Why Should Organizations be Authentic? The Competing Logics of Trust & Uniqueness

Everyone agrees: It’s a good thing for organizations to be authentic.

Where folks disagree, though, is why organizations should be authentic.

Deep down, we know that authenticity is valuable. But when we try to talk about “why our organization should be more authentic” and convince others to pursue authenticity, our conversations can get pretty confusing.

We often aren’t clear about our logic and which one(s) we’re using. Worse, when we choose a logic that is wrong for the audience we want to convince, pursuing authenticity can actually look like a waste of the organization’s time.

There are two arguments for organizational authenticity: one based on trust, and one based on uniqueness.

Logic #1: Authenticity Leads to Trust

Authenticity is valuable because authenticity invites stakeholders’ trust.

Stakeholders feel safer trusting an authentic organization because being authentic makes an organization’s behaviors become more predictable, reliable, and more trustworthy. Thus, authenticity is valuable because it makes it possible for stakeholders to trust the organization.

Logic #2: Authenticity leads to Unique Contribution

Authenticity is valuable because organizations that act authentically create a more accurate and more abundant expression of their unique values, capabilities, and purpose.

Being authentic effects the type and quality of the products, services and experiences that an organization offers. When an organization acts from its identity, it expresses its ‘one and only’-ness, who that organization is that no other organization is. Because acting authentically draws forward the indigenous qualities inside the organization, an authentic organization creates behaviors, products and services that are specific and unique to that organization.

What authentic organizations create, in terms of products, services and experiences, are less easy to substitute and more likely to be special. Thus, authenticity is valuable because it establishes a distinctiveness that, relative to other organizations, makes relationships with the authentic organization more significant to stakeholders.

Kumbaya or Competitive Advantage?

Both the Logic of Trust and the Logic of Unique Contribution make real sense, but one logic is more ‘business-like’ than the other.

To put it bluntly, the “trust” logic for authenticity has a kind of ‘Kumbaya’ feel to it, and treats authenticity as a quality that’s “nice to have” but not necessarily mission-critical.

In contrast, the logic of ‘unique contribution’ has a ‘bottom-line impact’ because authenticity is the only way to generate sustainable competitive advantage. Thus, for an organization that wants to maximize its impact and achieve its purpose, being authentic is critical to success.

Is Kumbaya or Competitive Advantage more compelling to your stakeholders?

A few weeks ago I met with some of the members of The Community Roundtable to talk with them about strategies for sustaining authenticity in their online communities. Rachel Happe started us off by asking each manager to share his or her definition of authenticity and understanding of why being authentic would be good for an organization.

To a person, the managers believed that being authentic was valuable because it leads to trust. Each of them (and each of their organizations) is striving for a more trusting and trustworthy organizational culture. The logic of uniqueness and the conversation about competitive advantage didn’t come up as readily, and I was glad to have the chance to explore the issues with this group.

Both trust and uniqueness are important arguments for organizational authenticity.

Trust is absolutely something that every organization should pursue. But trust is not the central reason for being authentic. The central reason for being authentic is to sustain our organization’s uniqueness and to put that uniqueness to work to achieve the organization’s purpose.

We need to talk more about how authenticity leads to sustainable uniqueness and why authenticity is critical to an organization’s success.

The idea that these managers were advocating for more authenticity but relying only on one logic — and the ‘kumbaya’ one at that — made me realize that we/I need to talk more about how authenticity leads to sustainable uniqueness. We need to talk more about why authentic is critical to an organization’s success.

And, it made me wonder:

Have we been under-utilizing the logic that organizational authenticity leads to unique contributions?

Have we been under-appreciating organizational authenticity not only as a virtue in and of itself, but as an engine for creating stakeholder value?