Being Your Best Self

David Novak is the chairman and chief executive officer of Yum! Brands, which is the world's largest restaurant group, and in his book, Taking People With You, he shares this insight about leadership authenticity and being your best self

People know and follow the real deal when they see it — those who walk through life on their own terms, who stay true to their beliefs, and who don't back down. We can all name people like this, and there's often a pretty broad consensus that such diverse figures as Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, Oprah Winfrey, Muhammad Ali and Winston Churchill are (or were) all real deals, which goes to show that authenticity can be demonstrated in many different styles.

I call this having "extraordinary authenticity," which means having the ability to be yourself even in the toughest situations. This requires living with a paradox: To inspire as a leader, you need to know your stuff, but you also need to be able to admit when you don't know stuff. You need to be both confident and vulnerable at the same time. Allowing yourself to be vulnerable can be hard enough for most of us, but in the business world, the idea of being yourself is further complicated by the fact that it's also important to get along with all sorts of people while staying true to yourself. You obviously can't just say to colleagues or customers, "This is me being myself, take it or leave it." Not if you want to get ahead. Instead, you have to figure out how to be you in a way that broadens your appeal and impact versus turning people off or unnecessarily clashing with company culture.

For many of the leaders FranklinCovey works with there are 3 stages to becoming your best self - the first is an awareness of this as being an important leadership characteristic (as advocated by David Novak, and others), the second is gaining clarity on what they value and what their values are and the third is then living and making decisions in congruence with these values. 

Having become aware of the importance of this as a characteristic, FranklinCovey's input helps leaders to structure their thinking on the different roles they play and what 'matters most' / what contribution they can make within each. For many, this can be quite a profound and challenging experience. Once completed, the challenge becomes turning this aspiration into reality and FranklinCovey's support is targeted at the choices leaders must make on a daily basis to make time for 'that which is important, rather than merely urgent'. We also recognise the issue that demonstrating integrity to these values is easy until a decision needs to be made that carries a cost or consequence to it, and we support leaders in the thought process of dealing with these situations.