It’s International Leadership Week 2026! The annual event, organised by The Institute of Leadership, who recognised us as their Leadership Training Centre of the Year 2025, is a perfect opportunity to reflect on what good leadership looks like in practice.
Organisations invest in leadership development because it introduces managers to models, tools and frameworks they can use to approach their work with confidence and consistency – valuable traits in a complex and unpredictable world! The only unintended consequence can be leaders trying to perform leadership, rather than practise it.
That’s where authentic leadership comes in.
Authentic leadership isn’t about abandoning structure or ignoring tools, it’s about ensuring leaders bring their values, personality, and self-awareness into the way they lead others. So, a question you might choose to reflect on for International Leadership Week 2026 could be:
Are your leaders being themselves…?
Authenticity with purpose (and self-awareness)
It’s easy to misunderstand authentic leadership as encouragement for leaders to behave however they want or ignore professional expectations. As a leadership style, it’s actually about pursuing alignment between values, behaviour and action.
Authentic leaders try to demonstrate a number of characteristics:
Self-awareness: understanding their strengths, limitations, and impact on others.
Consistency: behaving in ways that align with their values.
Transparency: communicating openly and honestly with their teams.
Integrity: making decisions that reflect organisational and personal principles.
In other words, authentic leadership is about credibility. When leaders are perceived as credible, they are trusted, and that trust unlocks increased engagement and healthier environments.
Why authenticity matters in modern organisations
Employees increasingly expect their leaders to be human, approachable colleagues, rather than distant authority figures. Authenticity plays a key role in building that relationship.
When leaders are authentic:
- People feel psychologically safe to speak up
- Communication becomes more open and honest
- Organisational culture becomes more noticeable and widespread
By contrast, when leaders feel they need to adopt a leadership “persona”, people often sense the disconnect. When people bring real challenges or concerns to their leaders, they don’t want a rehearsed response. In the world of organisational development – authenticity is a key ingredient in cultures where people feel safe, valued and engaged.
Evidence suggests that trust in leadership is already fragile. According to a global indicator from Gallup, only 19% of employees strongly agree that they trust the leadership of their organisation. At the same time, broader workplace indicators have been moving in the wrong direction: global employee engagement has fallen to 21%, and measures of employee wellbeing have also declined.
Supporting leaders to develop their own authenticity
Authentic leadership can’t quite be ‘rolled out’ in the same way as some technical skills and you can’t hand managers a checklist for turning up to work one day and “being authentic.”
However, organisations can create the conditions for change in the right direction and set managers and leaders along the path to embodying authentic leadership. Development sessions (i.e. workshops or action learning sets) should take a reflective approach, helping learners to explore questions like:
“What are my natural leadership strengths?”
“What kind of leader do I want to be known as?”
“What kind of leadership does my team want and need?”
Part of this reflective action planning often involves leaders considering the environment within which their leadership will be deployed – employees want community, connection to their colleagues and to know that their contributions matter, so which leadership behaviours will unlock this?
Practical development approaches may also explore useful theories like the trust equation and the nuances of balancing authenticity with skill.
Ultimately, the goal isn’t to produce robotic leaders following the same script, it’s to help leaders develop their own authentic approach which is tuned to the needs of their people, the culture of their workplace, and the overall goals of their organisation.
From reflection to action
International Leadership Week is a great moment to reflect on leadership, but reflection only takes you so far.
The real value comes when leaders pause, explore their strengths, and think intentionally about the kind of leader they want to be. If you’re thinking about how to help your managers lead with greater authenticity, trust, and self-awareness, we’d love to explore that conversation with you.
Let’s find out how we can support the development of authentic leaders in your organisation.