The problem with ‘bringing your whole self to work’

Being yourself at work has become a corporate mantra—and it certainly started in a well-meaning way. But it can also have significant downsides, according to Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, author of Don’t Be Yourself: Why Authenticity Is Overrated (and What to Do Instead). In this episode of McKinsey Talks Talent, Chamorro-Premuzic joins McKinsey leaders and talent experts Brooke Weddle and Bryan Hancock, as well as Global Editorial Director Lucia Rahilly, to explore what authenticity really means in the workplace, when it helps and hurts, and what may matter more for employees looking to accelerate their leadership trajectory in the age of AI.

The following transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

What’s wrong with being yourself at work?

Lucia Rahilly: Tomas, your new book challenges the mantra of authenticity in the workplace—that we should bring our true self, if such a thing exists, to our professional lives and relationships. What does “authenticity” mean in this context?

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: Authenticity is usually celebrated, often misunderstood, and rarely defined. A beautiful and simple definition of authenticity is by Abraham Maslow, the psychologist who gave us the hierarchy of needs.¹Abraham Maslow, “A theory of human motivation,” Psychological Review, July 1943, Volume 50, Number 4. He defined authenticity as “zero phoniness.” This is how most people think about authenticity at work: “Don’t worry about what people think of you. Just be you. Be the real you; bring your whole self. And always be true to your values.”

Lucia Rahilly: What do you think catalyzed the rise of this corporate mantra, to bring your whole self to work?

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: The origin was well intended. In the 1990s, organizational psychologist William Kahn introduced the concept of employee engagement as the psychological degree to which you identify with your work persona. If you think your professional self is an integral part of your identity, you will work hard, be engaged, and love your job. Your manager won’t need to tell you to “be productive.” This creates better workplaces and offers people careers that have meaning.

A distorted version of that is, for example, if you don’t identify at an almost cult-like level with your job, you should feel you have to quit because you’re doing something wrong.

Lucia Rahilly: When HR talks about bringing one’s whole self to work, who is the intended audience?

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: The idea was that if you’re part of an “out” group—say, a diverse employee, manager, or leader—we shouldn’t put pressure on you to conform and become like the normative—or “in”—group. It was a naive but good attempt to improve inclusion, because diversity without inclusion doesn’t work. If you bring in people not representative of the norm, you have to help them succeed.

If you resemble the status quo, you’re better able to bring your whole self even to the job interview. But if you really want to look at this explicit invitation, should I bring my whole self to work if I’m grumpy me, opinionated me, entitled me, or narrow-minded me? Probably not.

There’s a nice but obscure concept in social psychology called self-complexity. In essence, it says we inhabit multiple selves. Your work is not an invitation to unleash or display all aspects of yourself, but rather to activate the relevant ones.

When companies tell you to bring your whole self to work, they’re hoping you bring your best professional self. Ideally, that doesn’t feel fraudulent because it’s not violating your fundamental moral values or assumptions. It’s about finding compromise, not taking it from one extreme to the other.

What matters more than authenticity?

Bryan Hancock: One of the central ideas of the book is that success comes from adapting behavior to context. Why is adaptability more valuable than staying true to your sense of self at work?

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: We’ve all given feedback to people who just say, “It’s just who I am,” like that’s a valid answer for not wanting to change. But to be an effective leader, you have to be sensitive and flex to the nuances of a situation. Versatility is one of the most important skills a leader can harness and develop.

We’ve known for decades that emotional intelligence is one of the fundamental ingredients utilized by successful managers and leaders to be effective. EQ [emotional quotient] is about exercising empathy, understanding what people think of you, and flexing your behavior because you understand your right for self-expression must not override your obligation to others.

So why have we forgotten the values of adaptability and flexibility? One, because when people overdo it, it looks phony. Look at the rise of unconventional, contrarian leaders in politics around the world. That’s because people are fed up with politicians who seem fake. The other part of this disdain for flexibility and adaptability is the culture in which we’re living, which is quite narcissistic.

Bryan Hancock: Last time we had you on the podcast, we talked about narcissists becoming leaders because they’re perceived as confident and having a perspective people will follow. Here, you say, “We need to be adaptable to succeed.” How do you see those two strands connect?

