Ivy League psychologist: 'Bring your whole self to work' is bad advice

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/24/bring-your-whole-self-to-work-is-bad-advice-ivy-league-psychologist-saysheres-why.html

by donsupreme • 9 months ago

43 70 9 months ago

cnbc.com

carabiner2• 9 months ago

Millennials are the generation of chesterton's fence. We're just rediscovering professional work culture.

readthenotes1• 9 months ago

But, sadly, probably not the tale of the fence

y-c-o-m-b• 9 months ago

Hmm not sure I agree. I think we tend to be the centrist group in this duality. We give some flexibility in allowing people to "be themselves" while still holding them accountable to professionalism. I've held many different jobs in the past 20+ years, and that seems to be true anywhere I go. This makes sense because we were of working age before professional work culture changed to what we see today. We may have broken some of the older traditions and paved the way, but I don't think we're responsible for what you see today

carabiner2• 9 months ago

Well, look at the time dependence. 20 years ago we were leftist, today centrist, tomorrow right wing. We're just following the same pattern but are the first to be wholly expressive on the internet about it.

wasitwrongto3• 9 months ago

Was it wrong to not keep any personal mementos on my desk, as a no-benefits contractor in software in a civilian hospital? (10 years before COVID-19)

aydyn• 9 months ago

I mean if you want to go the extra mile, you could keep fake personal mementos that align and ingratiate yourself with the ingroup.

wasitwrongto3• 9 months ago

A person shouldn't say things like this - re: interviewing with a swizzle stick in one's pocket and confetti in one's hair - if they are a manager:

"George Carlin - Tell the boss (who's the boss)" https://youtube.com/watch?v=p5x7-0mR86A&

I've had to hide laughter in probably almost every interview since learning of this approach to interviewing.

CLI: Clean Language Interviewing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_language_interviewing

I'm more of a three-hour workweek sort of manager.

harvey92• 9 months ago

I never put personal mementos on my desk in any job regardless of employment type. Didn't know I was supposed to.

jawns• 9 months ago

People whose behavior and beliefs align with their company’s prevailing culture may benefit from sharing more about themselves at work, Chamorro-Premuzic says.
However, people who express “authentic” opinions that run counter to the group’s views may risk damaging their reputations or relationships.

I feel bad for anyone who doesn't see this as obvious.

I've seen a lot of folks celebrate that their work allows them to be their authentic selves, even though they're well aware that the same opportunity isn't afforded to those with disfavored views or characteristics.

pinkmuffinere• 9 months ago

Definitely. In fact, I'll say it is the same in almost _every_ interpersonal relationship. I engage with my parents, grandparents, siblings, etc in specific ways that we have agreed we have overlap. Depending on the person, I soften my utopian ideals, my fascination with drugs, my progressive-ness, my math memes, even my accent when I talk. I don't think this is unhealthy, I think this is just what it means to be alive. I express my "authentic self" through my life as a whole, and it is probably witnessed by no individual person; only I can see / enjoy it.

oceanplexian2• 9 months ago

What a time it was to be alive before the Culture War (tm) in San Francisco.

I worked at a household name tech company and you could draw a pie chart of Libertarian, (Self described) Communist, Progressive, Anarchists, and everything in between. Drugs weren't really controversial but you had an entire spectrum of personalities and drugs that were popular in different groups. Everyone kind of accepted each other to be honest.

claytongulick• 9 months ago

Manners are the grease of society, as they say.

gompertz• 9 months ago

I behave this way too. But I also fear it leads to a degree of split personality disorder... and feeling a bit like a fraud.

dhutvjhfguhg• 9 months ago

Great, so you have to pretend 40 hours a week. Great system we built for ourselves. Maybe we should tell kids that in school. That will motivate them.

ElevenLathe3• 9 months ago

The whole point of school is to teach kids social facts like this. It's certainly not to teach them algebra or literacy.

nemomarx2• 9 months ago

The kids already have to pretend during school and maybe at home to please parents. I think they're aware

ecshafer• 9 months ago

Yeah, its a perfectly fine system. You don't have a friend who you don't talk about the same things that you talk about with another friend? Or things you don't share with family? whats the difference?

SaltyBackendGuy• 9 months ago

Isn't this just baked into the social fabric of humanity?

vorpalhex2• 9 months ago

Living in a society with other people who you interact with is about compromise and that means behaving in a way that aligns with social and cultural norms - which change from place to place.

I interviewed for a major company and was rejected for being "too combative" after I corrected an interviewer on what unit tests are supposed to cover. I got hired somewhere else and my boss mentioned he had also been rejected by the same company, so I mentioned that they rejected me over being combative. My boss laughed, like rolling on the floor laughing about it - because our company culture was so different that he considered me a peace seeking negotiator between teams.

