Why aspiring marketers need to step out of the leadership template — Karl Van den Bergh, CMO of Illumio, on consistency over conformity when building trust in B2B

It took Karl van Bergh years to learn how to be himself at work. What he’s since worked out is how to tell when someone else isn’t — and why that difference is what separates a CMO people trust from one they don’t.

Most leadership advice pushes the other way: fit a recognisable template of what a leader is supposed to look like, rather than trust what’s distinctive about you. Karl Van den Bergh argues the opposite: that being yourself, held consistently across every context you operate in, is the foundation trust is built on — for leaders, for teams, and for brands alike. It’s a case worth taking seriously, not least because of who’s making it.

Van den Bergh has spent more than 25 years leading go-to-market teams at global technology companies — CMO roles at Gigamon and DataStax, and now Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer at Illumio, the breach containment company — and arrived there via a genuinely varied path, from a physics degree through a spell in humanities to stints in product, M&A and general management before he settled into marketing leadership. It’s a perspective on “being yourself at work” that’s been tested across a lot of different contexts, not just formed in one.

So when I asked him, on the latest episode of the Trust & Influence in B2B podcast, what prompted him to start writing about it, his answer didn’t start with a framework or a brand principle. It started somewhere more personal. “It’s been a sort of a personal journey,” he told me. “It took me a long time to be myself at work. I think that’s probably true for many of us — for whatever reason we believe we have to try and be the ideal manager, leader, or some other well-known figure who’s been successful, rather than discovering what it means to be yourself and find success in being yourself.”

Underneath that is a belief he holds without much qualification: that everyone has, in his words, “their own unique genius” — and that we tend to idealise a handful of high-achieving figures instead of trusting what’s distinctive in ourselves. “You just have to find that,” he said. “And the only way you can find that is to be yourself and to be confident in being yourself, and trust what comes from within.”

The word he’s since attached to that idea is authenticity. It’s worth being upfront that it’s a loaded one — overused in leadership content to the point of meaning very little. Van den Bergh uses it anyway, but what he means by it is narrower and more specific than the word’s reputation suggests, and it’s worth defining properly before going further.

What he actually means by it

Stripped down, van Bergh’s version of authenticity is consistency: being true to your values and your point of view in every context you show up in, whether that’s with your team, with customers, or on a day nobody’s watching. “That’s probably the hallmark of authenticity,” he said — not a personality trait, but a track record.

That definition also answers a fair question a sceptic would ask: how would you even know? Van Bergh’s view is that the performative version gives itself away through inconsistency — someone who says one thing internally and shows another face externally, or who holds together when things are easy and comes apart under pressure. “When there’s a crisis of any shape or form, when people are under pressure, then you see their true colours,” he said. “If at that point you are not being consistent to your values, that’s when it really shows up.” Trust isn’t proven in the calm periods. It’s tested in the ones nobody plans for.

Why brands default to safe

This is where the argument moves from personal conduct to brand strategy, and it’s where Van den Bergh’s own record gets more interesting. Earlier in his career, he ran a campaign built around the phrase “caught with your pants down” — people walking through an office without their trousers on, tastefully done but unmistakably not safe. Some regional teams pushed back, worried it wouldn’t land culturally. He let it run anyway. “I’d much rather something like that than something that’s generic and looks like everybody else,” he said.

That instinct — choosing defensible over inoffensive — sits behind his broader point about brands. Organisations default to safety because trying to please everyone feels lower-risk. Van Bergh’s experience is that it isn’t: it just relocates the risk from “some people dislike this” to “nobody remembers this at all.” A distinctive point of view, consistently held, is what actually differentiates a brand in a category where most output looks the same — and cybersecurity, where he’s spent most of his career, is a category he thinks suffers badly from exactly this problem.

Even he has reservations about the word

It’s worth raising the sharper objection here, because van Bergh raised it himself: isn’t “be yourself” just permission not to grow? There’s a well-known book, Don’t Be Yourself, that makes roughly this case — that the most effective leaders adapt to what a situation demands rather than staying rigidly fixed. Van Bergh had read it before we spoke, and it’s in this part of the conversation that he volunteered his own discomfort with how the language gets used. “Authenticity is maybe overused right now,” he said, “and being yourself — we hear this a lot, bring your whole self to work… if you misinterpret it, or you take it at a superficial level, you’ll definitely not do the best work that you can do.”

His resolution isn’t to abandon the term but to be stricter about what it excludes. What Don’t Be Yourself is really arguing against, he said, is a shallow reading — “I am who I am, I don’t need to improve, I don’t need to listen to feedback.” That’s not what he means by it. “You should take feedback. There are certain expectations of a role, and of course you need to perform to those expectations.” His version absorbs feedback and keeps improving; it just doesn’t abandon what’s genuinely true about you in the process.

It cascades: teams that speak candidly

That link between authenticity and improvement runs through how Van den Bergh talks about leading his own team. Much of it, he told me, has been a deliberate push to get people — a mix of Californian and European colleagues, cultures with different defaults on how directly people speak up — to actually say what they think. He points to Patrick Lencioni’s work on the five dysfunctions of a team, and specifically fear of conflict: the tendency to avoid disagreement to keep things pleasant, which curdles into frustration and passive-aggressive behaviour instead. Getting people comfortable naming problems directly hasn’t cost the team anything in cohesion, he said — it’s improved performance, because problems get surfaced and dealt with rather than left to fester.

AI raises the stakes for the real thing

The same logic is what makes van Bergh relatively unbothered by AI’s effect on all this — a live worry for a lot of B2B marketers right now, as AI tools flatten content into a kind of polished sameness. His view is that this raises the value of visibly human, relational work rather than eroding it. “The best businesses will become even more human or relation-centric,” he said. “It’s about the person, the human, not the AI-generated content coming out from that organisation.” His prescription isn’t to reject AI — automate what it’s genuinely good at — but to reinvest the time that frees up into building real relationships with customers, the part AI can’t substitute for. That only holds, though, if what’s underneath is the tested, consistent version described above, not a performance of it.

Asked what one thing a marketer or aspiring leader should start doing differently, van Bergh’s answer wasn’t directly about authenticity at all. It was about broadening perspective — spending time in other parts of the business, in sales or operations, reading and listening more widely outside your own domain. The reasoning connects straight back to trust: credibility with an executive team comes from actually understanding the business, not performing competence in your own function. Consistency, in other words, isn’t just about your values holding steady. It’s about your substance holding up under scrutiny.

Practical takeaways

• Start from the substance, not the label. “Being yourself” — knowing your values and point of view — is the real work. “Authenticity” is just shorthand for it, and shorthand wears out with overuse.
• Expect the real test to arrive during a crisis, not a calm quarter. Don’t assume you’ve proven your consistency until it’s actually been under pressure.
• Resist decisions designed to avoid offence rather than earn attention. Safe and forgettable are often the same outcome wearing different names.
• Treat avoided disagreement as a performance problem, not a culture win. Lencioni’s fear-of-conflict trap is more common on teams than most leaders admit.
• Use AI to buy time for the human, relational work it can’t do — not as a reason to produce more of the same, faster.
• Broaden your view beyond your own function. Credibility with the wider business comes from understanding it, not just performing well inside your lane.