Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

So there's a very nice, but again, quite obscure concept in social psychology called self-complexity.

In essence, it says that we inhabit multiple selves and work and your job and your organization is not an invitation to unleash or display all of these aspects of yourself, but rather to activate the relevant ones.

And by the way, even when companies tell you you should bring your whole self to work, what they're hoping for is that you bring your best professional self.

And sure, ideally, that doesn't need to feel like a fraud to you because it's not violating some fundamental moral values or assumptions that you have.

But it's about finding the compromise, you know, not taking it from one extreme to the other.

First of all, we've all seen people being in situations, even when you debrief them and you give them feedback and you tell them, they just say, well, it's just who I am.

You know, like that's a valid answer to kind of not wanting it.

And if you want to be an effective leader, of course, all the time, you have to be sensitive to the nuances of the situation.

And flex, versatility is one of the most important skills a leader can harness and develop.

We've known

for decades that emotional intelligence is one of the fundamental ingredients that successful managers and leaders utilize to be effective.

What's EQ is to exercise empathy, to understand how people think of you, how they see you, and to flex your behavior because you fundamentally understand that your right for self-expression must not override your obligation to others.

So why have we forgotten the values of adaptability and flexibility?

One, because when people overdo it, it just looks very phony and very fake.

So there's a reason why political skills overdone make you a politician.

And even if you look at now the rise of kind of unconventional contrarian leaders in politics around the world, it's because people are fed up with politicians who seem so fake.

So if you overdo it, then we say, no, no, just be, but that isn't good either.

And then the other part to understand kind of this disdain for flexibility and adaptability is really that the culture in which we're living is quite narcissistic.

I think we need to distinguish between emergence, the factors or the qualities that help you become a leader.

And unfortunately, narcissism is often conflated, not just with perceptions of authenticity, but with overconfidence, self-belief, communicational skills, megalomaniac visions that make people feel better about themselves.