Award-Winning B2B CMO | VP, Brand Marketing at Workhuman | HR Futurist | D&I | Content Producer | Best-Selling Author | Keynote Speaker.
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Last spring, one-third of employees of software company Basecamp resigned after the CEO declared several policy changes, including a ban on talking about politics at work, as those conversations were deemed “a major distraction.” A similar situation happened at Coinbase last autumn. Lots of discussion ensued about companies declining to participate as social actors. Woke or not woke, however, the more urgent issue is power.
Those CEOs thought they were enforcing a culture of focus on work. In fact, they were telling people to leave their human selves at the door.
HR talks about people bringing their whole selves to work. It comes up when talking about diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging (DEIB). It’s part of the employee engagement strategy. It’s part of the culture discussion.
Much of the talk is about people learning to become more comfortable with each other’s differences. Before that can really happen, though, we need to have uncomfortable conversations about what “whole selves” means and how HR makes it a daily reality.
When The Check Box Is A Barrier
CEOs and board members understand stakeholder capitalism and the need to create a more human experience at work. They check the box on DEI (“Let’s change our hiring and have employee resource groups!”), on performance management (“More feedback!”), on learning, compensation and transparency.
Box-checking signals a willingness to change culture. Unfortunately, it’s also a barrier to long-term progress unless top leadership is willing to go deeper and have the hard conversations about power, courage, accountability and vulnerability. This is where HR’s attempts to signal genuine, lasting and consequential change run up against leadership’s reluctance to give up some control.
Stakeholder capitalism was embraced with great fanfare (and analysis) by the Business Roundtable two years ago. Change has been slow, in part because of nonstop crises (a time when most leaders focus on limiting the damage) and in part because cultural change calls for re-arranging both how people work together and how they’re rewarded in material and psychological terms.
Bringing our whole selves to work means going beyond the box-checking, virtue-signaling and good-intentions posing and digging into the hard conversations. Here are four:
Power
Leaders talk about empowering people as if empowerment were a tangible asset. It’s not. You don’t own that power, your employees do. The only way employees bring their power to work is if it’s in service of their own values. You can certainly squelch it and discourage it, or conversely, you can embrace it. The difficult conversation starts when a leader admits the constraints on their own power, and this is also a clarifying moment.
If a CEO says all decisions are based on maximizing shareholder value, then employees know where they stand. If the CEO pleads for greater engagement, they are asking employees to put more of themselves into their work. The CEO must admit that it’s not within their power to compel that. Leadership may wind up left with people who agree that only part of themselves should come to work or who feel powerless to change the situation. That’s a bad outcome at any time, but in tight talent markets, it’s a one-way ticket to mediocrity.
Courage
Contrary to business clichés, courage is not betting the company on a new product. That’s risk management. Courage is when a leader builds a values-based culture that puts more control in the hands of employees, accepting that the outcome is unpredictable. Courage is when leaders make decisions that align with values and making less profit for a while or bypassing an opportunity. It takes courage on the part of HR to go to the mat for principles. The difficult conversation happens when you insist on an open discussion of what everyone knows but nobody will say aloud.
Accountability
The human workplace needs more than accountability for business outcomes: It demands accountability for human outcomes. How do we treat each other on a daily basis in order to deliver those business outcomes? The most uncomfortable conversation I know about accountability happens when people have their hidden biases pointed out to them. Right away they assume they’re being accused of intentional racism, sexism or another prejudice. It takes a lot of self-awareness to say, “Yes, I can see that I have built-in biases and I need to work on those.” Most people want to be perceived as fair. Yet, humans are biased creatures and everyone brings assumptions and worldviews to the workplace. It’s how our brains organize the world. What matters is that leaders take accountability by admitting the cost in human terms and then go about repairing the damage and changing.
As a leader in HR, or as a C-level leader, are you thinking that way? Are you advocating for that on your team?
Vulnerability
Despite all the conversation about workplace vulnerability (Brene Brown certainly comes to mind), it might be the hardest conversation of all. Men may be uncomfortable admitting their vulnerability because it’s so threatening to the standard view of manhood; women may be uncomfortable with admitting it because vulnerability has historically been used as a weapon against them in corporate power struggles. The human workplace must become a place where people can say, “I’m worried, I hurt, I’m unsure, I don’t know the answer” and a hundred variants of expressing vulnerability because everybody feels it whether anyone admits it or not. Leaders, habituated to notice the consequences of every decision, are particularly caught up in maintaining appearances.
Vulnerability isn’t a fault — it’s the human condition. The sooner we bring it into our cultures, the sooner we’ll see how much we have in common, and the more we will connect and see our whole selves.
The cultural walls that business has built, thinking it could separate the human employee from the human being, are long out of date. HR’s new, difficult conversations about power, courage, accountability and vulnerability can lay the foundation for a new, fully human culture at work.
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