Many graduates are being minted this month and next. Congratulations if you're one of them. Last night, the caps went flying in Singapore; a moment of joy and chaos. As a teacher, it's rewarding and joyful to celebrate alongside new graduates, witness the pride in their eyes and the spark of something new starting to glow. Congratulations everyone!

 

July, I will be in Hong Kong & Mumbai. Email me if you'd like to meet up.

Every personal effectiveness class I teach… every executive presence workshop… somewhere along the way, a hand goes up and the question arrives: "But how can I be more authentic?" said with sincerity; often with frustration. As if authenticity were a fixed version of ourselves we just need permission to reveal. But what if that’s the wrong metaphor?

Authenticity, at its worst, is mistaken for emotional entitlement: “Take me as I am.” “I’m just being honest.” “That’s not my style.” That kind of authenticity is self-expression without self-regulation. It prizes individual comfort over collective impact.

Authenticity that serves leadership is anchored in strategic self-awareness. It’s not about abandoning your values or playing a part. It aligns who you are with what the moment needs.
-Professional, not performative.
-Grounded, not guarded.
-Present, not polished.

In the end, it’s not “How can I be more authentic?” It’s “How can I show up with integrity, so that my presence adds to, rather than subtracts from, the trust and purpose around me?” That’s the kind of authenticity that builds, not erodes, leadership.

I’ve coached managers who realise slowly and painfully, that they weren’t hired because they were the best, but because they were the safest. The less threatening choice for the hiring manager. The “good enough” fit. Not the star. 

This article by Manfred Kets de Vries  surfaces what drives hiring managers to hire beneath the needs of the role. How does it feel to be that hire?

What follows is often a quiet kind of disillusionment. You do the work. You hit the goals. But you sense in subtle sidelining, and unspoken ceilings that your role was never designed to stretch or spotlight you.

Worse still, the internal story becomes corrosive: Maybe this is all I’m worth? Maybe I’m not the ‘high potential’ I thought I was?

I try to remind them that being under-hired doesn’t mean being under-capable. It means you walked into a system that didn’t see you clearly. The work now is not just to perform but to consciously reframe your value, and, if needed, find a manager that’s not afraid of your full potential.

“You should be more visible” has become one of those vague, catch-all phrases managers use when they don’t want to or don’t know how to give specific, actionable feedback. These scenarios frequently emerge during coaching when:

 

-Your manager doesn’t want to confront the real issue, be it office politics, bias, poor delegation, or even their own lack of clarity; they default to “visibility” as a non-confrontational deflection.

 

-When the decision’s already been made, “you need to be more visible” becomes a justification rather than a guideline.

 

-You walk into your performance review confident in your impact: results delivered, goals met, positive peer feedback. Only to be told you’re “not visible enough.” The phrase drops like a trapdoor under everything you thought was solid.

 

So “be more visible” is a placeholder for the discomfort of honest feedback, a lack of advocacy, or a culture that conflates confidence with competence. That's why I developed the course Boost your Visibility. Firstly to explain what professional Visibility is, which line managers often cannot do. Secondly to guide you how to build it.

The best leadership development gives an opportunity to rehearse new identities in safe spaces.

Is the leadership retreat a thing of the past? In my career, I attended many team off-sites mixing planning, learning and relationship building. Deep in European forests or poolside in tropical resorts, the leadership retreat was not only a luxury, it was a container. A ritualized space to explore ambivalence, enact authority differently, and digest the emotional weight of leading.

Its decline may be a cost benefit but it is certainly a leadership loss. We see the erosion of reflective distance just when leaders most need to step outside the performative frame of daily operations.

What will hold the anxiety of transformation now? Can organisations design new, everyday holding environments where leaders can surface doubts, question inherited scripts, and experiment with more adaptive selves?  Team's that meet regularly as a group, facilitated by a coach report many similar benefits like enhanced self-awareness and the space to rehearse new identities... but they miss the social bonding.

I am not wallowing in my nostalgia for off-sites, flip charts and role-plays. The world has changed. This is a call to re-imagine the developmental spine of leadership work; to find the foundry for your leadership

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