Should You Bring Your Whole Self to Work?

Back in the day feminists told people to bring their daughters to work. Doing so one day a year would naturally mold young female minds into careerist contortions. Then, of course, someone discovered that bringing your daughter to work excluded your sons. So now, we have-- bring your son and daughter to work. 

Obviously, this may or may not be appropriate to your child’s age, but still, why not waste a day thinking you are being politically correct?

Anyway, I have recently discovered yet another mindless corporate fad. It was conjured by some very serious consultants, people who have no idea how to think. It has been around for a few years now. It has been blessed by business schools. It is called-- Bring your whole Self to work.

Any time you see phrases like “whole Self” you ought immediately to recognize that you are dealing with utter inanity. Did you ever ask yourself what it means to bring your whole self, or  half of your self, or nine-tenths of your self to work.

As for wholeness, it is wholesome, to say the least, but the inane phrasing does not prevent you from bring your sexual needs to the workplace. Did the conjurers who dreamt up this phrase consider that we need far less, not more sexual harassment. In truth, there is nothing about the phrase that tells you not to make a fulsome display of your sexual proclivities and declivities in the office. 

This shows clearly that those who invented the concept did not know how to invent a concept.

Anyway, over at the New York Times, Pamela Paul has explained that bringing your whole self to work is a genuinely bad idea. Kudos to her for arguing the point effectively and cogently. Hers is a welcome antidote to the whiners who are telling people to expose their vulnerability in the office and on the assembly line. Nothing is quite so mindless as showing how vulnerable you are. Nothing will more quickly cause you to lose everyone’s respect than to start whining and complaining, not to mention, exposing your weakness.

So, Paul explains that you should keep your personal preferences, your emotional core and your deepest feelings out of the workplace:

Do not “bring your whole self” to work.

That’s right! Defy the latest catchphrase of human resources and leave a good portion of you back home. Maybe it’s the part of you that’s grown overly attached to athleisure. The side that needs to talk about candy (guilty). It could be the getting-married part of you still agonizing over whether a destination wedding is morally defensible in These Times.

If you start sharing personal information that is irrelevant to the job people are going to lose respect for you. They are going to conclude that you are not there to do a job, but to get some free therapy or maybe even some free love:

Anyone worth sharing a flex desk with is not someone you want to see every last ounce of either. They, too, can reserve their aches, grievances, flimsy excuses and noisy opinions for the roommate, the pandemic puppy and the houseplants.

How pervasive is this notion? Paul explains:

According to TED talker and corporate consultant Mike Robbins, author of a book called — that’s right — “Bring Your Whole Self to Work,” it means being able “to fully show up” and “allow ourselves to be truly seen” in the workplace. Per Robbins, it’s “essential” to create a work environment “where people feel safe enough to bring all of who they are to work.” Bringing the whole self is a certified buzzphrase at Google and encouraged at Experian. An entire issue of the Harvard Business Review has been devoted to the subject. In this new workplace, you don’t have to keep your head down and do your job. Instead, you “bring your whole self to work” — personality flaws, vulnerabilities, idiosyncratic mantras and all.

She continues:

According to BetterUp, which bills itself as the first Whole Person™ platform, “That means acknowledging your personality, including the quirky bits, and bringing your interests, hopes, dreams, and even fears with you, even if they don’t seem relevant to your work.”

Now, Paul aptly explains that if you do all of this, if you bring your whole self to work, your co-workers will want to vomit. Not only will you be wasting their time and distracting them from the task at hand, but, why would you assume that they care about your hemorrhoids: 

In other words, for the world outside the H.R. department, the phrase “bringing your whole self to work” is almost guaranteed to induce a vomit emoji. Rarely has a phrase of corporate jargon raised so much ire and rolled as many eyeballs with everyone I’ve talked to about the subject.

Now, Paul suggests that the whole self movement connects somehow with diversity and equity programs. How might that be? Well, how many of these diversity  hires are incompetent? How many of them would be happy to hide their incompetence? How better to do so than by rattling on about your child’s efforts to master the art of the bicycle:

And yet. In recent years, the “whole self” movement has gained momentum in part because it dovetails with fortified corporate diversity, equity and inclusion (D.E.I.) programs. Both purport to make employees feel comfortable expressing aspects of their identity in the workplace, even when irrelevant to the work at hand.

The truth is, private life has no business being part of the workplace:

The problem is for many people, it’s no more comfortable dragging the whole kit and caboodle into the workplace than it is showing up every day on a relentless basis. Nor is it necessarily productive. Not everyone wants their romantic life, their politics, their values or their identity viewed by their colleagues as pertinent to their performance. For some people, a private life is actually best when it’s private.

As we have occasionally noted, in contradistinction to mega-TED-talker, Brene Brown, you should keep your vulnerability out of the workplace. It will give people the wrong idea:

Nobody is asking a line worker or customer service representative to add more personal vulnerability to the enterprise. For most gainfully employed people, it’s not work’s job to provide self-fulfillment or self-actualization. It’s to put food on the table.

Obviously, the goal is to make work more like therapy. Would it not be better to make therapy more like work:

Nor is it fair to ask the workplace to deal with all your hopes, dreams and problems. “A lot of staff that work for me, they expect the organization to be all the things: a movement, OK, get out the vote, OK, healing, OK, take care of you when you’re sick, OK. It’s all the things,” an executive director for an advocacy organization recently told The Intercept. “Can you get your love and healing at home, please?”