When authenticity is at stake

Beware businesses and politicians posing as authentic -- and easily abandoning their supposed principles

What’s good for the garden isn’t necessarily trustworthy in society. We need to be dubious.

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As the hauler of wheelbarrow loads of topsoil and the digger of countless holes in the dirt, I can testify to my wife’s apparent philosophy of gardening: Enthusiasm yields joy. That’s why our gardens do not present ordered rows of a few choice specimens. No, our plots are thickly planted, so that by this time of the year there’s hardly room for weeds to grow. Which would be a labor saver, you know, except that it only encourages more planting in more plots next year. It can leave an aging wheelbarrow guy exhausted.

All this is by way of explaining why I took delivery several weeks ago on a few dozen 5-foot wooden stakes, the better to support a massive patch of dahlias and other plants. We had ordered the stakes from the place where we have lately gone to pick up all sorts of merchandise, from that sturdy wheelbarrow to some tough overalls: our nearby Tractor Supply store. We liked the vibe of the place, and we had a vague sense that it was a business with good values. That matters to us. We are not Hobby Lobby shoppers. 

Now, though, it looks like we’ll have to switch our garden shopping allegiance. Tractor Supply announced last month that it is flat-out abandoning both its commitment to diversity and its efforts to combat climate change, apparently in response to an attack on the business from right-wing activists, who clearly abhor efforts to achieve human justice and assure our survival. “We have heard from our customers that we have disappointed them,” the company said, in a June 27 statement. So it is eliminating company jobs that support diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), dropping its involvement with the Human Rights Campaign, ending sponsorship of both pride festivals and voting campaigns and withdrawing its carbon emission goals.¹

Instead, the company said, it will now focus “on rural American priorities including ag education, animal welfare, veteran causes and being a good neighbor.” My first reaction was surprise at the assumption that all Americans who live in rural areas don’t consider it neighborly to support equal rights for everybody and the fight to lessen the impact of climate change. But maybe my neighbors on the edge of the countryside aren’t like everybody else’s.

In any case, it's a stunning about-face for a company that had worked for years to draw attention to its announced commitment to diversity goals and support for LGBTQ rights. Just three months ago, Tractor Supply Co. had joined 4,000 organizations in promising to reduce carbon emissions under the Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi). And while the recent switch drew glee from those who claimed credit for bullying the company into its retreat, an inevitable backlash seems to be emerging. That underscores a lesson that’s taught in every leadership training program and business school: authenticity matters.

You know, nobody likes an imposter.

Public images are carefully managed these days by armies of message manipulators on behalf of businesses, executives and politicians. In 1980, the ratio of public relations professionals to journalists was two to one; now the imbalance has tripled, so that there are today six PR pros working to shape the views of every journalist in the U.S.² And in the polarized media ecosystem of 2024 — with many digital and broadcast outlets choosing to cater their messages to audiences on either the right or the left — it’s hard for people to separate reality from image.

So while Tractor Supply executives have in recent years touted the company’s longstanding commitment to diversity and to environmental, social and governance programs — so-called ESG goals — it’s hard at this point to know if that was born from genuine concern, as executives had said, or was just a marketing strategy. Tractor Supply was “a purpose-driven company,” its chief financial officer, Kurt Barton, claimed in November, talking with a Morgan Stanley analyst. “We’re a relationship business, not transactional,” Barton said, bragging that the company’s DEI and ESG work had been “pretty phenomenal.”³

But then the purpose-driven phenomenon ran up against Robby Starbuck, a Nashville-based music video director and right-wing activist. Several weeks ago, Starbuck’s social media accounts spotlighted Tractor Supply as supposedly contradicting the values of its rural customers, and encouraged a boycott. Now Starbuck claims credit for the company’s change of heart. On Newsmax, a host introduced him as the hero of a “win against woke,” which prompted Starbuck to reply, “It is a big win for sanity in America.”

But perhaps not a win without unintended consequence for Tractor Supply. Retail Dive, an authoritative industry site, reported this week that Tractor Supply’s move has “incited a backlash” from consumers, apparently prompting it to shut off comments on its social media accounts and refuse to talk with journalists about its about-face. The National Black Farmers Association called for its CEO to step down, and the company’s share price has slipped since its announcement.

So in the same way that some shoppers avoid Hobby Lobby and Chick-fil-A because they have contributed to groups that oppose equal rights for LGBTQ Americans, and just as the antics of Elon Musk have chased away some potential Tesla buyers, Tractor Supply’s effort to appease right-wing shoppers may backfire. After all, rural America is not all-white, conservative and Christian: nearly a quarter of the people living in rural areas are people of color, and the percentage who identify as LGBTQ is about the same as in urban areas.

