As business leaders, we’re operating in an environment where cycles that once took decades now compress into months. Innovation curves are steeper. Expectations are higher. And the human systems that power our organizations—those wonderfully complex, diverse, and sometimes messy networks of people—are being asked to adapt in real time.
If you lead people, you sit at the center of this storm. Your challenge isn’t just deciding what to build next—it’s creating the conditions for your people to do the best work of their lives while navigating ambiguity, generational diversity, and relentless change.
That’s why conversations with people experts who have spent decades transforming leaders and teams are so valuable. In my conversation with leadership consultant and executive coach Rachel Burr, three takeaways emerged that every executive can operationalize right now. They center on authenticity as a business capability, building the muscles to lead across differences, and using coaching not as a perk but as strategic infrastructure for performance and culture.
These aren’t soft skills. They’re bottom-line levers. Here are the three lessons and how to put them to work in your organization.
Takeaway 1: Authenticity is not a slogan—it’s a speed advantage
“Authenticity” gets thrown around in leadership conversations, often reduced to platitudes. But the way Rachel frames it is both practical and urgent: in a world of accelerating change, authenticity reduces friction, speeds alignment, and increases the adaptability of your organization.
Here’s why. When leaders spend energy managing a persona that isn’t aligned with their actual values and style, they slow themselves down. They second-guess. They hesitate. They communicate in ways that feel “off” to others, breaking trust and requiring more explanation and repair later. Multiply that across a leadership team and you create an invisible drag on execution. In a stable environment, you might get away with it. In a market moving this fast, you won’t.
Authenticity, as Rachel defines it, begins with a solid core: values, motivations, interests, and innate talents. That core doesn’t change every quarter; it’s the foundation. What does change is how you express it in different contexts—boardroom vs. offsite, all-hands vs. one-on-one. That’s not being fake; it’s being skillful. Think of it like having a consistent operating system and a dynamic user interface. The core is stable. The expression flexes to meet the moment.
Executives who want the business benefits of authenticity should treat it like they treat any strategic capability: define it, operationalize it, and measure it.
- Define it: Establish a shared language around values and strengths. Make authenticity concrete, not conceptual. Leaders should be able to articulate their top three values, their energizing strengths, and their derailers under stress.
- Operationalize it: Build leadership rituals that align to that core—weekly reflection on intent vs. impact; pre-briefs for high-stakes meetings to plan expression; post-briefs to assess whether the experience others had matches the intent.
- Measure it: Track indicators that authenticity is improving trust and speed—decision latency, rework rates due to misalignment, regret moves on talent, and employee net promoter score in leadership units.
Authenticity is not license to overshare or abdicate standards. It’s a commitment to lead from a true center so your organization can move quickly, with clarity and trust.
Executive action plan:
- Institute quarterly “intent vs. impact” 360s for your top 50 leaders, focused specifically on how their authentic strengths are experienced by others.
- Adopt leadership narratives: have each executive document their values, leadership commitments, “always/never” behaviors, and stress triggers; share with their teams.
- Add an “Authenticity Check” to leadership meeting agendas: Is how we’re showing up accelerating or slowing this decision?
Takeaway 2: Lead across difference—because your business depends on it
We like to imagine people as predictable systems. They aren’t. Computers do what we tell them; people interpret, react, and adapt based on history, identity, expectations, stress, and context. That’s the beauty—and the challenge—of leading humans.
Rachel’s point is blunt: leaders who resist investing in understanding people are essentially saying, “I don’t have time to pour the foundation.” It’s a false economy. The result is cracked structures—conflict avoidance, roles that calcify, talent that disengages, and a leadership bench that can’t carry the strategy.
Layer on the generational dynamics of today’s workforce: digital natives entering leadership tracks earlier, Gen X operating as the connective tissue of organizations, and seasoned leaders bringing deep institutional wisdom. None of this is a “problem” to solve; it’s an asset to harness. But only if you design for it.
Executives must build the capability to lead across difference—not as a one-off training but as part of how work gets done.
- Normalize multiple communication modes. Your youngest managers are fluent in async, short-form, and visual comms. Your senior operators may prefer long-form narrative and live debate. Build rituals that leverage both: memos to develop thinking, async prep to reduce meeting waste, and structured live dialogue for alignment.
