As I mentioned last weekend, spring is in the air here in Lausanne. Or at least it was. Today, the first full day of spring, is cold and foggy with wet snow and high winds. That’s no problem for me, though, as I’m planning to spend most of the day indoors anyway.
We have today and Saturday off from classes so I am working right now on my group’s LPO paper on “Authenticity in Leadership.” It is very in vogue to talk about authenticity as a given “must have” in Western leadership right now. However, some of my international colleagues have mixed feelings about it. In China, for example, where leaders have a more stoic style, authenticity could be seen as a weakness. This makes for a very interesting topic that we are analyzing from from three different perspectives: research in the popular press, our own LPO coursework, and our multicultural group members’ experiences. There may be no hard and fast leadership rules (e.g., “A leader is this.” or “A leader does that.”), which is exactly why I came to IMD. My leadership experience has been in leading small (< 500 people), mostly homogenous organizations and I want to be aware of what issues are at play in larger, more diverse ones.