In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.
| Albert Camus
…
The quote by Camus is contested. Apparently, it was originated by Howard Zinn in his A People’s History of the United States, with the added clause, ‘according to Albert Camus’.
But I offer it up for its intent, not its provenance. And, to slightly soften the language, and broaden the context, I will paraphrase:
In a world of division, a world of the powerless and the powerful, it is the job of thinking people to stand with the disempowered.
My motivation in this recasting of Zinn and Camus to set up the backdrop for a discussion of ‘being yourself’ at work. Or more accurately, the arguments as to why we should — or should not — take on that challenge.
Be Yourself, Or Not?
As I was preparing to write this section of the newsletter, I read an article in today’s Economist with this at its head:
Workplace training can confer useful skills. It can also prevent legal trouble and fulfil compliance obligations. And it can be a very easy way to try out time travel. You only have to watch a typical corporate training video to feel the clock rewinding.
First, and most obviously, some of these videos were filmed before you were born, on a subject that is so evergreen it has never needed an update. The footage is grainy. Men wear ties and women wear pleated skirts. They have names like Rodney and Carol. No one has a tattoo or brings their whole self to work. If they had an illness, it wouldn’t be a mental-health issue but something from the distant past, like consumption or scrofula.
I include this fragment, not to delve into the woeful state of corporate training videos, but to note the use of the phrase ‘brings their whole self to work’, which serves as an indication of time: We are in a time where people purportedly do bring their ‘whole self’ to work, in distinction to the olden days, where people didn’t, couldn’t, or wouldn’t. (Likewise, tattoos: another digression.)
We’ve come to a time in which being yourself on the job (or ‘bringing your whole self to work’) is taken almost as a given, that authenticity is a positive factor for the individual and for the enterprise.
But is that true?
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, one of the most insightful commentators on work, says that it’s not. In When Authentic Leadership Backfires1, excerpted from a book of the same name, he musters evidence that debunks that conventional wisdom. He takes a very micro/personal view of 'being yourself' at work and boils down its pros and cons to appearing competent and leaderlike. He writes,
Simply put, when our behavior feels consistent or aligned with our self-concept, we experience a sense of internal coherence and harmony that lubricates our ego. Conversely, when our actions clash with how we see ourselves, we feel inauthentic, fake, and guilty, and our self-esteem suffers.
However, feeling authentic does not equate to being perceived as talented or competent by others. Despite the subjective benefits of authenticity, being true to ourselves does not translate into being better colleagues or leaders.
So, in effect, if the point is to convince others you are competent and/or talented, being yourself at work is not the way to get there. He backs up his reasoning with research:
In a recent meta-analysis of 55 independent studies, impression management (rather than self-perceived authenticity) was positively related to leadership emergence and effectiveness, as well as to both task-oriented and relationship-oriented leadership behaviors. Even if feeling authentic feels great, you are more likely to become an effective leader if you focus on gratifying others and adjusting your behavior according to what the situation demands. So, it’s not authenticity, but knowing where the right to be you ends and your obligation to others begins, that makes you effective in work settings.
Turning that around: your obligation to others (and, by extension, the organization) is to manage the impression that others have of you, as competent and effective, rather than letting it all hang out.
He goes on, and the negative undercurrent of inauthenticity and façade-building starts to build:
In short, life is about choices, and one of the most fundamental choices we face in daily interactions is whether to impose our raw, unfiltered selves on others or to regulate our behavior for the sake of relationships. To be sure, this ought to be done with social skills and emotional competence, for there is a high cost to being seen as overly diplomatic or as a social chameleon.
[…]
Skilled self-awareness and sensitivity to how others see you will enable you to seem genuine rather than fake, even when you are making an effort to not be yourself.
[…]
The irony, then, is that by disciplining or editing our authenticity, we may actually come across as more trustworthy and competent to others. People don’t judge authenticity by how you feel about yourself; they judge it by whether your behavior seems appropriate, effective, and considerate.
This echoes a line by the sociologist Erving Goffman, from The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life:
When the individual does move into a new position in society and obtains a new part to perform, he is not likely to be told in full detail how to conduct himself, nor will the facts of his new situation press sufficiently on him from the start to determine his conduct without his further giving thought to it.
