Chapter 1: What does 'bringing your whole self to work' really mean?
Welcome to McKinsey Talks Talent, featuring McKinsey leaders and talent experts, Brian Hancock and Brooke Weddle. I'm Lucia Rahilly. Being your true self at work might sound like a liberating and even a productive idea, but author and psychologist Tomas Chamorro-Premusic warns against it.
What people want is that you bring your best self. And yeah, sure, if you can identify with your professional persona so that it doesn't feel totally alien, that's good for you. But what's rewarded at work is pro-social, competent behavior that serves others, not your ego.
Today we'll hear about his new book, Don't Be Yourself, to help us figure out just how real we should be in the workplace. Demas, welcome back to McKinsey Talks Talent.
Chapter 2: How does authenticity impact workplace behavior?
It's great to be back. Great to see you all.
Congratulations on your book, Don't Be Yourself, such a timely and fun and insightful read. So this research challenges the prevalent mantra, as you describe it, of authenticity in the workplace, that folks should figure out who they are and bring that true self, if such a thing exists, to their professional lives and their professional relationships.
What exactly does authenticity mean in this context?
Authenticity is usually celebrated or even worshiped, I would say often misunderstood and rarely defined. And it is important to start with some proper definitions.
Chapter 3: What historical context led to the rise of workplace authenticity?
So we see our behavior as authentic if it is aligned with our values or if it's aligned with the person we think we are, so with our identity. And we see other people's behavior as authentic when it seems genuine.
In fact, quite sort of obscure but beautiful and very simple definition of authenticity by Abraham Maslow, you know, the guy who gave us the pyramid of the hierarchy of needs, is that it's sort of a zero phoniness. That's his definition of authenticity. And by and large, you know, these definitions have cascaded how most people think about the implications of authenticity at work,
Don't worry about what people think of you. Just be you, be a real you, bring your whole self and always be true to your values.
And what do you think catalyzed the rise of this imperative that became really part of corporate mantra, as you say, to bring your whole self to work?
So actually, the beginning of authenticity is quite well-intended and well-meaning.
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Chapter 4: What are the potential downsides of being your true self at work?
In the 1990s, William Kahn introduces the concept of employee engagement, which now everybody knows. And he defined it as the psychological degree to which you identify with your work persona. So imagine. If you think you or your professional self is an integral part of your identity, you will work hard, you will be engaged, you will love your job.
And, you know, your manager won't need to be breathing behind your neck and telling you, hey, hey, hey, be productive. Then we create better workplaces. Then we are able to offer people a career that has meaning. And then the extreme, maybe an extreme distorted version of that is like, oh, you know, just be you. And, you know, your need for self-expression kind of,
can override your obligation to others.
Chapter 5: How can adaptability in behavior enhance leadership effectiveness?
And if you don't find that you identify almost in a cult-like level with your job, you should quit because there's something wrong with what you're doing. And you can see how it starts in a good place, but then like all ideas, when you lose nuance and they become too radical, they become diluted and very incoherent or nonsensical.
When HR talks about bringing one's whole self to work, who is the intended audience? It almost seems like we're talking about it in terms of employee engagement, driving productivity, but there's a power factor to it as well, yes?
The idea is that, hey, if you're part of an outgroup, a minority, or a diverse kind of employee, manager, or leader, we shouldn't put pressure on you to conform and become like the normative group or the in-group, right? And so it was a very... I think, naive but good attempt to improve inclusion because diversity without inclusion doesn't work.
If you bring people who are unrepresentative of the norm, it's not enough bringing them, you actually have to help them succeed or remove any barriers. So, you know, clearly, if you resemble the status quo, you will be much better able to kind of bring your whole self, even at the job interview.
And let's not forget that, you know, if you really want to look at this invitation kind of explicitly, it's like, should I bring my whole self to work if I'm a grumpy me, opinionated me, entitled me, narrow-minded me? 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.
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Chapter 6: What are the four authenticity traps to avoid in the workplace?
One of the central ideas of the book is that success comes from adapting behavior to context. And as I was going through, I was wondering, why is adaptability more valuable than saying true to your own sense of self at work?
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.
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Chapter 7: How does AI influence our understanding of authenticity?
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.
When we had you on the podcast the last time, we talked about narcissists becoming leaders, advancing in the organization because they were perceived as confident and had a perspective and had a view that people would follow. Here, you say, hey, actually, we need to be adaptable to succeed. How do you see those two strands that you've had on narcissists connect together?
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. And there's a big halo effect here. You know, the leaders we like
We're seen as authentic and as confident and as intelligent because we project what we see. But if you look at leadership effectiveness, then for sure you need to be able to flex, to adjust, to adapt. In fact, so effectiveness is enhanced by not being limited by your authentic self or what you've always done, but...
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Chapter 8: What practical advice can HR leaders take from this discussion?
But the people who just exude charisma, confidence, often because they are narcissistic, tend to emerge as leaders more frequently. And by the time they become leaders, they're even more entitled and less likely to flex their behavior to adjust to the concerns or the demands of others.
So walk us through how to manage for self-presentation successfully, given that, as we've said, we're all operating in certain contexts where the perception of authenticity is often more important than authenticity itself.
So we all talk about the virtues of self-awareness. Of course, it's important. But if I'm deluded to the point that I go to a job interview to be president of a country or a company or CEO, and I have no insecurities whatsoever because I think I'm the best or greatest thing since sliced bread, I'm going to ace the interview, right?
On the other hand, if I'm self-aware and honest and authentic and you ask me, could you do this? And I'm going to say, well, you know, to be honest, I've never done that before. And I don't know if I will be able to learn it. But I'll try hard to say, okay, gone. Bring back the narcissists. So, you know, when it comes to impressing others, actually, it helps not even to be honest with yourself.
can be an advantage. But then, if I want you to be a good leader, a good employee, whatever, oh, I better give you a reality check and help you understand how you impact others. Or you will end up to quote a naive and seemingly kind of funny example, like David Brandt or Michael Scott in The Office. Why are they so funny? They represent the whole spectrum of the problems with authenticity.
People who think they're funnier than they actually are, who have no inhibitions, who are cringy in their behavior. We laugh. It's cathartic because we don't have to work for them. And maybe we did it in the past, and now we appreciate that we don't.
Tomas, maybe as you talk about some of the ways in which to do things better in the context of authenticity, I wonder if we just take a half step back. You actually define four authenticity traps. Do you mind just recapping those traps?
Yeah, and so the traps are, you know, they're traps because when people try to follow them, either they will experience some conundrum and a kind of paradox, and it's not so easy to navigate these traps if you try to action them. And the other possibility is that actually it worsens their interpersonal competence and behavior. So the first one is always be honest with yourself and others.
As I just said, being overly honest with yourself, actually the term for that is depressive realism. delusions tend to be rewarded in most areas of life. Like, for example, you don't get a job or you don't get a promotion, far better to blame your boss or the company than yourself.
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