The Authenticity Paradox and the Work of Becoming

Herminia Ibarra says something that unsettles most leadership advice. Being authentic, in the way it is usually preached, can quietly become an excuse for standing still.

Her point is simple and disruptive at once. Growth starts with behavior that feels unnatural. New roles ask you to speak differently, decide differently, show up differently. That discomfort gets mistaken for inauthenticity. So leaders retreat to "this is just who I am," and call it integrity. It is often just avoidance, wearing integrity as a costume.

I recognize this from both sides of the desk. Twice in my career I stepped into a Managing Director role. Both times, the job demanded a version of me that did not yet exist. Direct in one culture, consultative in another. Blunt with the board, patient on the shop floor. None of it felt like me on day one. By year three it was me, expanded. Now, after more than twenty years of coaching senior leaders, I watch my clients go through the identical discomfort and mistake it for a crisis of self. It is not a crisis. It is the cost of range.

Where situational leadership meets the paradox

Situational leadership asks a leader to flex style to fit the person and the moment. Directing here, coaching there, delegating somewhere else. Many leaders resist this. It feels like acting. It feels like managing five different people instead of leading as one coherent self.

Ibarra's reframe dissolves that resistance. Style-flexing is not a betrayal of self. It is what a self in development looks like from the outside. The operations manager who directs a struggling new hire on Monday and delegates fully to a seasoned engineer on Tuesday is not being fake twice. He is exercising a wider range, the way a musician plays in more than one key without losing their voice.

I built a four-year leadership program for hundreds of operations managers across Europe on precisely this premise. The pattern was unmistakable. The managers who progressed fastest were not the ones with the strongest natural style. They were the ones willing to feel slightly wrong in a new style long enough for it to become theirs. And in coaching sessions today, the moment a manager says "that's just not how I lead" is usually the moment we have found the actual work to do.

Where continuous learning meets the paradox

Continuous learning carries the same trap. Real learning is clumsy before it is fluent. A leader trying a new negotiation approach, a new way of giving feedback, a new posture in the boardroom, will feel like an impostor for a while. That feeling is not a warning sign. It is the entry fee.

Most people believe they need to feel like a leader before they can act like one. Ibarra's research says the order runs the other way. Act first, in provisional and slightly uncomfortable ways, and identity follows through repeated experience. Waiting to feel ready is often just waiting.

I have sat with this exact moment more times than I can count. A newly appointed Managing Director, weeks into the role, tells me he does not feel like a leader yet. My answer is always the same. Good. That means you have not flattened yourself back into your old shape. The feeling of not-quite-fitting is not evidence of failure. It is the leading edge of a new capability arriving.

This is also where a coach earns their keep. Not by supplying answers, but by protecting the clumsy middle phase, the weeks where the new behavior is real but the new identity has not caught up. Organizations abandon leaders in that phase all the time. A coach does not.

The practical implication

For an operations manager, or a Managing Director stepping into an unfamiliar cultural context, the useful question stops being "is this the real me?" The useful question becomes "is this a version of me I am willing to test?"

Every stretch assignment, every cross-cultural adjustment, every deliberate change in leadership style is the authenticity paradox in miniature. The discomfort is data, not a diagnosis. It tells you learning is underway, not that you have wandered off yourself.

Thirty-five years in management and twenty as a coach taught me the same lesson from opposite directions. As a manager, every country, sector, and crisis demanded a version of me I had not used before, logistics, manufacturing, public transport, fifty-five countries' worth of adjustment. As a coach, I help others make the same journey faster and with less wreckage. Ibarra's paradox is not an academic curiosity to me. It is the mechanism behind every leader I have ever helped, and every leader I have ever been.

Leaders who understand this stop treating growth and authenticity as competitors. They start treating authenticity as something built through tested behavior, not something protected by refusing to try new ones.

Watch Herminia Ibarra's talk, "The Authenticity Paradox".