Yes, we have to actively choose how to behave in both public and private settings. Still, it is not intuitive that we should begin with the premise that inauthenticity — acting a part — should seem the highest form of work performance.
And we have to keep in mind one question: who is served by the role-playing involved? Chamorro-Premuzic is pretty clear in his formulation: if you want to be perceived as effective and competent it’s likely to be necessary to act like effective and competent people act. He expressly says that if you want to be considered leaderlike — to move up the ladder — you have to adopt the behaviors associated with leaders.
But consider the costs. The extra work involved in playing the role, and the suppression of other behaviors, has to be taken on by the individual, for the benefit of the company.
Kathi Weeks, in her magisterial The Problem With Work, addresses this perspective directly:
In these latter sectors of employment in particular, the dimensions of the self that are considered part of the human resource to develop — and, thus, legitimate targets of managerial concern — continue to expand into new territories of subjectivity. Consider, for example, the new terrains opened up by the recent interest in “wellness.” As the authors of a recent overview of contemporary management concepts and regimes observe, “the idea that one’s employer provides some sort of totalized care for the worker’s wellness opens up a powerful horizon for expanding the boundaries of organized work”.2 Or consider what Peter Fleming3 describes as the “just be yourself” managerial discourse that asks workers to bring their “authentic” selves from outside work into work, attempting thereby to incorporate “the whole person into the production matrix”.
Flemings hits the ‘be yourself’ discourse as a mechanism for the organization to blur the boundaries between our who we are and what we bring to work.
Traditional distinctions between work and life are increasingly blurred by management in these its most self-consciously biopolitical modes. Whether or not the watchwords of such programs — empowerment, participation, responsibility, flexibility, and enrichment — involve empty rhetoric or meaningful improvements in the experience of work for employees, they do give employers opportunities to induce new modes and degrees of effort, and in some cases of identification. Thus, worker empowerment can boost efficiency, flexibility can serve as a way to cut costs, and participation can produce commitment to the organization, thereby “embroiling the subject in the act of organizational control” and internalizing organizational discipline.4 In short, often programs presented under the rubric of work enrichment are also methods of work intensification. In a kind of bad dialectic, quality becomes quantity as the call for better work is translated into a requirement for more work.
Week’s perspective changes the presentation of being a better participant in the machinery at work as a means of intensifying work, of taking on more work — both directly by the play-acting, and indirectly, as the increase in effectiveness creates a margin which workers are then supposed to fill with more labor, somme of which is becoming enmeshed in that same ‘organizational control’ they have already personally adopted.
Weeks takes this to the final end: by accommodating the inherent blurring of organizational control and the need to remain independent of work’s psychic demands, are we losing the ground on a demand for better work?
The problem, therefore, is how to advance demands for better work — how to make good on work’s promises of social utility and individual meaning — in a way that does not simply echo and reaffirm the prescription for a lifetime of work. The question I want to consider is whether the kind of affirmation of work at the heart of the work ethic can be used successfully in the struggle for better work: is it possible to demand both better work and less work without one demand neutralizing the critical force of the other? Muirhead5 offers one attempt to combine these efforts.
To recall the earlier discussion, both Gini and Muirhead call for new ethics of work that can continue to celebrate and encourage commitment to waged work, while insisting that such work should be adequately compensated and personally satisfying. But Muirhead goes further, recognizing that these two commitments, to the affirmation of work’s inherent value and to the improvement of its conditions, can function at cross-purposes. As a way to manage this, he adds a third commitment: to keep work, even good work, in its place so that it does not consume the whole of life, which would moderate the claims about work’s value by simultaneously pursuing a politics directed at work’s reform and reduction. “Tempering the value of work,” Muirhead explains, “also protects against the abuse of that value in the name of practices that are exploitative— an abuse to which the work ethic is particularly prone”.
As my paraphrase of Albert Camus (via Howard Zinn) implies, thinking people have an obligation to stand with the disempowered in the unequal struggle to make work better. We should never have to settle for becoming part of the machinery.
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