Leaders may be profoundly self-aware and essentially authentic but not because of contemplation or analysis; they are not characters in some Woody Allen film.So how do authentic leaders acquire these attributes? The relative simplicity of their goals often helps. A great leader is usually trying to accomplish no more than three or four big goals at a time. He is unwavering about these goals; he doesn’t question them any more than he questions himself. That’s because the goals are usually connected in some way to one or another of the leader’s authentic selves. His pursuit of the goals, and the way he communicates them to followers, is intense—which naturally promotes the kind of self-disclosure we are talking about and educates him further about his various selves.We have also found that great leaders keep close to them people who will give them honest feedback. As Roche Pharmaceuticals head Bill Burns told us, “You have to keep your feet on the ground when others want to put you on a pedestal. After a while on a pedestal, you stop hearing the truth. It’s filtered by the henchmen, and they read you so well they know what you want to hear. You end up as the queen bee in the hive, with no relationships with the worker bees. My wife and secretary are fully empowered, if they ever see me getting a bit uppity, to give me a thumping great hit over the head.”As consultants, we often have been called in to do precisely that for senior executives, acting both as priests and spies as we try to make leaders more open to truths about themselves and their relationships with others. This does not necessarily mean helping these leaders develop more of what psychologist Dan Goleman calls emotional intelligence; rather, it means helping them to sharpen their skills in disclosing the emotional intelligence they already have so they can give better performances for their followers.Consider an executive we’ll call Josh, the CEO of one of the world’s largest TV production companies for the past ten years. When we first met him, Josh was one of the early innovators in the field of documentary TV. Over the years, as he moved up the corporate ladder, he matured into a highly knowledgeable and effective executive who, in the process, became rather serious— even distant and austere—in the eyes of some of his employees. These perceptions were weakening his ability to attract and retain followers, so we coached Josh to return to the mischievous sense of humor that he had displayed more readily earlier in his career. He has an amazing sense of comic timing, which he has learned to use to devastating effect to disarm opponents and delight his followers. At a recent retirement celebration, for example, people expected him to deliver a rather sober speech concerning the departing senior executive. Instead, they were treated to a comic tour de force, which thrilled the retiring executive and stunned Josh’s followers, none of whom would have guessed their boss was so funny. Josh’s ability to use humor is an especially important attribute in the entertainment business, and his reputation as a leader has benefited accordingly.Besides possessing self-knowledge and skills in self-disclosure, great leaders have to be able to recognize which aspects of their authentic selves particular groups of followers are looking for. Most great leaders have highly developed social antennae: They use a complex mix of cognitive and observational skills to recognize what followers are consciously—and unconsciously— signaling to them.The good news is that while some people seem to be born with these discernment skills, others can, in fact, learn them. We have found that individuals who have had a great deal of mobility early in their lives possess these skills to a higher degree than those who have stayed mostly in one place. It’s no coincidence that many CEOs start out in sales and that most senior executives in multinational companies have gone on multiple foreign postings. Exposure to a wide range of experiences during a manager’s formative years enhances her ability to read and empathize with different people and situations.Experiences outside of an individual’s comfort zone can also sharpen her social awareness. Marks & Spencer’s Jean Tomlin, for example, developed her social skills during her journey to establish credibility as a black businesswoman operating in an environment dominated by white males. And Nestlé’s Peter Brabeck-Letmathe learned much from his stint in the military at age 17. The living conditions and treatment were barely tolerable, and several of his fellow soldiers attempted suicide. Brabeck-Letmathe survived by observing his superior officers very closely; the better he anticipated their behavior, the easier it was to stay out of their way.