Building a Culture of Authenticity at Work

This is part 4 of a 4-part conversation on authentic leadership.

You can’t fake authenticity — and culture knows when you try. 

In this episode, author and executive coach Jim Fielding joins to discuss how leaders shape organizational culture through tone, vulnerability, and consistent behavior. As a former executive with teams of thousands at companies like Disney and Claire’s, Jim shares the signals of inauthentic cultures, the role of curiosity in connection, and the daily actions that build psychological safety. His advice? Start listening. Start watching. Culture is built in the small moments — and leaders set the pace.

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Transcript

Russel Lolacher: Relationships are so essential for figuring out authenticity for yourself and for your teams and the organization. So I wanna dig into some tangible things we can do to be on more authentic or maybe understand authenticity that's around it. You've given great examples of therapies, a great one for ourselves.

Tools to learn each other. I'm now hearing if you wanna really understand authenticity in your organization, curiosity might be a really key way of figuring that out. How does, how can that show up? Perfect example in your story there is, can we sit down and talk about what you're going through? But you have to lay the groundwork for that too.

Jim Fielding: You do. You do. I mean, one of the tools that I love, and it's a super simple tool, and I think it's actually a team building tool. And again, I mean anybody can Google this, it's called a lifeline exercise, right? And or uh uh, and you, you literally say to people, come into this meeting. That doesn't have to be pretty, but draw a timeline of your life and what the high points of your life were and the low points of your life and explain them to us. It's like an icebreaker. It's like a way of getting to know somebody. I think that's a great tool of just, again, stoking curiosity because all of a sudden you find out that somebody was like a college division, one track and field champion. That you never knew. Or they're one of 10 kids. Something about them, like you start to learn their uniqueness. I think another great one is, is to start meetings to take, like meeting management 101, when you pull a group of people together, have an agenda, have a set that's published ahead of time, have a set of expectations so they know what meeting they're coming to, and then literally put on the agenda warmup or icebreaker. And have, there's so many different ones. You can Google, what are 10 great icebreakers, right? Tell me something, go around the room, tell me something about yourself that no one else knows. Or something that would really surprise you. And again, you know, someone says, you know, I'm one of 10 children.

Or you know, I was actually born in Japan. Like my dad was in the military. It doesn't have to be soul wrenching, right? It can be my first job was in an auto mechanic shop, right? But it, it creates that humanism again, right where it, it makes them, it makes everybody in that room slightly more human and slightly more accessible to each other.

And they're not just bluntly widgets performing a job in a company. They're humans coming together to work. And particularly in creative organizations, which I was always running, I think it was really, really important to have those human connections.

Russel Lolacher: And I think it says the power of communication as well, because I've, I've been with teams and I, I'm like, I don't really know your motivations. I don't really know where you're coming from. I don't know what your values are. Do they align with the organizations? Should they? So people will take the information you're describing and keep it to themselves.

And go, good. I know me better. Fantastic. But in exercises like that, it's, yeah, but now everybody in the room knows you better.

Jim Fielding: Mm-hmm.

Russel Lolacher: You can be authentic because you're communicating and we're doing this vulnerably out loud.

Jim Fielding: You get it. Yeah. I love that you, you so understand this. Yeah. Like you and I would be great together working together 'cause you so get it. No, and the other there's other, all these hints I give, and I do a lot of this in coaching too. I mean, I'm not consulting, but in coaching, go have different people run meetings, make them be in charge of the meeting.

Like you don't always have to run the meeting. And, and by putting other people in charge of the meeting, the meetings are different because different managers communicate differently. But it's a really good exercise for someone to plan a team meeting or plan a business update meeting.

You know, when I, when I was in an office environment with a team, we definitely had a meeting cadence. We definitely, you know, we had team meetings every week at the same time. And I would change who was in charge of it. And there's all these other hints too, like we did meeting free Fridays. Fridays were not days where you did any scheduled meeting

because Friday became a very good catchup day for you to work on your work. But also what you started to see happening is people kind of walking around the office and just doing those casual hallway conversations or meeting up at the coffee thing. I mean, one of the best investments I made at Fox, this gonna sound so stupid, I put in a a commercial grade espresso machine, right?

Like it was an expense, right? Because it was like those espresso pod things. Why did I do that? Okay, I'm a capitalist. Number one. My people were running out to Starbucks every two hours and be gone, right? By me providing them free and espresso. And I had to justify this to everybody. Finance and everybody else. It doesn't mean they still went, didn't go to Starbucks. Of course they did. 'cause it was Starbucks, but they, maybe one time a day they'd go into that espresso machine. Every time I walked into where that espresso machine was, I put one on one side of the building and one on the other. There was two or three people talking while they were making their nespressos, and they might have been, one was from graphic design, one was from finance, and one was from HR.

It doesn't mean one team got up and went and made coffees together. You know what I'm saying? And I think that those spontaneous, natural, again, human conversations were huge for building the culture. What are you doing this weekend? Oh, you're going to the, you're going to the Madonna concert?