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: We need to distinguish between qualities that help you emerge as a leader and those that help you become an effective leader. Unfortunately, narcissism is often conflated not only with perceptions of authenticity but with overconfidence, self-belief, communication skills, and megalomania, which can make people feel better about themselves. There’s a big halo effect. We see the leaders we like as authentic, confident, and intelligent because we project what we want to see.

But if you look at leadership effectiveness, you need to be able to flex, adjust, and adapt. Effectiveness is enhanced by not being limited by your authentic self or what you’ve always done. People who exude charisma and confidence, often because they are narcissistic, tend to emerge as leaders more frequently. By the time they become leaders, they’re more entitled and less likely to flex their behavior to adjust to the concerns of others.

Lucia Rahilly: Walk us through how to manage for self-presentation successfully, given that we’re all operating in certain contexts where the perception of authenticity is often more important than authenticity itself.

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: We all talk about the virtues of self-awareness. But if I’m deluded to the point that I go to a job interview, have no insecurities, and think I’m the best candidate, I will ace it. On the other hand, suppose I’m self-aware, honest, and authentic. If you ask me, “Could you do this?” and I say, “I’ve never done that before and I don’t know if I can learn it, but I’ll try hard,” you might say, “Gone! Bring back the narcissist.”

So, when it comes to impressing others, not being honest with yourself could be an advantage. But if I want you to be a good leader and a good employee, I’d better give you a reality check and help you understand how you impact others. Otherwise, you’ll end up like David Brent or Michael Scott in The Office. They’re funny because they represent the spectrum of problems with authenticity: people who have no inhibitions and are cringey in their behavior.

Four traps to watch out for—and what to do instead

Brooke Weddle: Would you walk us through the four authenticity traps you write about?

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: They are traps because when people try to follow them, they experience a conundrum, or a kind of paradox, when trying to action them. They may also worsen interpersonal competence and behavior.

The first trap is: “Always be honest with yourself and others.” Being overly honest with yourself—the term for that is depressive realism. As I said, optimistic delusions tend to be rewarded in most areas of life. For example, if you don’t get a job or a promotion, it’s far easier to blame your boss than yourself. And when it comes to others, if you’re going to be brutally honest, you’re not going to be trusted. You’re going to be seen as an agent of stress. Say someone asks you, “What could I have done better with my presentation?” What they want is affection—not, “You sucked. Why didn’t you prepare?”

The second trap is: “Don’t worry about what others think.” The only way people, especially leaders, get better is by internalizing feedback. Psychological safety creates conditions for people to tell you not only when you’re good but also not good at something. The only way to improve is to care about what other people think of you.

The third trap is: “Always be true to your values, no matter what.” History is replete with examples of brutal leaders who were true to their values. If you’re leading a team with diverse views, you don’t need to broadcast what you think about everything and alienate people. Aim for the ability to unite people, as opposed to dividing them.

The last one is: “Bring your whole self to work.” We debunked this already. What people want is your best self. If you identify with your professional persona and it doesn’t feel alien, great. But what’s rewarded at work is prosocial, competent behavior that serves others, not your ego.

Lucia Rahilly: As an alternative, you encourage “organizational citizenship.” Could you give us some examples of what that might look like and how it differs from what we’ve been discussing?

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: The best way to define it: Don’t be a jerk and be a nice person. Can you function as part of a cohesive, collective unit and have the desire, or at least the intention, to set aside selfish and egotistical drives to make compromises for others? We cannot collaborate or cooperate effectively unless we self-censor individualistic or negative tendencies.

The difference between a good and a toxic culture is not so much task competence or task performance but organizational citizenship. When toxic individuals join a team or organization, they function like parasites who pollute or corrupt the environment and have a negative effect on others. Organizational citizenship is the opposite of antisocial, negative, selfish, and toxic behavior.

Reputation matters

Brooke Weddle: You write quite a bit about how to understand what your reputation is, versus what you think it is. Also connected to that is how to be more self-aware within the environment you’re operating in and how to show emotional intelligence to be kinder.

