When I set up this blog I knew it will be a strange mixture of random thoughts from my personal and professional life.
I had to decide if to write it under my name, anonymously, and even if to split it into “personal” and “work-related”.
I still remember, when my man P-Diddy asked me “What are you worried about?” I was worried about someone taking some comment or a stupid joke out of context and using it against me in the future, possibly not hiring me. “Hey, this guy writes too much poor satire. We don’t need that nonsense here.”.
It made me think about the professional personas we create especially on LinkedIn. “Young, senior, driven professional. Future thought leader. Guru on all things data/finance/tech. French revolutionary from 17th century.” You know the drill.
From creating a small cover letter summary to describe what we are interested in, we switched to the same type of advertisement as perfumes are using. I bet there are a lot of people that would want their LinkedIn profile narrated by David Beckham, with strangely angled shots of upper-class people, cars, and glass things. Although no perfume ever made me cool as he promised. I have to ask for £50 refund for Lynx Africa.
There are more and more conversations about authenticity in the workplace and there is a good reason for it. Some of us don’t have the best experience from primary or high school for not following “a norm” and we don’t want to recreate a similar experience in the workplace. We want people to feel comfortable in order to be able to present their opinions and ideas, to be able to focus, and not to feel unnecessarily stressed on top of their normal workload.
Yet, we don’t want people to be completely authentic. We work with people who will come home every day “CHICKEN AND BROCCOLI AGAIN?!!!” and will start swinging. And we are somehow ok with it because it is their personal life, so as long they are doing well at work… We don’t want that kind of authenticity at work.
Authenticity comes from us as a whole. When we start to create different personas for work and anywhere else just to fit, we could probably start talking about something else, like “mentally comfortable”.
The point is, if you hire a person, you are not hiring just the LinkedIn profile or someone whom you saw for 2 hours in an ill-fitting suit at the interview.
Is it better to know the unknowns?
Just above average 