Authentic Leadership

By Victor Kuarsingh

The Job No One Applauds

Senior roles come with a lot of things people assume are glamorous — the title, the room you’re now in, the decisions with your name attached. What they don’t often see is how much of the job is necessary and needfully unglamorous. Budgets, difficult conversations, finding clarity through obscurity – a duty many are not drawn to. Absorbing pressure from above so it doesn’t land unfiltered on your organization is essential. None of that gets a headline, yet all of it is the actual work.

For nearly three decades, across various career levels, I’ve watched this dynamic play out in enough rooms to trust it as a pattern rather than a one-off. When it comes to authenticity, I’ve come to believe that how an executive handles the unglamorous 80% says a lot more about them as a leader than the often-visible keynote and strategy deck does.

The Bridge You Forget You’re Supposed to Be

It’s easy, especially as scope grows, to get pulled almost entirely upward — reading the room above you, anticipating what leadership wants, managing the optics of your own function. That instinct isn’t wrong on its own; every executive has to do some of it. The problem is when it becomes the whole job, and you stop being the bridge your organization actually needs: the connective structure that translates strategy downward and reality upward, in both directions, honestly.

An org can feel the difference immediately. A leader spending most of their energy managing up starts to feel, from below, like a relay point instead of a person — present in meetings, absent in practice. The team ends up managing themselves, left to form, sort, and operate without real connection to the person meant to be leading them.

You Can’t Fake the Real Thing

Here’s the part I think gets underestimated: people know. Not eventually — pretty quickly. Teams can tell, often before an executive can admit it to themselves, who’s actually invested in the mission versus who’s here for the ride. To be clear, this isn’t a rare failure mode — most leaders I’ve worked with, at most companies, genuinely are what they present themselves to be. But every organization, without exception, has a handful who aren’t: people whose real orientation is their own trajectory, and whose teams figure that out long before leadership above them does. You can manage a narrative upward for a while. You can’t manage one downward for long, because the evidence is daily and specific — who shows up when it’s inconvenient, who takes the harder conversation instead of the easier one, who’s consistent when nobody senior is watching.

That’s really what authenticity is in a leadership context. Not a communication style. A track record that either holds up under close, repeated observation or doesn’t.

The Actual Job

Which brings me to what I think the real job is, underneath the title: making the organization strong er and better, and specifically making the people downstream of you more capable than they were before you got there. Not as a nice-to-have alongside the “real” work — as the real work. Everything else, the strategy, the roadmap, the board updates, is in service of that or it isn’t worth much.

I wrote about a version of this a few years ago in Everyone Deserves a Mentor — the idea that a leader only has 24 hours in a day, and the only real way to multiply your impact is by building other leaders who extend it. Authenticity is what makes that possible in practice. Mentorship that’s really just performance doesn’t hold up once things get hard — a bad quarter, a reorg, a crunch. Mentorship rooted in genuinely wanting someone to grow does. The bridge-building, the unglamorous work, the resistance to managing purely upward — it’s all the same discipline, just applied at different altitudes. Show up as who you actually are, consistently, and the org will trust you with more. Perform it, and eventually the org stops believing anything else you say.