The Big Wigs Were Never a Disguise: What Dolly Parton Got Right About Authentic Leadership
The author with a mural of Dolly Parton at Icons in Colorado Springs.
Dolly Parton was in some ways a paragon of artifice: a woman famous for big blonde wigs, permanently bedazzled in rhinestones, and plentiful surgical enhancements. Paradoxically, she is also someone who inspired exceptional trust, genuine love, and a sense of “realness” that is reserved only for the most authentic leaders.
What makes her an authentic leader is not that she felt free to “be herself”. The freedom to “be yourself” is frequently a privilege that attends to people who have money, fame, status or power. It is actually no grand achievement. There are plenty of leaders in politics and tech who shoot from the hip, do what they want, and disregard social norms and conventions. Dolly Parton’s authenticity comes from another place entirely.
Unwavering self-awareness
For those who struggle with authenticity, there is an uncomfortable gap between who they think they are, who they’d like to be, and what others see. This can mean they are unable to take even humorous or playful jabs at their appearance, behavior, or character, and they can also be quite defensive in the face of even the most mildly critical feedback. Feedback that we get from other people can set in motion an uncomfortable reckoning between how we wish to be seen and how we are actually seen. When we have a deep need to be seen as ‘a good person’, someone calling out our behavior in a meeting ‘brusque’ or ‘offensive’ is a dangerous threat to our need to be seen as our ideal self. This gap between how others see us and how we’d like to be seen is a precarious one and people often choose to defend against this threat, either by lashing out, attacking or withdrawing. These are all common defensive reactions. This is especially the case for leaders that have hidden doubts about their capacity or competence but that try to quash them by projecting a powerful and confident persona and doggedly squashing any disconfirming feedback from others.
Dolly on the other hand had an uncompromising capacity to accept and even poke fun at herself. When interviewers would make comments about her appearance, her responses indicated that she was very aware of how she looked (and how it was seen by others), but I have never been able to see her stung by it. She would even pile on, and affirm it. Take the decades-long joke about her wigs and her figure. In a 1977 interview with Barbara Walters, she didn’t deflect it, she owned it: “All these years, people think the joke has been on me, but it’s actually been on the public. I know exactly what I’m doing… I make more jokes about myself than anybody.” A few years later, when Roger Ebert asked whether she’d ever take a serious, unglamorous role, she didn’t get defensive about her image being “constructed.” She said she’d take off the wig for the right part — so long as she wasn’t “ugly and a bad actress.” When it came to how she is seen, Dolly got there first, so no one else’s joke could land before hers.
With Dolly, there was no gap between how others saw her and how she saw herself, and therefore no threat to defend. Research indeed shows that people are most secure and stable when the feedback they get from others matches their self-view. She also had another key component of authenticity: there was no sense that how others saw (or judged) her affected her core belief in her own intrinsic value and capacity for good.
Free people free people
The lack of gap between her self-view and others’ view ultimately had a much more powerful effect, and something that all authentic leaders share. There’s an expression that goes something like “free people free people” and is used to signify that when someone is comfortable in their own skin, not trying to be something they are not, and free of judgement of themselves and others, that it becomes easier for us to connect with them and even to open up to them.
Dolly Parton is famous for being a woman of faith, while at the same time advocating love and acceptance of all of “god’s children”, without judgement. Deeply beloved by the LGBTQ community, she believed in letting people be who they are, and letting people love who they love. Asked about her enormous gay following in a 2014 Billboard interview, she put it simply: “I think everybody should be allowed to be who they are, and to love who they love. I don’t think we should be judgmental.” On Larry King’s show, years earlier, she said the same thing even more plainly: “If you’re gay, you’re gay. If you’re straight, you’re straight. We are who we are.”
And by her own account, it wasn’t just a talking point for cameras. She described being the family member that gay and lesbian relatives would come out to first, telling them, “You need to let people know who you are and you need to come on out.” Some of us may have been lucky to meet, be mentored by, or even be raised by such a person, and can attest to the powerfully positive influence they have on our life and sense of self-worth. These are the kinds of leaders that amplify our internal capacity to achieve great things with self-compassion and humility.
We see that with Dolly, the wigs and rhinestones were never an artificial disguise. She loved them and the ease with which she wore them was the ultimate authenticity tell. Through her, we can view authenticity in leadership as two related questions:
Do you accept with kindness who you are, and can you do the same for others?
References and further reading
Bartiromo, M. (2017, February 21). Five of Dolly Parton's funniest quotes about her own looks. https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/five-of-dolly-partons-funniest-quotes-about-her-own-looks.amp
Billson, C. (2025, October 3). Resurfaced Dolly Parton clip about LGBTQ+ acceptance goes viral. https://www.thepinknews.com/2025/10/03/resurfaced-dolly-parton-clip-about-lgbtq-acceptance-goes-viral-health/
Bravo, T. (2026, August 26). Dolly Parton's legacy made her a rare LGBTQ icon in country music. San Francisco Chronicle. https://www.sfchronicle.com/entertainment/music/article/dolly-parton-lgbtq-legacy-22403147.php
Ehrbar, N. (2016, August 31). Dolly Parton helped gay family members come out. https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/dolly-parton-helped-gay-family-members-come-out
Foreman, K. (2014, July 15). Dolly Parton: No 'dumb blonde'. BBC Culture. https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20140715-dolly-parton-no-dumb-blonde
Swann, W. B., Jr. (2012). Self-verification theory. In P. A. M. Van Lange, A. W. Kruglanski, & E. T. Higgins (Eds.), Handbook of theories of social psychology (pp. 23–42). Sage Publications Ltd. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446249222.n27