You can even imagine that Tractor Supply could someday be one of those famous Harvard Business School case studies, in which a business’s misstep is used to train the next generation of leaders in how not to behave. Those studies were a part of the extensive executive training I got nearly a quarter-century ago from the big media company that employed me. Among the key lessons, often repeated by our distinguished lecturers, was the value of leaders’ authenticity.

“Our growing dissatisfaction with sleek, ersatz, airbrushed leadership is what makes authenticity such a desirable quality in today’s corporations — a quality that, unfortunately, is in short supply,” a Harvard Business Review article declared at the end of 2005.⁴

Jo-Ellen Pozner, a professor of management at Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business, told Retail Dive this week that companies need to “think carefully about corporate values well in advance of any disruption and then use those values to guide decision-making.” She added, “Capitulating to activists without reference to those values can be a dangerous move.”

For one thing, it can be disheartening to employees. The company’s pivot prompted the manager of a Tractor Supply store in the Adirondacks, a gay man, to quit his well-paying job. “I felt betrayed,” said Joe Montello, in an interview with the Adirondack Daily Enterprise. “I felt that they betrayed not only their employees, but also a large part of their customers.”⁵

There’s economic power, certainly, in the MAGA movement. That’s what led to the creation of an online shopping platform, PublicSquare, that features businesses aimed at conservative consumers, with the backing of investors including Donald Trump Jr. PublicSquare frequently targets businesses that the MAGA crowd sees as catering to the left. There is often impact: Bud Light’s partnership with an online trans influencer, Dylan Mulvaney, prompted a wounding boycott, and a campaign from the right prompted Target to pull its Pride Month displays in many stores.

But consumers may be more forgiving of a business that reaches out to a particular audience than they would be of an organization that flip-flops after pretending to embrace a social cause, only to abandon its supposed values in the face of political pressure. One side of that might be seen as marketplace capitalism, the other as harlotry.

As the comic actor George Burns wrote in his 1980 memoir, The Third Time Around, “To be a fine actor, when you’re playing a role you’ve got to be honest. And if you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”

Burns’ book was published during the presidential campaign of Ronald Reagan, who is often credited with displaying admirable political authenticity — but who was, of course, the first actor to be an American president. It wasn’t until 2016 that voters opened the White House doors to another ex-TV star, Donald Trump.

It may be no coincidence that Trump, a veteran performer even before his star turn on NBC’s Apprentice, has gone through many political metamorphisms: The independent analysis organization On the Issues, which annually revises its ratings of politicians, has changed its labeling of him 10 times, from “liberal-leaning populist” (2003-2011) to “libertarian-leaning conservative” (2012-2013) to “hard-core conservative” (2017-present). Which stance, if any, might be considered truly authentic?

Trump is the exemplar of what the Norwegian communication expert Gunn Enli describes as “strategic performance of authenticity.” Writing for a London School of Economics website earlier this year, Enli noted, “Authenticity, in the way Trump embodies it, gives him a ‘free pass’ to push the boundaries of acceptable conduct without the usual political consequences. This dynamic creates a dangerous precedent where divisive or harmful actions and statements are not only overlooked but are seen as evidence of a politician’s realness. This erodes the foundational democratic principle that leaders are accountable to the people and must adhere to standards of decency and respect.”⁶

We are long past the point of expecting Trump to meet any standards of decency and respect; indeed, his behavior is influencing a generation of politicians to seek success in following his coarse model. It remains to be seen, though, if businesses that push the boundaries of authenticity in pursuit of profit — as Tractor Supply did, in abandoning what it claimed to be its deep values — can similarly manage to elude accountability.

So it’s worth noting that just a few miles down the road from our nearby Tractor Supply, there’s an Agway. And I have to say that the store has a nice feel to it. We have plenty of wooden stakes, of course, but you never know what we might need for our ever-expanding and joy-inducing garden. We’re always looking for authentic partners in our work.

1. https://corporate.tractorsupply.com/newsroom/news-releases/news-releases-details/2024/Tractor-Supply-Company-Statement/default.aspx#:~:text=For%20more%20than%2085%20years,the%20communities%20we%20call%20home.

2. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/beware-we-now-outnumber-reporters-six-one-john-o-dwyer-i0owe/

3. https://www.retaildive.com/news/tractor-supply-woke-DEI-consequences-uncertainty/720526/

4. https://hbr.org/2005/12/managing-authenticity-the-paradox-of-great-leadership

5. https://www.adirondackdailyenterprise.com/news/local-news/2024/07/i-felt-betrayed/

6. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2024/03/04/donald-trumps-performance-of-authenticity-is-a-smokescreen-that-threatens-democracy/#Author

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-REX SMITH