- Make context a leadership responsibility. When speed and complexity increase, so does ambiguity. Leaders should routinely translate strategy into “what this means for us” for their teams, and upward into “what we’re hearing” for the enterprise. Think of them as context routers.
- Treat difference as a design constraint. Staff projects intentionally with cognitive, functional, and generational diversity—and then equip teams with norms to work through friction quickly. Don’t hope it resolves; structure for it.
One of the most instructive tools in Rachel’s practice is the mirror: recording a leader in action and replaying it to examine intent vs. impact. A senior leader who “wins the room” by sheer force may not notice the wake of shut-down colleagues. Seeing it on video is often the unlock. It’s not about shame; it’s about awareness and choice.
Executive action plan:
- Implement a “Leader Lens” program: quarterly recordings of key meetings for senior leaders with a coach-led debrief on patterns—dominance, interruption, question quality, synthesis, and space-making.
- Standardize 360s with perspective diversity: direct reports, peers, cross-functional partners, and senior stakeholders. Synthesize themes into two commitments per leader per quarter.
- Build cross-generational mentoring: pair high-potential Gen Z/early-career leaders with senior leaders for mutual mentoring—digital fluency for institutional wisdom.
Takeaway 3: Coaching is not a perk—it’s strategic infrastructure
Many executives still treat coaching as a remedial intervention or an individual perk. Rachel reframes it as strategic infrastructure: the mechanism by which leaders metabolize change, strengthen self-awareness, and translate feedback into repeatable behavior shifts. In other words, coaching is how your leadership operating system gets updated.
Consider the leader Rachel described: brilliant, fast, and capable of unintentionally decimating colleagues in meetings. Traditional feedback bounced off—he was successful by many metrics. But watching himself on video, with a coach guiding the narrative, allowed him to see the gap between intent and impact. He didn’t need a personality transplant; he needed new practices. With coaching, he developed them. His team noticed. Performance and culture improved. He now sponsors coaching for his own leaders. That is strategic compounding.
Executives should architect coaching as a system that scales:
- Target the right layers: SVP and above for enterprise impact; director/VP levels for culture cascade; frontline managers for the first-line experience where engagement is won or lost.
- Codify the coaching flywheel: assessment (360 + self), awareness (mirrors like video), practice (behavioral experiments), reinforcement (leader commitments and peer accountability), and measurement (leading and lagging indicators).
- Protect the container: coaching requires psychological safety. Leaders need a space to process imposter syndrome, take apart hard conversations, and test language before taking it upstream or downstream.
This is not indulgence. It’s risk management. Leaders without a safe place to metabolize stress push it into the organization through reactivity, avoidance, and brittle decision-making. Leaders who work through it in coaching reduce cultural noise and increase execution signal.
Executive action plan:
- Create an enterprise coaching framework with tiered support: executive coaching for top leaders, group coaching for mid-level leaders, and skill sprints for managers (e.g., feedback, conflict, facilitation).
- Align coaching outcomes to business metrics: decision cycle time, regrettable attrition, engagement by leader, cross-functional project throughput, and quality of talent pipeline.
- Require “leader as coach” capability: train leaders to use coaching questions, reflect back patterns, and co-create commitments—not to replace formal coaching, but to make it the leadership default.
How to operationalize these takeaways in your enterprise
Bringing these ideas to life requires moving from concept to cadence. Here’s a 90-day blueprint to start building authenticity, cross-difference leadership, and coaching infrastructure—without boiling the ocean.
Weeks 1–4: Baseline and alignment
- Sponsor alignment: get your executive team aligned on the stakes—why leadership capability is the growth constraint and how these three levers address it.
- Leadership narratives: each executive drafts and shares their leadership narrative (values, strengths, derailers, “always/never” commitments).
- Quick 360 pulse: run a lightweight, two-question 360 for your top 50 leaders—“What’s one behavior this leader should do more of?” “What’s one behavior this leader should do less of?” Synthesize themes.
Weeks 5–8: Practice and coaching containers
- Launch the Leader Lens: record two critical meetings per top leader; debrief with coach on patterns. Establish two behavior experiments per leader (e.g., ask three genuine questions before offering a solution; pause and synthesize before deciding).
- Cross-gen mentoring: stand up a 12-week mutual mentoring pilot across two business units; provide a discussion guide focused on context translation and decision-making.
- Manager skill sprints: run two 90-minute sprints—“High-Impact Feedback” and “Facilitating Strong Decisions.” Require managers to practice in live settings and report outcomes.
