Richard Young explains why it’s time for business leaders to drop the facade and start to be more authentic

I was chatting with the CEO of a professional services firm the other day. The topic was culture. Her take on changing corporate culture for the better was simple. “The CEO has to be honest and transparent,” she said. “Being open and sharing your thinking demonstrates a preparedness to be authentic. It shows you’re not always right and that you’re prepared to change, too.”

Interestingly, she was also a proponent of social media to get that message across – “intimacy at scale,” she called it.

And despite all the misgivings about social media, especially in B2B – we’re coming to them, don’t worry – I think she’s bang on the money about this one.

Business is too often about masks. Companies are “brands”, constructed public personas onto which marketing people attach moods, emotions and personalities. Many customer-facing staff have scripts and processes to follow, all to protect this image.

Inside businesses, people play to the attributes they think will make them successful. That’s why exploitative salespeople and aggressive charity fundraisers exist – they’re not bad people, they’re donning the masks appropriate to the sentiment they think will elicit praise (usually by generating cash).

Managers become aggressive or manipulative to show they’re “effective” or “hungry”. You only have to look at the interviews with the contestants on The Apprentice to know that these masks remain powerful signals to hard-driving bosses like Lord Sugar that a person is worthy of advancement.

But it’s mostly bogus.

And people are working that out. The most important story you’ll read today is this one, about Essena O’Neill, a teen Instagram and YouTube sensation in Australia who woke up one morning and realised that her life was miserable.

Projecting physical and emotional perfection, measuring her life in social media “likes” and “follows”, made her feel monstrous. So she’s given up. She’s channelling herself into genuine change instead. (“Read more, listen more, ask more,” she now says. That sounds good…)

This is a powerful lesson for brands.

They need to start being honest, open, personal and vulnerable with content. O’Neill was miserable because the façade she created didn’t reflect her reality. And it’s not hard to find content marketing that’s exclusively about the façade, purged of genuine personality in favour of a corporate style guide or an edict about tone or, even worse, a paranoia about not saying the wrong thing.

What if a digital native like O’Neill is a trailblazer? What if there’s a generation coming through – a generation becoming employees, suppliers, customers and leaders – that’s tired of bluff, bland statements and unrealistic aspirations. Even if it’s only partially true, failing to be authentic could have consequences, both for commercial success and for your company culture.

So use social media – but not via a corporate account. Tweet honestly from influential individuals (see Paul Polman, CEO at Unilever for a great example) or from customer-facing departments with a power to respond to the audience. Or use LinkedIn, which is where people look for corporate messages. Don’t confuse reach with influence.

Commission honest, objective content with your views baked in; material that tells readers you know and care about a subject, but that you’re always open to new ideas and even to changing your view. Of course we’d recommend using professional writers and taking editorial advice on what to talk about. But it should be rooted in your business’s authentic experience.

Which brings me to Seth Godin, whose 1999 book Permission Marketing seems appropriate here: “You need humility and patience to do permission marketing,” he wrote. “That’s why so few companies do it properly. The best shortcut, in this case, is no shortcut at all.”

And stop wearing masks, either personally or as a brand. As that CEO put it, “When you unmask your true self, you’re showing people what they can do themselves to change corporate behaviour. As a leader, you show by example, not by edict.”

You might not switch from Instagram star to wannabe revolutionary like Essena O’Neill. But you’ll create deeper, richer and more lasting relationships with all manner of stakeholders.