How much of your personality should you bring to work?

Many people adopt distinct personas for work and personal life [em dash] but can this personality split take a toll? People and culture consultant Jade Green believes it does.

Everyone should feel safe to bring their whole selves to work, Green says. The notion that workers should keep their work and personal lives separate is a hangover from industrialisation when people were told to “slam down the roller door of disassociation” in order to carry out their work, whether on the assembly line or another form of menial labour.

But knowledge workers in the modern economy can’t zone out from the task at hand, she says. “Expecting people to dissociate from work nowadays is unfair and unrealistic.”

Green says people who repress their true selves in the workplace are at risk of burnout. “It’s exhausting trying to be something you’re not, and it chews through cognitive resources that could be used for other things, such as decision-making.”

 

"It’s exhausting trying to be something you’re not, and it chews through cognitive resources that could be used for other things, like decision-making."

 

This has implications for organisations, as it affects employee performance and productivity.

“You’re not getting people’s absolute best work because their brain is preoccupied trying to project a persona, rather than being present in the moment, focusing on a task and using cognitive resources on problem-solving,” Green says.

Separate work and home personalities can also be due to an unconscious process of social conditioning, which means some people may not be aware that they’re doing it.

Workplaces where employees don’t feel capable of being themselves lack psychological safety, which points to an issue with organisational culture.

To find a solution, “you’ve got to go to the problem behind the problem,” Green says. “Look at how cultures create the space that makes people feel safe to show up as their full selves.”

Green says workplaces where leaders and managers don’t deliver regular feedback often have issues with psychological safety. When an employee receives no feedback, she explains, they are more likely to make mistakes that could result in a crisis. “If we give fast, real-time feedback on the spot – I call it course correcting – we don’t have to do performance reviews,” she says. “It’s a little tap in the right direction, which prevents a small issue becoming a big problem.”

Waiting to give feedback until something goes wrong creates a culture of fear and switches the focus from the task to the person.

 

"Being yourself at work is how you’re going to get job satisfaction. If you can’t be comfortable in your own skin or play to your strengths, then it could be a case of the wrong fit."

 

“When we wait until it’s a situation of the straw breaking the camel’s back, the reprimand often seems personal - ‘you did a bad thing’ - versus ‘you made a mistake while performing a task that we can fix’,” Green says.

When implementing any cultural change, it’s important to ensure a company’s values, purpose and mission statements are more than ‘words on a wall’ and resonate with employees and the work they do.

It also helps for leaders to turn the lens on themselves. Green recommends reading Brené Brown’s Dare to Lead and The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni as starting points, then “pull the threads”.

“Get your leadership team in a room and ask: ‘Where are you putting up the veil? Where are you posturing and bolstering and not bringing all of you? Where are you judging?’”

While cultural change is always a challenging undertaking, it’s in a business’s best interest to foster psychological safety in the workplace. “It’s up to business leaders to create a culture that fosters vulnerability and the ability to have true real-time feedback,” Green says. “You cannot have full creativity and peak performance without a culture of psychological safety.”

Organisational psychologist Dr Amanda Ferguson believes a work persona can serve a valuable purpose in certain circumstances.

She says it’s customary to adopt more formal behaviour in the workplace, to signify professionalism and respect for authority.

“Behaving in a professional manner shows that an employee is taking their role seriously.”

However, Ferguson, who is the host of the Psych for Life podcast, says someone who feels incapable of being their true self at work might be in the wrong role. “Being yourself at work is how you’re going to get job satisfaction. If you can’t be comfortable in your own skin or play to your strengths, then it could be a case of the wrong fit.”