Corporate bodies or corporate selves?
“it is in the context of relationships that people make choices about bringing their selves fully into their work” - William Kahn
In my last post, Are We Friends? I mentioned in passing that Shared Assets was a workplace that talks about ‘bringing your whole self to work”’
This is not unusual in modern organisations, but it is a very recent concept.
Organisational psychologist William Kahn conceived the idea in a paper he published in 1990, although he only spoke of it in terms of ‘personal engagement’. It wasn't until 2015 that motivational speaker Mike Robbins, popularised the term ‘bringing your whole self to work’ in his 2015 TEDx talk and subsequent book.
Kahn wrote that “people can use varying degrees of their selves, physically, cognitively, and emotionally, in the roles they perform, even as they maintain the integrity of the boundaries between who they are and the roles they occupy”. He further suggested that “the more people draw on their selves to perform their roles within those boundaries, the more stirring are their performances and the more content they are” with the roles they undertake.
He proposed that there were three ‘psychological conditions’ that lead to people being more or less engaged at work, namely:
meaningfulness: feeling valuable, useful and worthwhile, that you are making a difference, and are not being taken for granted,
safety: being able to show oneself without negative consequences, and
availability: having the physical, psychological and emotional resources to be able to fully engage.
Robbins meanwhile frames this in terms of vulnerability - of being able to be personally vulnerable at work - and suggests that vulnerability enables us to build trust and to be more creative.
Given its relatively recent coinage it is remarkable how fully this idea has become embedded in the corporate world in the space of only around 30 years. But how genuine is it and what are the boundaries?
The speaker and writer Jodi-Ann Burey reminds us that Kahn’s requirement of ‘safety’ is not equally available to everyone in the workplace. She points out that ‘professionalism’ is often code for white and ableist cultural norms and standards, and that “without the accountability to examine these systems of bias and power the call for authenticity fails”.
Sometimes we also run up against a conflict between the whole self of the individual and the whole self of the corporate body. In 2022 Netflix issued new ‘culture guidelines’ that made clear that staff had to work on content that they may not agree with or which infringed upon their personal values, because Netflix lets “viewers decide what’s appropriate for them, versus having Netflix censor specific artists or voices”.
This elision of the self at work can be subtle and fluid. As Kahn noted, the extent to which we are ourselves in our roles is not fixed “like a pose in a still photograph”. In his model it varies depending on our sense of meaning, safety and the resources we have available at any given time.
But it also varies depending on our role and context. Some individuals (someone doing a lot of external representation work, or internal leadership work, for instance) might find that they are more often having to act as an avatar for the legal person for the organisation … to be the corporate body. To share their personal vulnerabilities might be seen by partners, funders, colleagues or clients not as an opportunity to build personal trust but as a worrying reflection of the weakness or fragility of the organisation itself. Its a tightrope that many of us have to walk.
To a large extent organisations have grasped Robbins’ popularisation of the term without fully understanding Kahn’s three psychological conditions for meaning, safety and resources that underpin it.
Without meaning the transaction is an unfair one in which you bring yourself to work but get no satisfaction or nourishment in return.
Without safety the invitation is one that is dangerous and inequitable, especially if the organisation is not doing the work to address the systems of oppression and marginalisation that reproduce the harms of wider society in the workplace.
Without care, and without being able to resource people’s wellbeing, the expectation to be physically, psychologically and emotionally available risks being downright abusive.
Maurice Mitchell’s great piece ‘Building Resilient Organizations: Toward Joy and Durable Power in a Time of Crisis’ highlights the risks of ‘unanchored care’ which he defines as “assuming one’s mental, physical, and spiritual health is the responsibility of the organization or collective space”. He states that organisations generally do not have the skills to provide emotional or spiritual healing and cannot replace medical professionals. But he also rightly points out that they can provide a salary, benefits, paid time off, and other resources to help individuals access the support and care they require.
If we are to fulfil the psychological conditions that will enable people to ‘bring their whole selves to work’ we need to be able to build organisations that not only properly resource people’s wellbeing, but that provide meaningful work, and that examine and dismantle, rather than mindlessly reinforce, the systems of oppression and domination that are so deeply written into the original sins of incorporation, limited liability, legal personhood and the minefield that is contracting.
If you have thoughts about the desirability or otherwise of ‘bringing your whole self to work’, or experiences you’d like to share with us to include in our forthcoming podcast, please drop us a voicenote here. We’d love to hear from you!