned up, everything’s great” kind of leader. I realized it wasn’t making me a great leader; what it was doing was forcing everyone around me to do the same thing: shove the emotions in a drawer and just fake it.

So I stopped doing that. I showed up a little bit messy. I said, “I don’t have my ish together. I make mistakes. I’ve failed. I don’t know what I’m doing all the time.” … It created better teams and better culture around me. So many people took a deep breath and were like, “Oh gosh, it’s so refreshing to be able to have somebody that says, ‘Hey, we’re going to screw up. Let’s figure it out.’”

b.: Did you find higher performance because that burden of expectations was lifted off?

Garcia: Absolutely. … One of the most fun things about writing this book is I interviewed a bunch of CEOs, people who have made movies … and every single one of them was like, “I’m just figuring it out every single day. I’m still screwing up.” … It would create not just better leadership, but better performance overall, for people to go, “Hey, I have a question. I don’t know the answer.”

b.: How do you balance allowing mistakes with holding people accountable?

Garcia: What really helps that is just postmortems. … The more we sit with failure, the more we actually learn from it and the faster we’ll get to success the next time. Teams that struggle with failure are the ones that sweep it under the rug and don’t address how and why they failed.

A lot of people don’t move forward because they don’t want to talk about failure. You cannot move forward unless you address failure. You’re going to be stuck in fear forever because failure is the step out. It’s really funny, nobody’s like, “Oh, gee, I want to move forward. I can’t wait to fail. Gee, that sounds like fun.” No, but that’s the only way we get to success, the only way we get to authenticity, the only way we get to grow — when we go, “OK, that was a problem. Where do we go from here?”

b.: Do you think portraying perfection on social media has started to dwindle down?

Garcia: There’s a difference between being messy and being performatively messy. I see a lot of that on LinkedIn, where it’s like, “Oh, I did this. This happened. Look at me. I made a million dollars from it.”

I think the average person needs to be able to say, “Yeah, I’m not where I thought I’d be at this point in my career,” or “I need a mentor,” or “Hey, I didn’t start succeeding until I did this correctly, or until I stopped doing this.”

A lot of us feel that pressure to show up shiny, pretty, and Instagram-ready. But the more we don’t, the more people gather around and go, “Oh my God, thank God, me too — I’m so glad you said that because I don’t have all the right answers either.” … We need to hear that. Otherwise, it’s like, when do I get to that point of perfection?

b.: Based on your experience working with brands globally, how do different cultures perceive authenticity in leadership?

Garcia: Every culture has its own quirks. … I worked in Australia for a while, and they have this idea of “the tall poppy syndrome,” right? Like, if you get too big for your britches, as we would say — if you get a little taller than everybody around you — their No. 1 thing is, “How do we chop you down? … How about we pick away at you negatively until you come back down to our level?”

That permeates leadership in some of those cultures as well. That idea of, “Hey, don’t get too fancy over there. We all want to make sure that nobody’s really achieving more than the rest of us.” I don’t really think that’s the best approach. The best approach is we raise everyone else up, instead of trying to pull down a few … when really, we have the opportunity to say, “How do we learn from that?”

The Europeans tend to be a little more stoic, like, “Hey, you’ve got it figured out. Just dot the i’s, cross the t’s.” But I think overall, everyone is really hungry for real these days. Everybody I talk to in every country is just like, especially with the rise of AI, “What is real? What can we believe?” What everybody really wants is just a leader — or a person in their space — that’s like, “You get it. You’re human. Me too.”

b.: How do you see the role of authenticity evolving in leadership over the next decade?

Garcia: In the work that I do with higher education organizations, I see the younger generations coming in, and they are the first ones to say, “I don’t believe what I see on TV. I don’t believe what I see coming out of AI. I don’t believe the news.” They’re desperate to see what reality looks like — not reality TV, not the scripted or edited version, but like, “Give me something that I can believe in and get behind.”

Authenticity is going to go from just sound bites of, “This is what we stand for as a brand,” or “We give you these holidays off and that creates our culture,” to, “Hey, we really stand behind these [ideas] by taking action.” … Our leaders at political levels and employment levels of all kinds are going to have to figure out what authenticity really looks like. Is it just the shiny, or is there messy in there too?

We’re Gonna Need Cake is available now.

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