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Whole Self

My friend T told me about a recent experience she had at work. It was a quarterly planning meeting with the boss and directs. As an ice-breaker for what would be a long session, someone came up with the idea of each person sharing a line about what they are currently working on and one thing about them no one would guess seeing them. The boss went first and provided info about her personal life that must have been incredibly difficult to share. 

T's boss is known to wear vulnerability like a suit of armor and invisibility cloak combined. She has made a performative art out of it from what I can tell from T's stories. With the bar being that high, everyone else in the team was forced to step up and most people missed the mark by a mile by saying inane stuff like they make a mean pasta with fava beans, foster a couple of blind kittens, tinker with a 1960s tractor in their spare time and so on. Clearly no one in T's crew was willing to bring their full authentic self to work and maybe that is the right thing to do.

..while it is nice to provide people with a sense of purpose and help them see their work as more valuable and meaningful, let’s keep in mind that a significant proportion of any company’s workforce may never see work as a central part of their life, yet that won’t stop them from making a valuable contribution to their organizations and be good organizational citizens.

T's boss may have her self-worth fused with her work and that's great for her if that brings her satisfaction but the rest of her team does not have to live up to that standard. They could be people who work the job (and do very well at it) to pay for the things that they are truly passionate about. That is their protected personal space that they should not be expected to share anything about. Many years ago, I remember how we all felt when one of our colleagues dropped it casually into a conversation that he was a movie critic on the side and got passes to just about every important film festival. 

This guy was average at his job, a sharp dresser and needed a fair bit of assist from the team to take projects to close. We did not mind lending him a hand because he was very pleasant and friendly. Now this business about moonlighting as a film critic cast everything in very new and different light. People became far less inclined to support him. Many of us had our passion projects too but we still took full ownership of the job that paid the bills. There was not much sympathy left for this guy who we collectively saw as using us to further his own cause in life. 

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