Being real at work

I have been surprised at the many reactions I’ve received to my webinar on Managing the Curveballs in Your Life. Sharing my process for dealing with setbacks, which has developed through personal experience, seems helpful to quite a few people. This boosts my resolve to keep the work up and gives me hope that we are making progress towards more humanity at work.

But how much humanity do we really need at work? Please don’t misunderstand me. I firmly believe that how you handle relationships is one of the most important drivers for accomplishment and success as you gain scope and responsibility, becoming as critical as how you make decisions. Strong relationships are built on trust. They require that you are genuine, reliable, and that you care for the other person in the relationship. But how much of ourselves should we lay bare? Being authentic is highly prized, but at what point does being the real you turn into oversharing?

We understand reliability: doing as you say you will. Most people subscribe to this as a value. Caring is a little trickier. Not everyone readily agrees that there is a need for or value in caring for the people they work with. It is just work, they argue, we don’t have to be friends. I agree with that, you do not have to be friends with everyone. Nobody is asking you to. This is about making the effort to make the people you work with feel seen and heard as a person. You don’t even have to necessarily understand all of what drives them. What matters is that you can accept how they show up and work with it. This is where managing yourself comes in: you do not have to, and often won’t be able to, change other people. Which leaves you with just one lever: how do you respond when other people’s behaviour triggers you?

In such situations you may not want to show all of your thoughts and feelings. If your temper flares or you get frustrated, what is there to gain from airing that at work? Would you rather be 100% genuine here or give a calm, considered response that moves the issue forward? In the moment you may be tempted to go for 100% genuine: you need them to understand how upset you are! Then the moment passes, and that doesn’t seem to matter so much anymore. Now you wish you’d impressed with the skilful way you managed to move the issue forward. At least that is in broad strokes the story many clients bring to our conversations. One reason why it is so difficult to do this in the heat of the moment is that we worry we aren’t being true to ourselves if we manage our first impulse. But how is our first impulse reaction more our true self than a response we have taken a moment to consider? I get it: it can feel like you deny yourself your anger or frustration, when you really don’t have to. Learning to give a considered response involves experiencing those strong emotions and deciding not to let them take over. They don’t have to control you. You are in charge.

The question, then, is not so much whether there are any limits to how authentic you should be at work, and more about what version of the real you you want to leverage in certain situations.

Let me help you with this. You can find me here if you'd like to chat.

If you're new here you can subscribe below to get more newsletters like this.