Culture fit is real.

yathern• 9 months ago

Great, so you have to pretend 40 hours a week

You don't have to do anything - if it's more important to you to bring your authentic beliefs and opinions in front of others - you're free to do so. But if your number one priority is getting ahead at work - or simply aiming to develop social cohesion with a group around you, conforming to that group's beliefs and culture are helpful. This applies not just to the 40 hours you work, but to any group you want to be welcome in, whether it's your school, country, church or sports team. And after a little while, it's not really pretending anymore.

Maybe we should tell kids that in school

Half of the reason we have school is to socialize kids to these very concepts. We obviously lecture about peer pressure, but most of this is learned innately. Society couldn't exist without these social pressures, even though they're not always beneficial.

duxup3• 9 months ago

Pretend what exactly?

I find it easy to go to work and do my work and just choose not to share some things. That's not pretending as much as good healthy boundaries.

I once sat next door to a group of HR folks who brought their personal lives into the office every day. People in conference rooms I booked crying and so on. Now a random one off of that, whatever, but it happened a lot and people bringing their emotional issues TO work really felt like a weight on me and those around me.

Boundaries can make work a heck of a lot easier to deal with. Depending on your situation it can even be an escape at times.

lawlessone• 9 months ago

Have you never worked before? This is most jobs. lying to kids isn't going to help.

wakawaka283• 9 months ago

It's called being professional. Your coworkers don't exist to be a sounding board for political, religious, or overly personal topics. This is just the baseline. You don't need validation about that stuff to do your work. Pushing people out because they don't have the same "vibe" is counterproductive and makes everyone worse off.

If you told kids in school the truth, it would be that juvenile attitudes die hard. Adults are too often like big kids. Looks and superficial stuff still matter a lot, although you can still get admitted to companies if your job requires actual skills or characteristics that you have.

jjav• 9 months ago

Great, so you have to pretend 40 hours a week.

Pretend to what? Not sure what this means.

My "whole self" is my hobbies and my passions and interests. A few of those overlap with the stuff I do at work. At work I do the work stuff, which conversely also overlaps with my passions (that's why I'm there). Other passions don't overlap with what's useful at work, so I don't do those there. I'm not pretending, just not doing those things at work.

musicale4• 9 months ago

Great, so you have to pretend 40 hours a week

I think this is an important realization - you are in a sense being paid to play a role at work, and there is a script for that role that everyone expects you to follow.

One of the benefits of having such a script is that it standardizes how to interact with people in a particular role, and reduces the friction of having to change workflow based on a specific person.

duxup3• 9 months ago

It's always the executives, who likely face no consequences.

Or the folks celebrating it are just playing the game.

pseudosavant• 9 months ago

My own experience has been that even if it was "safe" to do at a company at a certain point, people and managers will change, and your next manager won't care at all that the previous one valued your "whole self". Anything that can make you an outsider (disability, culture, etc) will likely eventually harm you if it is a meaningful part of your work persona. Sadly, less is more when it comes to sharing yourself at work.

everdrive2• 9 months ago

I feel bad for anyone who doesn't see this as obvious.

I don't mean this in a rude way, but inexperienced, or socially-immature, or spectrum-y people really fail the most with regard to this kind of advice.

There's a (correct) stereotype that spectrum-y people are overly-literal. However, from the perspective of a spectrum-y person this is totally perplexing. Why do people frequently state literal facts which have a secondary, contextual and metaphorical meaning? "Bring your whole self to work" has a really straightforward and literal meaning. It's not a metaphor which requires interpretation. However "bring your whole self to work" is quite obviously not meant to be taken strictly literally. So then why the hell say it like that? Why would people go around saying things which are definitely incorrect and rely wholly on subtext or cultural knowledge? It'd be like if I said, "hey by the way it's safe the change the lawnmower blade while the spark plug is still in" or "looking at the sun won't blind you quickly enough to be risky." And then people are just supposed to know I didn't mean my very literal statement literally.

And if everyone who's normal and socially well adjusted understands that you're not meant to take "take your whole self to work" then what work is this phrase even doing? Why does anyone even say it?

jjj123• 9 months ago

It’s rhetorical. It sounds and feels nice to a subset of the population. And I do believe it’s literally true for a small subset of the population. The people who have a personality that fits well into corporate structures, who believe in “the mission” and whatnot.

C6JEsQeQa5fCjE• 9 months ago

[...] then what work is this phrase even doing? Why does anyone even say it?

Most people are far more emotional than logical (possibly as a consequence of a lack of basic education in logic). They are not precise with their language, and they are not logically consistent in their words and actions. A lot of them (most?) tend to say things that make them feel good, or that they aspire towards, not things that are actually true. It's not even a conscious choice to lie, they're too used to being like that, and there isn't enough peer pressure to change since most people are like that, too.

A technical person on the spectrum should consider most people inherently "bugged" and treat all their outputs as unreliable.

musicale4• 9 months ago

Bring your professional facade to work.

