No, Your OTHER Self

Reading Time: 5 minutes

I have been noticing my guard dropping in my interactions at work. I first noticed it after a class, when the students had brought up a topic and I had ended up reaching back into my own personal history for a story. I’ve felt it a bit with interactions with some colleagues, when we have been in a room just shooting the breeze. Don’t get me wrong, I am still embodying a very tightly constrained persona, but I’m feeling a bit of a shift in how constrained it is.

I might say, “Anyone who knows me” but I think that any statement that starts that way will be wrong. People who have known me for decades will, I think, have seen a different persona or set of personas than people who’ve met more recently. The experience my family had in relation to my brother’s detention was cauterizing in its effect on me. I noticed it again the other day when I was getting a photo taken for a professional purpose and the person kept telling me to smile. Okay, first, the smile you get is the one you get. But also, I could feel myself leave my face in exactly the same pose every time, like I had learned the mask so well there wasn’t an alternative. Resting director face or perhaps I learned how to do a variant of the Gen Z stare during all of my media preparation.

So, anyone who knows me may or may not know the person I once was. I don’t even know that I know who that person was other than as a memory. At times, those memories have become overwhelming sources of negative self-talk, although I find that it serves to reinforce my focus on not repeating those memories. It certainly isn’t a person I can return to being or anticipate what they would have done. But the disruption means that I think a lot about my personas and which one I bring to any given event or to my workplace.

The story I related to my students came up because we were discussing the Federal judicial circuits. The law firm I was clerking at was on the same floor (40th? near the top, anyway) of the TCBY Tower (now Simmons Tower) in Little Rock as Judge Morris “Buzz” Arnold of the 8th Circuit. We had a patio outside and somehow it came up that I played the bagpipes. So one day, at what I understand was the judge’s request, I ended up playing my pipes outside on the balcony for him.

For a time, there has been a human resources-related movement towards authenticity in leadership. See, for example, this HBR collateral. One thing about management or leadership skill development is that there is the goal and there is the manifestation. What does it mean to be authentic in the workplace? How are you honest and living your values? How do you move from thinking about these things and to putting them into practice?

It’s tricky. We all wear personas. I have always felt that the times when someone wasn’t wearing their persona was when the most extreme behaviors shone through, the ones they couldn’t restrain: the yelling boss, the angry colleague. Someone who wears that persona all the time may fall under the No Assholes Rule for the toxicity they carry and unburden on others. But personas aren’t emotionless, and frustration, kindness, and tears are all things I would expect from other people’s normal, day-to-day personas. The question for me was always where authenticity started and stopped. How much of my persona do I align with what I’m actually thinking or feeling.

I have mentioned before that I enjoy Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic’s writing and so I was interested that he is writing a book about the end of authenticity in leadership. I have obviously hadn’t read it but, as you can tell from his article, negative authenticity was a concern for him. What I had often considered as a crack in someone’s persona, an emergence of the true self, was perhaps a more methodical application of authenticity.

Personas are, to me, a bit like telling the truth. They have to be aligned with your true self or, like telling a lie, they become hard to maintain over time. The longer you interact with someone—can you ever truly know someone who is purposefully hiding parts of themselves—the more inputs you get. Someone whose persona is obfuscating their toxic qualities may find it easier to blend them into their persona.

This piece by Katharine Manning got to the heart of this tension. Your persona needs to be real. Leaders can err both by swinging towards toxic negativity or positivity, both of which have sub-optimal outcomes for the leader and for the people they work with.

We do not want to mask our emotions but, at the same time, we want to not be so raw as to make people uncomfortable. This issue of balance, can be a hard one to navigate if you overthink it. I liked how Chamorro-Primuzic described it as being a function of mastery:

Part of that mastery, then, is to know how to maintain that balance between sharing your inner thoughts or emotions and when to keep them to yourself. Hard leadership lesson: probably no one will tell you you’ve achieved the right balance. If you’re doing a good job of it, you may sense your team is happy and your other work relationships are positive. But it’s not really a destination. You’re never going to finish finding the right balance because the people around you, and the circumstances you find yourself in, will change too.

I do think that you get better at the balancing. It becomes more of a muscle memory and, like most things, the ones you are better at and more comfortable doing will feel easier over time. Experience means that you can often anticipate the need to deploy part of your persona in advance. This may make it sound manipulative but I think it is a normal part of how we use personas. I often go into meetings with a more positive mien than I may feel. I allow myself to reach equilibrium in the meeting once I have a better sense of how other people feel, and learn about issues I wasn’t aware of. We raise our shield or mask for protection until we’re sure it’s safer to lower them a bit.

In the end, teaching students has given me an opportunity I didn’t think I needed and, upon reflection, would have had otherwise. It is not teaching itself so much as having new groups—students, colleagues outside the library team—with whom my current personas are not a good match. I am needing to learn to deploy different emotions or engage in different story-telling, increasingly more personal than I have done for a decade or more, than when I was focused solely on my library team.

How do you know, though? As I reflected on this, I think the balance that I have striven for is to lean more heavily on positive emotions or traits. You rarely can go wrong with kindness and compassion; saying “thank you” is perhaps the strongest habit to develop after learning how to listen closely and quietly.

Honesty is another one that I try to use whenever possible. Not in a “how do I look in these jeans, be honest” way but when I’m dealing with a commercial unit, I tend to put my cards right on the table. I had an enjoyable meeting with some folks from ProQuest recently who I made it politely but plainly clear didn’t have any products I needed, in advance of their visit. But they came anyway and we talked about law library collection development and I think they appreciated having the chance to ask whatever they wanted without anyone playing poker. If something’s a bad idea, it’s better for everyone that someone says so.

What about toxic positivity? Or, perhaps worse for a new leader, what about being thought of as a pushover? “He’s so nice, you can get away with anything.” First of all, there are worse things to be thought of as a leader. Secondly, if you’re focused on people’s outputs, you can be nice and maintain high expectations. I have found that a new leader’s uncertainty is usually mirrored in the uncertainty of the staff. If you are consistent, both in your expectations and communication, it all comes out in the wash.

It has given me some food for thought. This is a positive change for me but I look back and know now that I could have done better in the past. It’s funny, it’s not so much that I was out-of balance but that my breadth was so narrow. My discomfort in sharing stories, and thus failing to reciprocate with those who did, was a missed opportunity. I think now that my mask will be broader and, perhaps more importantly, I don’t feel any stress about that.