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: Self-awareness is really about awareness of others. As the sociologist Charles Cooley said, “I am not who I think I am. I am not who you think I am. I am who I think you think I am.”

Take when people say, “This is just me.” Where do you think that identity comes from? Not from your genes or DNA. It’s probably about internalizing what your parents or caregivers told you when you were little. Unfortunately, too many people enter the workplace thinking they’re as smart, good looking, hardworking, and funny as their parents told them. It’s not the best sign of maturity. It’s something they need to work on. But for adjusted adults, work is an opportunity to permanently get feedback on who we are, what we’re good at, and what we’re not good at.

The anti-authenticity alternative I propose is the opposite. There’s a great quote by David Bowie, who was asked, “Who are you really?” because he would change his artistic persona from one year to the next. He said, “I am only the person the greatest number of people think I am.” Reputation matters more than identity. We all get hired, fired, demoted, promoted not based on what we think of ourselves but based on what other people think of us.

Bryan Hancock: This makes the skill of having courageous conversations particularly important. How would you recommend amping up on empathy when you have a performance outcome?

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: It still starts with feedback. Get feedback on whether you’re too direct, too authentic, too yourself, or too fake. You need to find that middle gradient. The kind of authenticity that matters most is in the eye of the beholder. It’s not how authentic you think you are that matters but how authentic other people think you are.

Self-rated authenticity is a lot like restaurants. When they say they’re authentic Mexican, authentic Italian—for sure they’re not. Likewise, when people say, “I’m authentic,” they probably aren’t. Research shows that leaders who are seen as authentic spend a lot of time in skilled strategic self-presentation, precisely because they don’t want to overdo it.

How AI changes the stakes

Lucia Rahilly: Did you grapple with the implications of AI as it intersects with this thesis? How might AI change what we think of or value about authenticity?

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: This book started for precisely that reason. What does it mean to be authentic in an age when creative or intellectual production done by AI is indistinguishable, in the Turing test sense, from human creation? AI is so good at emulating human activity that it is forcing us to act in a different way. People are now copying and pasting emails and memos or LinkedIn updates. When you get an email or a message from somebody, it’s now impossible to know if it’s a human or not.

It’s interesting that across social media platforms we’re apparently incentivized for posting authentically, which sadly also means engaging in inappropriate self-disclosure. And when people do that—as digital narcissism becomes a dominant etiquette in the online world today—they get fake positive feedback from others. It’s hard not to be a little bit sad or cynical about this because the kind of authenticity that is celebrated and rewarded online seems so sanitized, so manufactured, and so narcissistic that people sometimes respond, “That’s not the real person. But it certainly is a very obnoxious and not very likable version of that person.”

Brooke Weddle: What would be one or two things you would say to a chief human resources officer thinking about insights from your book and what to do about them?

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: Treat people like mature, well-adjusted adults, and don’t overdo “You can just be you.” You have an obligation to help people understand that the right for self-expression shouldn’t override their obligation to others. Create a prosocial environment where a culture can be developed that works for most people. If you create the conditions for people to be their best professional self, you don’t have much to worry about.

Lucia Rahilly: You conclude the book with the question, “Why be yourself when you can be someone better?” That’s a vital message at a moment of so much change. That said, I wasn’t sure whether that relates to the pursuit of self-optimization that Silicon Valley folks have been undertaking for a much longer period. Does it differ or does it rhyme with that tech-inflected mantra?

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: There is this wave of positive psychology that focuses on well-being, engagement, and individualistic feelings and that has been co-opted for the purpose of productivity. It has created an age of spiritual workaholics. People experience so much identification with their work persona that they think they’ll work really hard without burning out because of a sense of spiritual fulfillment.

I don’t think we need all that for people to get better at their jobs, appreciate their work environment, and feel like the person that their colleagues, bosses, and clients see at work is somebody they can be proud of. If feedback is real and people improve at work, then something good is happening.

But AI makes it even more important that we try to do this, because if we stagnate, we’ll be out. We’ve now gone from FOMO to FOBO: Fear of becoming obsolete. I think that’s a real thing.