Most leadership advice pushes you toward a familiar template: decisive, diplomatic, endlessly composed. It's meant to build trust. Often it does the opposite – because trust depends on people actually knowing who you are, not the version of you assembled to fit expectations.
In this episode of Trust & Influence in B2B, Joel Harrison is joined by Karl Van den Bergh, Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer at Illumio, the breach containment company. Karl has spent more than 25 years leading go-to-market teams at global technology companies, including CMO roles at Gigamon and DataStax, and now writes regularly on authenticity and what it means to be human at work.
Together they unpack why being yourself is a trust strategy rather than a soft skill, how to tell real authenticity apart from the performative kind, and why Karl believes AI raises the value of human, relational marketing rather than eroding it.
In this episode:
- Why most leadership advice pushes conformity rather than authenticity, and what gets lost in the process
- The test that actually separates real authenticity from the performative kind
- Why brands that try to please everyone end up forgettable – and the campaign that proves the opposite
- How fear of conflict quietly kills team performance, and what fixed it on Karl's own team
- Why Karl believes AI raises the value of human, relational marketing rather than replacing it
Chapters
00:00 Cold open
01:26 Karl's background – from physics to CMO
03:13 Why he started writing about being yourself at work
06:10 Why a distinctive point of view is a differentiator
08:37 Personal brand vs. company brand
10:55 What authenticity actually means
11:50 Spotting performative authenticity
13:47 How authenticity cascades through a team
17:27 Where leaders fall short on consistency
19:46 Does this get harder as the stakes rise?
21:56 The counterargument: "Don't Be Yourself"
24:30 AI and the flattening of content
27:52 One thing to start doing differently next week
Karl on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karlvandenbergh/
Joel on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joelharrison/
