Two high profile passings in the past week have driven home the difference between authenticity and transparency for me.
Dictionary.com defines the two words like this:
Authenticity: the quality of being authentic; genuineness.
Transparent: open; frank; candid: the man’s transparent earnestness.
And I think Walter Cronkite and Frank McCourt were the perfect examples of authenticity.
I grew up with Walter Cronkite as the news, and enjoyed reading Frank McCourt’s three memoirs.
Cronkite was the voice of the news. He was on the air for the most important events of my childhood. The assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy. The race to the moon, and Watergate.
One of the events replayed this past weekend, which showed why he was so trusted, was the death of former President Lyndon Baines Johnson. CBS cuts from a taped report on Vietnam to Cronkite at the anchor desk. Cronkite is on the phone with LBJ’s Press Secretary, Tom Johnson. Cronkite holds his finger up to the camera, while listening to Johnson. He then informed the audience that former President Lyndon Johnson had died, then went back to the call. (The viewers could only here Cronkite’s end of the call). When he had received all the details, he hung up the phone, and passed those details along to the viewers.
That is an example of what I believe made him special. He trusted the audience. And that trust came across to all of us. He was authentic.
Frank McCourt retired after 30 years teaching English in the New York Public Schools. After retiring he became a best selling author, writing the memoirs “Angela’s Ashes” (1997), “Tis” (1999), and my favorite, “Teacher Man” (2005). McCourt won the Pulitzer Prize for “Angela’s Ashes”, and saw it made into a movie. He was 66 when his first book was published. My favorite quote about McCourt came from the former publicity director for Scribner, McCourt’s publisher. “I watched him sign his name in thousands of books,” says Patricia Eisemann “But of all the people who came to the readings, he was happiest when he’d hear, ‘Hello Mr. McCourt,’ and he’d look up and find a former student. That’s when his ever present smile grew wider.”
If you have not listened to McCourt’s reading of “Teacher Man”, I urge you to find a copy. Hearing it in his own voice makes all the difference in the world. McCourt’s three books are not light stories, they are dark and difficult, and real, and authentic.
We hear a lot about being transparent, and I agree it is important that we are transparent. But it is just as important that our associations are authentic. That we as association executives are authentic. Members can tell when their employees, the association staff and executives truly care about them. And fake may work occasionally, but if you don’t really care about the people you represent, it may be time to find somewhere else to work.
Transparency isn’t enough in todays market, where members can find what they need (products, information, ect.) somewhere else. You better be authentic.
AssociationOkie 
Leave a comment