Awkward vs Authentic: What leaders on the campaign trail teach us about becoming less awkward
At dinner the other night, a friend was commenting on the ‘awkward’ debate performance of republican candidate for president, Ron DeSantis. In fact, the period after the debate saw much written about the purported awkwardness of De Santis, including the Washington Post and Vanity Fair. For some, it provided good joke fodder. For others, it hit closer to home, as we began to reflect on all the situations in which we showed up as hopelessly awkward too.
What does it mean to be awkward anyway? What makes an individual or an interaction awkward? There seems to be an implicit understanding of what ‘awkward’ is - maybe we can’t define it, but we know it when we see it, and we definitely feel it when we are it.
Awkwardness can broadly be defined as having to do with some violation of social coordination. The premier example is the mismatched handshake – one person comes in too strongly, and the other lags, or doesn’t come in for the handshake at all. We experience awkwardness when we stumble over our words or run out of things to say when we should still be talking (awkward silence), when we are caught in an interruptive loop (“no, please, you go ahead”), when we forget someone’s name. In each case, what should be a natural social process is somehow made unpleasantly conspicuous.
The potential for awkwardness is especially heightened when the rules to a social situation appear unclear – think back to when we started socializing and meeting people during the later stages of the Covid-19 pandemic. All the existing norms about how to greet others disappeared, and people found themselves without a script, each with their own individual preferences on whether to hug, shake hands, elbow-bump, or stay feet away from each other. Greetings suddenly became very awkward…
Situational awkwardness aside, there are also those who experience themselves as awkward people, who feel that they are play-acting at being human, and painfully sense each time they fail in their attempts. For some, it can be a lifelong experience that contributes to feeling chronically lonely or ‘out of place’. Children with high-functioning autism are instantaneously seen as “socially awkward” at a much higher rate than their neurotypical peers. Much of the experience of autism spectrum disorders is not understanding the tacit social script that coordinates so many interactions, and therefore unwittingly creating awkward situations.
In so far as awkwardness might be seen as a function of miscoordination, overcoming awkwardness is about developing two types of congruence: 1) between our inner and outer selves, and 2) between ourselves and other people.
The first kind of congruence is more commonly known as authenticity. Much of what we experience as authenticity is the confidence and self-possession that comes with those who are comfortable in their own skin. In these individuals there is a high level of congruence – e.g. between what they say and what they mean, and what they say and how they look, the tone of their voice, and their facial expression while saying it.
For political leaders on the campaign trail, this can become a major challenge, as they try and embody the kind of charisma that they (and their campaign team) think we are looking for in a presidential candidate. A perfect illustration is the leaked De Santis debate strategy published by the NY Times. It contains the sort of advice politicians, and other leaders in the public eye often get - be more warm, talk about family, don’t forget to smile. Hilary Clinton was advised to project warmth and change her voice so it doesn’t sound shrill.
The deep irony of this advice is that it often backfires. Clinton was consistently plagued by the sense that she was inauthentic and untrustworthy. Ron DeSantis’ debate performance put awkwardness in its most cringeworthy spotlight. These examples underscore exactly what can go wrong when communication strategists try to coach an individual on what kind of image to project. This advice puts up a dichotomy between “this is how you are, and this is how you need to be seen”, which can lead to both experienced inauthenticity and perceived inauthenticity. There is a documented reason for this effect. Trying to keep this communication advice in mind adds cognitive load for an individual. When we are trying to simultaneously track all the things we must say, along with all the things we must not say, all the while monitoring our entire nonverbal communication channel, it can actually produce a kind of communication paralysis, impairing both verbal and nonverbal communication performance. In other words, a perfect recipe for an awkward moment.
The second type of congruence is that between ourselves and other people, which allows for that effortless social coordination that we typically assign to charismatic people, but that is actually more a function of listening to and empathizing with other people. For example, in one awkward moment at a fair in Iowa, Ron DeSantis asks a child what she is drinking, and when she tells him that it’s an Icee, he replies with “That’s probably a lot of sugar, huh? Good to see ya.” The awkwardness of this moment is DeSantis’ failure to connect with the perspective of the child (who definitely does not think about food in terms of its sugar content), as well as the abrupt “Good to see ya” which is more appropriate for a golf buddy you run into at brunch, than in ending a brief interaction with any stranger, whether adult or child. This perspective gap can happen to anyone, but leaders who live very different lives from their constituents are especially liable to create these awkward situations.
The key to overcoming awkwardness is not about becoming someone you are not. Instead, research shows that reducing awkwardness is often achieved by finding common interests, similarities, humor, storytelling, helping behavior, and ofcourse, offers of food and drink. It requires becoming more in tune with other people, and understanding what you (authentically) might share with them in terms of interests, experiences, and values.
Know thyself and know your audience, and above all, know what the two have in common.
References and further reading
Clegg, J. W. (2012). The Importance of Feeling Awkward: A Dialogical Narrative Phenomenology of Socially Awkward Situations. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 9(3), 262–278. https://doi.org/10.1080/14780887.2010.500357
DePaulo, B. M. (1992). Nonverbal behavior and self-presentation. Psychological Bulletin, 111(2), 203–243. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.111.2.203
Grossman, R. B. (2015). Judgments of social awkwardness from brief exposure to children with and without high-functioning autism. Autism, 19(5), 580-587. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361314536937
Kadambi, A., Ichien, N., Qiu, S., & Lu, H. (2020). Understanding the visual perception of awkward body movements: How interactions go awry. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 82(5), 2544–2557. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-019-01948-5