Weeks 9–12: Institutionalization and measurement
- Embed rituals: add “intent vs. impact” reflection as a standing agenda item in leadership team meetings; start meetings with a one-sentence statement of intent.
- Tie to metrics: connect leader development efforts to engagement by team, decision latency on cross-functional work, and regrettable attrition. Share a leadership effectiveness dashboard with the exec team.
- Scale coaching access: extend coaching to VPs/Directors via a blended model—group coaching plus targeted one-on-ones for transition moments (new scope, new team, turnaround).
Governance and risk
- Confidentiality boundaries: define what stays within coaching vs. what rolls up for enterprise learning (themes, not names).
- Equity of access: ensure programs are inclusive across gender, race, age, geography, and role to avoid perpetuating power imbalances.
- Sustainability: budget coaching as an operating expense tied to transformation, not a discretionary perk vulnerable to cuts.
Navigating authenticity in a professional context
A common executive misconception is that authenticity means “bring your whole self to work” without filters. That framing creates understandable resistance: there are things leaders should not share with their teams, just as there are conversations not appropriate for children—leaders must hold confidence and provide stability.
Rachel’s framing is more useful: authenticity is alignment to core values and strengths, expressed appropriately for the context. The goal is not radical transparency; it’s coherent leadership. Leaders can be human—acknowledge uncertainty, name trade-offs, own mistakes—while still setting direction, standards, and guardrails.
Practical cues:
- Before a hard conversation, write down your intent in one sentence. Afterward, ask a trusted peer if your impact matched your intent.
- In high-stakes meetings, designate a “process ally” to watch for your patterns—talk-time share, interruptions, defaulting to solutioning. Debrief afterward.
- When imposter syndrome shows up, name the growth edge: “I’m stretching from functional excellence to enterprise leadership.” Then ask: “What’s one behavior I can practice this week that reflects the leader I’m becoming?”
Building teams that thrive under pressure
High-performing teams are not accident-prone miracles; they’re engineered. The leaders who build them deliberately design for human realities—limited attention, stress responses, bias toward action—and install counterweights.
Team design checklist:
- Clear purpose and scope: what this team exists to do, and what it doesn’t.
- Decision rights: who decides what, and how—consent, consult, or delegate.
- Norms for difference: how we disagree, how we decide, and how we commit.
- Feedback rhythm: micro-feedback weekly, formal retros monthly.
- Health signals: psychological safety pulse, conflict health, load balance.
Remember Rachel’s insight: we judge ourselves by our intent; others judge us by their experience of us. Teams thrive when leaders close that gap with habits that make intent visible and impact adjustable.
The human side of transformation: normalize the struggle
One of Rachel’s most powerful observations is how normalization reduces leadership anxiety: you are not uniquely broken because leading feels hard. It is hard. The leaders who appear effortless are often those who have private spaces—a coach, a peer circle, a thoughtful leader—where they can process the messiness, make sense of it, and return to the organization with clarity.
This is where culture shifts from slogans to substance. When your senior leaders model reflection (“Here’s what I intended, here’s what landed, here’s what I’m changing”), they make growth permissible. When they mentor across generations, they make difference valuable. When they invest in coaching as infrastructure, they make performance scalable.
Bringing it all together
- Authenticity accelerates execution by reducing friction. Define it, practice it, and measure its impact on decision speed and trust.
- Leading across difference is not optional. Build the muscles and the systems to harness diversity of thought, experience, and generation as a competitive advantage.
- Coaching is strategic infrastructure. Use it to update your leadership operating system, protect culture under stress, and compound performance over time.
If you lead an enterprise, your most consequential product is the experience of being led in your organization. That experience either unlocks energy and innovation—or it leaks value into politics, rework, and attrition. You can’t control markets, but you can design leadership. Start with the core. Build the capability to engage difference. Install coaching as the operating system for how leaders grow. Do those three things with intention, and you’ll create a company that moves at the speed of change without leaving its people behind.
Listen to the full episode on C-Suite Radio: Disrupt & Innovate | C-Suite Network
Watch the episode: DI 113 Unlocking Authentic Leadership: A Conversation with Rachel Burr
This article was drafted with the assistance of an AI writing assistant (Abacus.AI’s ChatLLM Teams) and edited by Lisa L. Levy for accuracy, tone, and final content.
