Should we really be bringing our ‘whole selves’ to work?

Should you bring your “whole self” to work?

Lesson summary

Hi there everyone, I’m Jeff and this is Plain English, where we help you upgrade your English with current events and trending topics.

I think one time I compared it to adding spinach to a fruit smoothie. You enjoy the fruit flavor so much, you don’t realize you’re getting the spinach at the same time. That’s what it’s like here, you enjoy the topics so much you don’t realize you’re getting better at English the whole time. Anyway, this is lesson number 483 for Thursday, July 7, 2022. The full lesson is at PlainEnglish.com/483.

Have you heard the term, “bring your whole self to work?” If you work for a large, international company, you’ve probably heard some version of this slogan. When I was researching this lesson, I found article after article uncritically espousing the idea that people should bring their whole authentic selves to the workplace. On today’s lesson, we’ll put that idea to the test.

In the second half of the lesson, we’ll talk about the English expression “on the surface.” And JR has a song of the week. Let’s get going.

Does your ‘whole self’ belong in the workplace?

When a company urges you to “bring your whole self to work,” the company is encouraging you to be open and authentic about your life with your colleagues, so as to form better interpersonal relationships. If you don’t feel comfortable sharing important things about your life with colleagues, the thinking goes, then you can’t build the trust needed to really succeed.

This is especially important in an age of knowledge work. If a team has to work together to solve a problem, or create something new, then the team members get better results if they know, like, and trust one another . But if everyone is pretending to be a rigid, perfect, “professional” version of themselves, if everyone is hiding the things that make them truly human, then it’s hard, if not impossible, to build that trust.

The idea is, in your conversations at work, you should feel free to share things that are affecting your life inside and outside the office. If you’re nervous about an upcoming presentation, it’s okay to tell your colleagues you’re nervous. If you’re worried about a sick relative, share that with them, too. If you’ve just broken up with a romantic partner, don’t feel like you have to keep it a secret.

This seems like a positive message on the surface . If I’m working on a team, for example, and I know someone was up late visiting a relative in the hospital, I don’t want that person to feel like he has to dial into a 7:30 am call. I’d rather know something’s going on so we can redistribute the workload. Likewise , if I’m nervous about a big project, I should be able to say I’m nervous and have the team around me offer their support.

But it’s possible to take this advice too literally. Let’s start with over-sharing. We live in polarized times. Imagine if one person brought her full self to work, decked out in campaign buttons for one political candidate. And imagine if her colleague brought his full self to work and couldn’t stop talking about the opposing candidate.

Would they—or any of the people sitting near them—get any work done? Is either one of them likely to be promoted to be a team leader, if they’re both seen as polarizing? Over-sharing can cause unnecessary conflict if you’re not careful.

Second, a workplace might be friendly, but it’s not a free-for-all. You have to respect the organization’s hierarchy and basic business purpose. An executive at HSBC, a bank, was caught joking that the risk of climate change was exaggerated. He thought the finance industry placed too much importance on the risks of climate change. His opinion contradicted the bank’s official position. He was suspended.

You may have also seen that a group of SpaceX employees brought their whole selves to work when they wrote an open letter. The letter criticized the SpaceX CEO, Elon Musk, for posting distracting and unhelpful messages on Twitter. Elon was being his authentic self on Twitter; the employees were being their whole selves when they objected. The employees were swiftly fired. They may now be wishing they had brought a bit less than their full selves to work at SpaceX.

Finally, a little bit of inauthenticity may be required in some business situations. If you’re starting a big project and you’re worried about finishing on time, should you authentically share that worry with your team? Maybe, but maybe you should also try an inspiring message, even if you don’t fully feel it. A little bit of false bravado is sometimes called for.

Similarly, if you’re an introvert trying for a promotion, you may want to close your door and lock your whole authentic self in a small office and put your messaging apps on “do-not-disturb.” But what you really need in the moment is to be out working the room, forming relationships, even if that’s not what you authentically feel you want to do.

None of this is to say that you have to create false persona to wear in the office, only to shed the persona when you log off for the night. But I do mean to say that a workplace is a shared endeavor, where rules and norms exist. People are complex and the whole messy complexity of our lives doesn’t necessarily belong in the workplace. Bringing a touch of humanity into the office is a good thing, but so is leaving a bit to the imagination.

Bring a certain amount to work

Sometimes I think companies are being inauthentic themselves when they say we should bring our whole authentic selves to work. They can’t possibly mean it. I think what they mean is that there’s an unspoken set of acceptable personal things to bring to work, but that set of accepted things is different in every place.

If you listened to my message last week, you know that I’m no longer part of a traditional office. But when I was, for those (what?) 18 years, I brought a certain amount of myself to work. “A certain amount” means, just some—bring an amount that you decide. And for me, the amount and the different parts changed based on the workplace, the team, the times, things like that. And it worked well for me. So if you want my advice, “Bring a certain amount of yourself to work.”