In this podcast episode, I talk the essence of authentic leadership. What is it? Is it simply influence or is it something more.

I have always been fascinated by this topic. Perhaps because I enjoy creating models that try to explain something people want to know about.

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I’m only twenty-seven. Since I finished college and started working, I have had about five years in the “real world” under my belt. However, a lot has happened in that five-year period.

Like most people right out of college, I have held a couple of different positions since entering the workforce. It’s given me a great perspective on different kinds of leaders. It has also made me think about the kind of leader I want to be when I am finally in a leadership position.

Last spring, Jim Bradford, Dean of Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University, interviewed me on my leadership philosophy and practice. He asked some tough questions. I tried to be as candid as I could be.

I intended to share the video here on my blog a few months ago, but it got lost in the shuffle. However, I thought about it today and thought you might enjoy seeing it.

Most leaders periodically talk to their teams about how they value honesty and why they want more of it. This talk on honesty has become one of the classical management talks in the business world.

However, judging by their behavior, I have noticed that very few of these leaders actually encourage honesty. And I’m confident this doesn’t apply just for the leaders I know. It’s very easy to state that you want honesty from people; it’s much harder to create a culture that actually fosters it.

A while back, Michael Smith, Associate pastor of ClearView Baptist Church in Franklin, Tennessee, interviewed me as part of a research project he was doing on leadership. I thought his questions were so powerful that I posted them on my blog under the title, “20 Questions to Ask Other Leaders.”

Several months ago, a former executive at our company made a commitment to a third-party via email. It is obvious that he didn’t research the cost of his promise, nor did he get anyone else’s approval. I was not aware of the obligation until the other party brought it to our attention. When I learned that the commitment was north of six figures, I gasped.

Many people have written on what it means to be a leader. Almost everyone identifies influence as the primary characteristic. By definition, this means that leadership and position are two different things. You can have a title, and a position of power, but this does not mean that you are a leader. Even people without these things can exert influence and thus leadership.

I started my selling career in high school. I sold door-to-door for Fuller Brush and a local cable television company. In college, I sold Grolier encyclopedias. Each of these sales positions involved “cold calling.” It was basically a form of human spamming: I called on people I didn’t know, who had not indicated an interest in the product, at times that were inconvenient for them. It was brutal work.

Today, we live in a world of near-total transparency. Google, Wikipedia, and many other websites make it possible to check any fact almost instantaneously. As a leader, speaker, or author, you have to be particularly careful with your statistics. If you exaggerate the facts, you will be found out. And the results can be embarrassing—or worse.

For example, we occasionally get proposals from authors who claim to have a blog that draws thousands of visitors. In fact, about a week ago, I had an agent claim that his client was “the most popular Christian blogger on the internet.” Perhaps he was just taking the author’s word for it. Maybe he was using hyperbole. Unfortunately, for him—and his client—this kind of claim can be easily checked.