The surprising truth: the most authentic leaders are sometimes strategically inauthentic
We've all heard the advice: "Just be yourself." "Lead authentically." "Show up as your true self."
But what happens when your "true self" wants to scream in frustration at a colleague who's blocking progress for the third time this week? Or when you're dealing with personal turmoil but need to project calm confidence to your team? For women — where we're already navigating gendered expectations about how "authentic" we're allowed to be — this advice can feel less like empowerment and more like an impossible standard.
Recent research by Marian Izzat White, Valerie Stead and Carole Elliott into authentic leadership reveals something liberating: the leaders who feel most authentic are often the ones who've learned when and how to be strategically inauthentic. And understanding this paradox might be the key to sustainable leadership.
Marian, Valerie and Carole explore this paradox through the lens of emotional labour. Emotional labour is a term coined by Hochschild (1983) who explored how employees are required to manage their emotions so that they only display the feelings appropriate to their work setting. The smile and cheery hello of a worker in a restaurant who feels anything but cheery would be a case in point.
So, how does pretending to feel one thing when you are feeling another enable leaders to remain authentic? Overall, these leaders reasoned that their emotional labour brought others along with them and this was necessary if they were going to realise the goals that accorded with their own values and beliefs.
Here’s how they do it.
Five Ways Leaders Navigate This Paradox
Marian, Valerie and Carole’s research with twelve leaders across sectors revealed five key rationales that help them feel authentic while performing emotional labour.
1. It's Part of the Job
The first thing to note is that leaders accepted that managing emotions wasn't optional—it was a professional duty. Karen talked about "this unwritten rule book on how you will act and how you will behave" as a leader. For women – of course - that rule book is thicker, more prescriptive, and comes with harsher penalties for violations.
For example, Kate, a research respondent, shared this insight:
"If I don't go in with my smile on my face, they may perceive someone that's grumpy. In actual fact, it's just someone that's distracted...So actually, just putting a smile on is the right thing....the authenticity's still there because actually you may still talk to them about what's on your mind, but you're doing it with a different visual."
2. Consistency Matters More Than Transparency
Leaders particularly valued being recognisably steady over time. Kate talked about this as playing the long game:
"In everything I do, I play the long game...So, when I'm dealing with people, they can really frustrate me sometimes and sometimes really make me quite cross, but...I will essentially swallow that anger and that frustration and I will deal with them in a very kind of considered and managed way because at the end of the day, it's about what I want to ultimately achieve."
3. Protecting Others
Leaders managed emotions explicitly for their teams' benefit. This can be because, as Kate says “a good part of leadership is how you make others feel”. Karen talked about being "a protector" when "brutal honesty is going to cause people unnecessary worry."
These leaders all spoke of needing to affirm the feelings of others and accepted that there was inauthenticity or deception in doing so. Donald, for example, commented:
“There is definitely a sense of being very cautious about saying anything that might come across negatively. So, if there is any challenge or critique of their work, I’m very conscious of trying to deliver that in a very positive, affirmative, learning, mentoring way rather than just the facts which could leave them feeling put down.”
4. Protecting Yourself—Because the Stakes Are Higher
In toxic situations, strategic emotional management became survival. Alice described showing "nothing, don't show your hand, don't give people any idea how you feel about anything."
5. Values Trump Feelings
Displaying different emotions to those you feel can clearly lead to feelings of being inauthentic. However, for some leaders they rationalise this in terms that this is necessary to realise an end goal that is underpinned by their values. As Kate says:
"In the moment you can feel not authentic, but actually, you're still living to your true values because you're working to the end goal."
Navigating Your Own Terrain
So how do you work with this paradox rather than against it?
Reframe emotional labour as skill, not fraud. The message from this research is that managing your emotions strategically isn't being fake—it's being professional. Just as you wouldn't submit a first draft as final work, you don't need to present unfiltered emotional responses as leadership.
Anchor to your values, not your feelings. Ask yourself: what outcome am I committed to? Sometimes being true to your purpose means not being transparent about your frustration in the moment.
Create safe spaces for authenticity. In this research one respondent emphasised needing "a safe place with a safe person" to "refill that emotional well." You can't be "on" all the time. Find colleagues, mentors, or friends who can hold the emotions you can't express at work.
Distinguish between helpful and harmful suppression. There's a difference between strategic emotional management (helpful) and toxic environments that demand constant self-erasure (harmful). Susan's experience—feeling "angry all the time about not being able to influence things"—led her to leave. Know when to adapt and when to exit.
Recognise consistency as its own authenticity. Your team doesn't need to see every emotion you feel. They need to see a version of you they can trust and rely on. That consistency is authentic too.
However – for women please know also
The idea that anyone—regardless of background, gender, or social position—can equally express their "true self" and be perceived as authentic is, quite simply, false. A working-class Black woman and an elite white man cannot both "be themselves" in any professional setting and receive the same response. Context matters. Power matters. Gender matters.
For women this matters doubly. We're already navigating a narrower range of "acceptable" emotional expression than our male colleagues. We're expected to do more emotional caregiving, more relationship maintenance, more smoothing of conflicts. And then we're told to "be authentic" on top of it all—as if authenticity is a level playing field.
It isn't.
Please don’t find this depressing. Think of it as clarifying. You're not a fraud when you "put on your work face". You're navigating a gendered terrain that demands more emotional labour from you by design.
The question isn't whether to perform emotional labour. The question is whether you can do it consciously, strategically, and in service of values that matter — while protecting yourself enough to stay in the game and, when possible, challenging the gendered expectations that make it necessary in the first place. Being on occasion strategically inauthentic may well help you to do that.
What's your experience with this paradox? Have you found ways to feel authentic while managing emotions strategically? I'd love to hear your thoughts.
With huge thanks to Marian Iszatt-White, Valerie Stead and Carole Elliott (2021) Impossible or just irrelevant? Unravelling the ‘authentic leadership’ paradox through the lens of emotional labour, Leadership, 17(4): 464-482 for a great piece of research.
Founder and CEO, Women-Space Leadership