Things I Knew and Didn't Say

During my years in Human Resources, people told me things. They told me about their careers, their relationships, their disappointments, and sometimes about circumstances they had shared with almost no one. There were times when repeating what I knew would have made a situation easier to explain, and I didn't. Nobody could see those choices, which was rather the point.

I don't know that I thought of those choices as authenticity at the time. They seemed like part of doing the job well. But I've come to wonder whether we've made authenticity too dependent on what other people can see.

We've become good at talking about it. We encourage people to bring their whole selves to work, to share their stories and speak openly, and somewhere along the way being authentic started to sound like something other people needed to witness. I wonder whether we've confused revealing ourselves with expressing ourselves. Revealing makes information available. Expressing makes character evident. They can happen together, but they aren't the same thing.

I believe in the invitation. Organizations are better when people contribute their judgment, imagination, and convictions instead of leaving parts of themselves at the door, and I've watched a conversation change when someone found the courage to speak honestly about an experience the rest of the room hadn't understood. But I've also known people who were private and deeply authentic. They shared little about their personal lives, yet you knew where they stood when something mattered. They spoke when silence would have been easier. They treated people with dignity when there was no advantage in it.

The trouble starts when openness becomes the measure of health. We celebrate leaders who tell vulnerable stories and call a workplace authentic when people seem comfortable talking about themselves. The person who speaks openly is considered courageous, and the person who stays private may be read as guarded or disengaged. We begin evaluating the appearance of authenticity instead of the integrity of what people actually do.

From the outside, we can't tell what privacy means. Take a colleague who contributes thoughtfully, supports others, takes responsibility when things get hard, and says little about themselves. They may simply be private by temperament. Or they may have learned somewhere along the way that being known carries a cost. The behavior looks identical. What reads as reserve to one person may feel like freedom to another, and what looks like a comfortable boundary may be one someone learned to keep for protection. Some people no longer experience it as a decision at all. They carry the lesson into new organizations long after the circumstances that taught it have changed.

That makes me cautious about telling people to bring their whole selves to work. The invitation may be sincere, and it still lands differently on different people. Some hear permission to stop pretending. Others hear one more expectation to meet, a requirement to demonstrate openness they never chose.

Most of the writing on this topic asks what leaders should do differently. My training in organization development points me somewhere else, toward what is happening between people that we aren't noticing. I've come to think that question matters most when what we can observe tells us so little about what someone is experiencing.

Discretion and self-protection can look alike, too. Sometimes silence reflects an obligation to others, and sometimes it reflects what we've learned about the risks of being known. Often both are present, and even the person staying quiet may not be able to separate them.

So the organizational question turns out to be less glamorous than asking everyone to be vulnerable. Can people disagree without being diminished, and contribute without explaining the experience behind their judgment? Are confidences respected? The answers tell us more about the relationships we've built than any number of personal stories shared in a meeting.

I think about the people who have mattered most to me over the years. Some were expressive and easy to know, and others revealed very little. What stays with me is how they behaved when something was at stake. They kept a promise, gave an uncomfortable truth room to be said, or helped someone when there was nothing to gain. I knew something important about them without knowing much about their private lives, and I suspect the people who trusted me with their confidences learned something about me the same way.

I still don't know what it cost some of them to speak and what it cost others to stay quiet. Maybe the better question is whether we've made room for them to decide that for themselves.

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