The idea of “authenticity” has been a big deal in leadership over the past few decades. We have all seen the practitioner commentary, the airport books, and the scholarly reviews outlining the dimensions of authenticity, its origins as a concept, and the important, critical perspectives of how it works in reality. Most of this work arose as a rebuke to the scandals and greed of the 2000s and particularly the financial crisis with all its excesses and long-term effects.

For many scholars, leaning into authenticity was a way to conceptualize a new type of genuine and values-based leadership. The proliferation of both practitioner and scholarly writings has resulted in competing conceptions of what authentic leadership really is and sometimes added to a confused landscape. From former Medtronic CEO Bill George’s True North (2007) to Luthans and Avolio’s (2003) calls for better investigation of what authentic leadership is and Iszatt-White and Kempster’s (2019) assertion that it is best understood as a practice-based phenomenon, interest in the idea is ongoing and the leadership development implications are compelling.

As an idea, it is usually traced back to ancient Greek philosophy and the Delphic maxim “know thyself” (Parke & Wormell, 1956). Connected to both authority and notions of a “higher good,” it is intimately associated with both self-realization and self-knowledge (Hutchinson, 1995). To be authentic, therefore, was to be powerful and wise.  

However, there has also been a growing awareness of what the “dark side” of being an authentic leader can mean. Leaning into your authentic self has, for some, resulted in damage to privacy, heightened vulnerability to bad actors, and unwanted exposure — publicly and privately (Jongman-Sereno & Leary, 2019). More realistically, no one is 100% authentic as Erickson (1995) pointed out. It’s more of a sliding scale, a spectrum in which we are at times more authentic in our behaviour and at other times, less so. Like so many interesting leadership concepts, authenticity has become simultaneously simplified and also over intellectualized, and in doing so, we seem to have a lost a firm grasp of what it’s actually about.

Or perhaps we had before Tuesday, and in the days since. Because in these last hours and days we have had a masterclass in what authentic leadership actually is, the power of it and the way it can sweep up swaths of people from diverse perspectives and positions. The death of Dolly Parton has been a shock. Since it was announced, it has dominated television screens, news outlets, and of course, social media. We have seen both an outpouring of grief and love and an innumerable series of anecdotes about her “goodness,” her generosity, and interestingly her authenticity — although that is a word which hasn’t been much used. Instead, people speak of her consistent warmth, her ownership of her origins, her career with all its darkness and light, and her seemingly bottomless work to make things better in the full awareness of that history. Parton was a contradictory figure. Describing herself as feminine rather than a feminist, most of her best-known work centred around the power of women. Her movie 9 to 5 is almost a Marxist feminist treatise on the patriarchy and given her dealings with Elvis and Colonel Tom Parker, she clearly had a better grasp for business and the ability to hold your nerve than half of Wall Street.