Leave your weird, authentic, (and perhaps messy) self for the contexts where it will be genuinely appreciated.

angryGhost• 9 months ago

Disagree. You can be your authentic self and be respectful of a workplace environment

card_zero• 9 months ago

My authentic self is in bed right now drinking cider, so no, I can't.

mathgeek• 9 months ago

Some people can, some can’t.

vorpalhex2• 9 months ago

It depends on your authentic self.

I've known people who were just deeply genuinely nice people. Yeah they can go totally authentic and are entirely welcome. Hell they can invite themselves over for dinner to my house and I'll be happy about it.

My authentic self is sharply sarcastic, critical and at times brutal. My coworkers don't want to deal with that - that's a very chaffing personality especially towards the end of a stressful week and it can very genuinely hurt morale. I very much tone myself down, avoid sarcasm as much as I can, carefully massage critical and direct messaging as best I can and generally try to be aware that the people around me have different communication needs.

And I think people do get a taste of the real person under the facade. I know I get that from my coworkers - I have coworkers who are great coworkers but whose friend I have no interest in being because same thing, their "out of work" authentic self I find off-putting even though they are amazing coworkers.

lm28469• 9 months ago

Having worked with people from all around the world what you think is respectful and normal might be seen as batshit insane to others.

f1shy• 9 months ago

If I could only make this comment more visible. I worked in 2 extrema of the spectrum. Ones would say nothing personal, strictly professional, never curse, like robots (any experience in Japan) The others would come, curse constantly, even calling a college would imply calling him literally “you son of a b*”, people would loudly talk about sexual encounters, and other private things (south Italy, south America). I asked both groups (as I have friends in both camps) what do they think about the other way of interacting: both think the other group is abnormal, awkward, and would not like to work in “such a terrible place”

tekla• 9 months ago

The most "bring yourself to work" places I've worked at always the most "don't be like that". I've been disciplined at a place that literally had a entire HR ceremony of "bring yourself to work" because I cursed many times when many systems were failing and I was a on-call line for hours,

Not even the most conservative white collar place (super super well known big classic old school engineering company) has ever mentioned jack shit when shit was burning to the ground and we were trying to keep things working

tester457• 9 months ago

It depends on the workplace and the person.

Some workplaces:

- penalize black women for having natural hairstyles like locs

- make Sikhs remove turbans

- deny chosen names and pronouns

There are entire swaths of groups who can't be their authentic selves.

JohnFen• 9 months ago

Yes, you can! I do it.

What I don't do is bring all of myself to the workplace. Professional relationships are different than intimate relationships and not every part of me is appropriate for both kinds of relationships simultaneously. But every side I show is authentic.

musicale4• 9 months ago

Maybe adjust it to "only bring the most professionally effective and contextually appropriate subset of your authentic self to work."

narcindin• 9 months ago

Bring your whole self to work, at this point, is the term you use to criticize this policy, not to describe it.

Maternity leave is a version of BYWSTW. As are PRIDE/ethnicity related activities as work. Should we jettison those?

I agree it can and is taken to far, but I'd prefer to read an article about actually navigating an office with different types of real people. For example, for example, thermostats preferences, volume preferences, "we a family/team" vs "just a job" preferences, etc.

onionisafruit• 9 months ago

That's not what the article is about.

zoklet-enjoyer• 9 months ago

If you're doing your job and not being an asshole to the people you work with, then you're welcome on my team.

snozolli• 9 months ago

I have never in my life heard anyone use this phrase. Is it actually common in modern, corporate America? It sounds like an HR trap, just like anonymous suggestion boxes.

politelemon• 9 months ago

Definitely heard it in several US and European firms. Quite possibly spread through linked in contamination.

nemomarx2• 9 months ago

Yeah, it's pretty common. A little less so this year than back in 2021 I would say

only-one17014• 9 months ago

Very much around and very much an HR trap

hexbin010• 9 months ago

If there was ever an "it's a trap", it's bringing your whole self to work/being completely honest/being completely yourself/forgetting it's a game

only-one17014• 9 months ago

No shit?

jpitz• 9 months ago

To every commenter offering incredulity or sarcasm at the apparent obviousness of this advice:

A great swath of us did not possess the social intelligence to arrive at this conclusion independently upon our arrival in the workforce. I didn't. I got lucky.

BeFlatXIII• 9 months ago

Did it really take someone with Ivy League training to figure this out?

tennisflyi• 9 months ago

I does indeed. Look at “gemba” lmao

RickJWagner• 9 months ago

I agree. Some topics are by nature divisive— these things should not be discussed in the workplace. Politics, religion, etc are best kept outside the work environment.

fittingopposite• 9 months ago

“You’re never going to get a job if you do that,” he says.

Can't really take this person serious if they can't differentiate a bit. People using the words "never", "always", etc. often generalize too much to really describe reality as it is.

Ivy League psychologist: 'Bring your whole self to work' is bad advice

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