Oh, you're kid has a soccer tournament like. And sometimes I'd walk in to make my espresso or get a juice or whatever, and I would just join in. Just observe. Just listen. We're humans. That's again, the, the humanness of it. It was the best investment I ever made. And by the way, they bitched at me like, you know, oh my God, oh my God, the rent on the machine, blah, blah, blah.

I'm like, fine. Take it outta my travel budget. I don't care. Like it's, to me, that was an investment.

Russel Lolacher: I think it's key to understand that the more comfortable people are, the more they understand each other as human beings and not a means to an end, or what you can and can't do for me, the more comfortable they'll feel to share that authentic information about themselves, their background, who they are.

Not a lot of people are comfortable with that. We've talked about diversity and there's a lot of people going, I don't care about you. I come to work.

Jim Fielding: Totally. Totally.

Russel Lolacher: I care about me. But to be a leader, I'm sorry, you're gonna have to get out of that. Out of that. So going back to, you've mentioned coaching, how do you coach authenticity?

How do you coach that in people?

Jim Fielding: Well, I mean, it's funny, I mean, I feel, I feel like this podcast I'm gonna use is advertisement for coaching. 'cause all these questions you asked me, I mean, all of my coaching engagements. First off, before I start a coaching engagement with somebody, we have at least two quote free sessions where we get to know each other and make sure that the goals are very clear about why this person's engaging a coach and that I'm the right kind of coach for them, because there's many different kinds of coach coaches. I am a very EQ coach, right? And so if you're not gonna be comfortable with doing a lifeline exercise or personality assessment, I can refer you to other kinds of coaches who are more IQ coaches but I'm, I'm more EQ. So, very similar to what we said, when, when I start with a new client, I have 'em do the lifeline exercise and I have 'em do a personality assessment. And, and if they've had one recently, I'll say, well, just send me the one you had because I'm trying to understand again, the context. And in the first couple of sessions, it's like getting to know you and I'm asking them questions that are bringing up things from their past. Not necessarily dredging up things from their past, but what's the largest team you've ever managed? Tell me the time where you felt the most happy at work. Tell me the time you felt the most stressed at work. Those are the kind of questions a coach asks to get them talking so that you really understand what, what makes them motivated, and that's where a, a good coaching relationship, I require a four month minimum because it's not solved. Like you can't have one coaching session and be like, okay, that's it. It's, to me, it's weekly sessions for three, four, or five months where that relationship grows. And to be an effective coach, you have to be an incredible active listener, and you have to be an incredible question asker because the rule is, you know, the client should be talking 70 to 80% of the time. They should be talking 'cause then you're hearing things and then you're like, oh, I'm gonna ask a question about that, or I'm gonna note that. And I, for me personally, I, I like one-on-one coaching and I like group coaching, but I, I, I purposely don't take on a huge coaching roster because I wanna have really quality relationships with my clients.

Russel Lolacher: If you had one action somebody could do tomorrow to be either a more authentic leader or, or to bring it to their team, where would you say they should start?

Jim Fielding: Well, I think you've hit on it so much. It's spend some time looking in the mirror, figuratively or literally, and get in touch with yourself and your self-awareness. What makes you tick? What do you like? What do you not like? What do you wanna change about yourself? Because listen, there's all things we wanna be better at.

Like none of us. I mean, we're never perfect. I, I think it's doing that self-awareness of and, and however you get there, right? For some people it might be by reading a book or some magazine articles or, you know, some online articles. Or it may be you know, it may be again seeing a therapist or whatever I think if you really wanna do it, like you have to be completely self-aware.

And self-aware means knowing what you're good at, what you're not good at, what you like and what you don't like, and owning that and, and accepting yourself unconditionally. There are things that I'm not good at I'll just use a great example. I'm good at interpreting numbers. I hate doing numbers.

For me to be an effective leader, I need a strong CFO. I need an incredible CFO that I can trust implicitly because I'm happy reading reports. But if you ask me to do a ledger or a P&I statement or a three year or five year plan, my head will pop off. That's not, I can do it. I don't like to do it.

I know I need a strong CFO or a strong head of finance on my team that I trust. That's my self-awareness, you know? So.

Russel Lolacher: Thanks so much for being authentic with us.

Jim Fielding: Oh, I love it.

Russel Lolacher: I couldn't believe I said That just so cheesy. It was just such an easy grab. It was.

Jim Fielding: It's there. It's, it's, the word is tattooed on my forehead at this point, I think.

Russel Lolacher: Thanks for sharing your insights and experience with us, Jim today. Really appreciated the conversation.

Jim Fielding: Oh my gosh. I appreciate you so much. Thank you for giving me the opportunity.

Russel Lolacher: That's Jim Fielding. He's an executive coach, professional speaker and author. Please check out his book. It's called All Pride, No Ego, A Queer Executive's Journey on Living and Leading Authentically. Take care, Jim. Thank you so much.

Jim Fielding: Have a great day.

Russel Lolacher: That's it.

Jim Fielding: Yay. That was awesome.