Authenticity: Bringing Your Whole Self to Work (guest post)

Authenticity: Bringing Your Whole Self to Work

By Sunnie Giles

The behavior of an individual operating at the edge of chaos is congruent and integrated across bodily sensations, thoughts, feelings, and actions. You are authentic when there is no discrepancy among these aspects of you: you feel what you see, express what you feel, think what you feel, and say what you think and feel. Integration also means you are congruent across all roles you play, whether as a spouse, parent, sibling, churchgoer, leader, employee, or citizen.

Stewart Butterfield, the CEO and cofounder of Slack, a collaboration messaging software, describes this action as bringing your whole self to work, not just parts of you. Authenticity builds safety, trust, and connection, and it speeds up team communication. The jerk boss (like one of my former bosses who told me she had more knowledge under her big toenail than I did in my brain) we see every day at work who saps the last drop of life out of us is actually, most likely, acting out of fear. When we present a facade that might be more appealing and acceptable to others, we (and those trying to connect with us) only feel empty because we cannot connect with a facade. When we are authentic, showing our authentic and even scared and insecure selves, we can bring our whole selves to work, and tap into the maximum potential of our wholes (not just a professional self) on a foundation of secure attachment and acceptance by our work families.

In corporate America, where professionalism counts more than authenticity, we have developed an overreliance and preference for the left brain. In the process, we have justified the thoughts such as work-life balance, as if it’s a zero-sum game where if we spend one more unit of energy at work then we become one less unit available for our families and “professionalism is not emotional.” We need to introduce more authentic emotions at work, not less. But bringing your whole self, including the messy emotions, makes you authentic, facilitates trust, and speeds up communication and decision-making processes (recall the Navy SEALs rescuing Captain Phillips from the Somali pirates and Sully and his first officer’s quick decision-making in the Miracle on the Hudson). Individually, when you are integrated as a whole person, it allows more efficient and accurate information processing across the brain’s corpus callosum, which integrates the left and right hemispheres. Being authentic requires courage and vulnerability, which requires the foundation of safety and trust. In other words, safety and authenticity are mutually reinforcing, and it takes time to build authentic relationships.

Companies that recognize the benefit of “bringing your whole self to work” must, in return, provide more flexibility and help to increase the quality of life with their employees’ families. For example, GE rolled out in 2015 a permissive approach to paid time off for exempt employees, where they can coordinate with their managers to take the time off and receive enhanced parental leave benefits. GE employees can now take up to ten weeks of parental leave (six paid and four unpaid) after the birth or adoption of a baby. Through the “Moms on the Move” program, GE moms in the US who are nursing and traveling for business can ship their milk back home for their babies.

As you can see, becoming an integrated boss that provides safety and connection for others does not only make good business sense (because it provides a foundation for radical innovation); it also improves our quality of life and overall happiness.

About Dr. Sunnie Giles:

Dr. Sunnie Giles is a new generation expert who catalyzes organizations to produce radical innovation by harnessing volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA).

Her research reveals that applying concepts from neuroscience, complex systems approach, and quantum mechanics can produce radical innovation consistently. Her expertise is based on years as an executive with Accenture, IBM and Samsung. Her profound, science-backed insight is encapsulated in her leadership development program, Quantum Leadership.

An advisor to the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, she also is a sought-after speaker and expert source, having been quoted in Harvard Business Review, Entrepreneur, Fast Company, Forbes, and Inc.

Dr. Giles’ latest book, The New Science of Radical Innovation, provides a clear process for radical innovation that produces 10x improvements and has been endorsed prominent industry leaders such as Jonathan Rosenberg, Daniel Pink, Marshall Goldsmith and Sean Covey.

Receptiveness to Community (Guest Post)

Receptiveness to Community

By Shelly L. Francis

Leadership can be lonely, but it doesn’t have to be. It requires not only a capacity to create community but also a willingness to receive community as a gift. Becoming receptive to the idea of needing a community is an act of social courage because it means allowing yourself to be real. Many leaders do not want to admit that they need help or have feelings or need other people. Such humility can be seen as weakness. Becoming receptive involves inner work. It must be present in you as “a capacity for connectedness”—a capacity to resist the forces of disconnection, such as narcissism, egotism, jealousy, and competition.

In the complicated landscape of your life, you may have community in one arena but not in another. At certain times in your life, you may be happily surrounded by colleagues, family, and friends; as circumstances change, you may find yourself alone once again. Community is rarely a given, obtained once and kept forever. As Patrick pointed out, community requires careful, regular tending, just as a garden does if it is to thrive for more than one season.

“I was keenly aware we didn’t have as much fun together as I thought we probably should. I decided to recruit what we call the Fun Committee. There’s three of us, and we have very fun planning meetings after hours in a local bar. Then we plan events, about one a quarter, for the senior executive team to do or to host for other executive groups. That sense of creating community has been really important, and helped us with some challenging work that we had to do in the first half of this year.”

Cultivating community can also be a form of self-care. Patrick applies an adaptive leadership concept: giving yourself a sense of sanctuary on a daily, weekly, monthly, and annual basis.

“It’s easy to feel you can’t add anything new to your day, but this idea didn’t require me to do something new, but just do what I’m doing with more intentionality.” When stepping into the shower each morning or being more attentive at church, he says to himself, “This is my sanctuary.” 

“I play racquetball once a week with the same guy, and I now say to myself, ‘This is my sanctuary.’ I’m still a jerk to him on the court, but that’s racquetball. At my poker group, I stop and look around the table at the five to fifteen guys and think to myself, ‘This is my sanctuary; these are the guys in the lifeboat with me.’”

He often tells the people he leads, “You can create your own community if you don’t have one. Find your own practice; here are some examples. Don’t shy away from thinking you can’t. There are lots of options.”

We were created in and for a complex ecology of relatedness, and without it we wither and die. This simple fact has critical implications: community is not a goal to be achieved but a gift to be received.

—Parker J. Palmer

About Shelly L. Francis

Shelly L. Francis has been the marketing and communications director at the Center for Courage & Renewal since mid-2012. Before coming to the Center, Shelly directed trade marketing and publicity for multi-media publisher Sounds True, Inc. Her career has spanned international program management, web design, corporate communications, trade journals, and software manuals.

The common thread throughout her career has been bringing to light best-kept secrets — technology, services, resources, ideas — while bringing people together to facilitate collective impact and good work. Her latest book The Courage Way: Leading and Living with Integrity identifies key ingredients needed to cultivate courage in personal and professional aspects of life.