Why, When, and How to be Inauthentic
A quick word first
Thanks for visiting The Jazz of Negotiation! When you have a chance, check out the About page to see the aim of this publication and learn how it can help you become a more effective negotiator.
Wait a second: Inauthentic? Is that a typo?
Nope, it’s not.
Sure, authenticity—expressing your true self—is widely extolled. Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg says, “Leaders should strive for authenticity over perfection.” And Howard Schultz, former Starbucks CEO says that authenticity is essential not just for individuals but for the organizations that they lead. “Companies that are lasting are authentic,” he says.
And research backs that up. Just last week the Harvard Business Review published an article by Andrew Brodsky, “Communicating Authentically in a Virtual World.” Brodsky, an organizational behavior expert, states that studies show authenticity is “a key driver of overall work outcomes for everyone from frontline workers to leaders.” He further warns that “being perceived as inauthentic has been shown to destroy trust and relationships, damage customer loyalty, worsen performance evaluations, and decrease organizational profits.”
So, in the face of all that, who would dare to speak up for being inauthentic?
Well, for one, the self-same Andrew Brodsky. Two sentences later in his article, Brodsky says, “While being perceived as authentic is ideal, actually always behaving authentically can lead to disaster.”
How about, for example, there’s a server in a restaurant or a technician trying to repair a laptop, and she’s being wrongly berated by a customer? (An all-too-common event these fraught days.) Should she authentically express her own pain, exhaustion, despair, and anger?
No. If possible, she should not. Her responsibility to her employer is to deliver “service with a smile,” as Brodsky puts it, and if she can, to deescalate the situation—often in the full view of witnesses to the incident. Not an easy assignment, especially if it’s something that must be done daily. But being truly authentic would only make things worse. (No wonder we’re living in the Big Quit Age.)
Even when there isn’t an explosion like that, we all have good days and bad ones. One morning the sun is shining and that brightens our face. The next day we get to the office late because traffic was awful and it shows.
Those experiences are bound to color our perceptions, what we say, and how we say it. A colleague asks us a favor that we must decline. We might do so gracefully if our day is going well. But if we’re in a lousy mood, our response could have a sharper edge, and bruise our relationship, unless we’re somehow able to stifle our negative feelings.
The medium and the message
At first blush putting up a false front and masking our feelings sounds creepy or worse. (Just think of the old wisecrack, “When you can fake sincerity, you’ve got it made in Hollywood.”) But surely, how much we reveal about our inner selves depends on the circumstances and who it is that we’re dealing with. How that’s expressed depends on our needs, goals, and mode of communication.
Brodsky’s research shows that if you want to fully convey your authentic thoughts and emotions, face-to-face or video-conferencing are the richest mediums.1 If you need to suppress emotions that aren’t appropriate in a given case, he says it’s “best to utilize telephone or audio in order to appear most authentic.”
In cases where you want to maintain interpersonal distance, it might seem that email would be the optimal medium.2 He warns against doing so, however. His latest studies found that people impute that negative intention (rightly or wrongly) from the use of email. It seems decidedly low effort, arm’s length.
If email is your only option Brodsky advises finding a way to make it clear you didn’t make the choice deliberately and that you’re eager to connect in-person or virtually very soon. Merely typing how excited you are about closing a deal with your counterpart may not be enough to win them over get them to say yes.
P.S. For a provocative and entertaining rant against authenticity—deriding it as “narcissistic”—see Michael Schrage’s ”When Authenticity Does More Harm than Good.”
Housekeeping
Just by signing up for Jazz of Negotiation, you’ll get free access to a full article, plus a shorter post, delivered by email 50 weeks a year. Paid subscribers get additional content: Q and A threads, videos, and from time to time, short exercises, with more to come.
See last week’s Jazz article, ”Better to Ask a Favor in Person.”
In other research, Brodsky’s subjects favored email believing it was the best method for concealing underlying emotion.