Are you a chameleon at the office? Why our professional and private selves are often very different

IHave you ever wondered what your close friends or partner are like at work? Could it be that your normally kind and gentle best friend is a total office tyrant? Is it possible that your normally the life of the party boyfriend is awkward and submissive in meetings? Many of us are professional chameleons, editing our personalities and behaviors when we enter the professional sphere, or feeling ourselves change under pressure. At best, it can lead to career advancement. At worst, to an identity crisis.

We have been correcting ourselves at work for centuries. A king’s lackey might have fawned over a monarch he genuinely despised. Second World War soldiers would have tried to put on a brave face in the trenches every day. Now, we have city boys who crack jokes to fit in and get ahead, and receptionists who adopt a cheerful disposition. It’s a key part of human nature, says cultural anthropologist Dr Alex Gapud, who refers to socialist Erving Goffman’s theory that life is theatre and people are like actors on a stage, each playing a variety of roles.

“At work, we play roles,” Gapud says, “whether it’s the role of the boss or someone who’s customer-facing, for example.” Goffman’s theory refers to a “stage” mentality: When we’re “on stage” we behave in a certain way, the clothes we wear can be compared to an actor’s costume, and we speak in particular terms or acronyms, almost like a script. Gapud recalls working in a call center as a young man and using his “telephone voice,” which was an octave higher than his own. “It’s not how I normally am, but I was playing the role of a customer service representative,” he says. Margaret Thatcher, on the other hand, took lessons in the 1970s to lower the pitch of her voice, to appear more assertive. These are typical on-stage behaviors. Then there’s the backstage version we all have, when we behave more organically with our peers at work or with our colleagues in everyday life.

“We put on a mask to some extent,” says career coach Alice Stapleton, explaining that other changes might include adjusting our posture or using less jargon. “It’s all about self-care. It’s about our reputation and doing what we need to do to get a promotion or be the kind of leader we think we need to be.” It goes beyond wanting to succeed at work, though. “It’s a need to belong,” Stapleton says. “We are a species and we want to be part of the tribe. But sometimes when you look at what happens in offices, you think, ‘Why are all these people playing all these roles and then they go home and they’re completely different people? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could all just be ourselves and get on with work? ’”

But these chameleon-like tendencies are useful. “The advantage is being adaptable,” Stapleton says. “It’s being able to be whatever and whoever you need to be in that circumstance, which will mean that you might get ahead, or be liked, or perform well. Sometimes it can be self-preservation, a coping strategy when you have to make pretty tough decisions.” If you need to fire someone, for example, or take on a daunting challenge, or carry out a task that you feel ethically conflicted about, you can tell yourself, “Well, that’s just the work me, that’s not really me.”

Gapud says people adopt different personas to “detach” themselves from situations, “for their own mental health.” “Otherwise, it can get very complicated,” he says. “Maybe it’s one of your coworkers who is a subordinate and you have to let them go. Then you feel the pressure to take on that role of protagonist.” Perhaps the same can be applied to surgeons, who often try to remove emotions from the task at hand.

However, it's not as simple as our professional selves being completely separate from our private selves, as happens in Apple TV's workplace thriller. Breaking off – where employees’ memories of their work and personal lives are surgically divided. At work, we present one of our many personalities, and it can still be authentic and sincere. “Who I am on a Saturday night out with my friends is not who I am at the stand-up meeting on Monday,” says Gapud. “That’s not to say that one of those two is actually fake.” Stapleton suggests that “we all have multiple personalities.”

However, constantly correcting yourself at work can be exhausting and unhealthy. And it’s when your professional self starts to feel inauthentic, or when you struggle to recognize yourself, that the problem arises. Gapud says that shyness and anxiety at work tend to arise when there is “a mismatch between who you feel you can be and the role you have to play in the culture of that organization.” “Who are the dominant personalities or demographics? Because if they put intense pressure on people to fit into a certain behavioral role, I think that’s pretty telling of the culture.”

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Stapleton has worked with many clients who want to change careers because they feel like they can’t be themselves. “It’s not just about the job, it’s about what the career or industry says about them and the people they can attract,” she says, adding that her 20-something clients in particular can feel “shy” at work and struggle “to find their voice and be the more assertive person they are outside of work.” “I see it in myself, too,” she says. “I’m quite an introverted person and I chose a career where I’m talking to people all day and I need to bring a certain amount of energy.”

Stapleton has observed that people who work in prestigious, high-pressure industries, such as law, struggle to be themselves at work. “When you’re young, it seems like there’s a certain status attached to it,” she says. “There’s an idea of ​​what you have to be like to become a partner, for example, so sometimes people struggle to see how they could progress in that way, but still be people-oriented and hold on to their values.” Stapleton adds that when people self-publish for work they don’t really believe in or feel fulfilled by, it can lead to an identity crisis. Especially in places like London, where many people define themselves by their jobs.

Of course, it’s not just in industries full of Oxbridge alumni where people can feel out of place at work. On a popular Reddit forum about the concept of the “work self”, one construction worker opens up about how he feels like a “fish out of water” and hides his true self on building sites, where his colleagues make snide jokes and have political views that concern him.

And there are also people whose uglier side can come out in the workplace. We know, especially in the wake of the MeToo movements across numerous industries and the growing awareness of bullying culture, that there are many people in positions of power at work who exploit their position – and whose families at home may not recognise the person they become at work. Gapud says that sometimes, “if there is cruelty or brutality, it’s not just a copycat game – I think there could also be an issue with the broader organisational culture that creates an implicit expectation that this is how a leader should behave.”

It can’t be down to workplace culture alone, though, as some people in toxic companies can still be unfailing agents of good. “Sometimes people think cruelty is a necessary part of leadership,” Gapud says. “And there’s also the possibility that it comes from something in their life or personality beyond the workplace.” She says bad behavior often arises when a manager hasn’t been taught how to manage, and so “when we’re in new and unfamiliar situations, we often revert to the same examples we’ve learned elsewhere.” She compares this to becoming our parents if we ourselves become one.

Yet the intersection between our professional and private selves has never been more blurred than it is today, with the rise of remote work. Now, we see our CEO’s cat lumbering across the keyboard during a Zoom meeting, hear her baby crying upstairs, and glance at her bookshelf. Stapleton notes that even when people place a filter over their background to prevent others from having a window into their lives, the choice to do so is revealing in itself: “That’s healing, isn’t it? That’s saying, ‘I don’t want people to be able to see a little bit more of me. ’” She says remote work has made it harder for us to play a role, as we see more of our colleagues, but it has also created a distance. “It’s a very strange tension,” she says. “I’ve certainly heard from clients that they’ve found it harder when they start a job to establish their professional self or even convey their regular self.”

Gapud also points out that one of the benefits of having multiple selves is that it helps you switch off at the end of the work day. Another great way to disconnect from the stress of work is to literally take off our suits, overalls or uniforms. Remote work has changed that. It can also prevent us from showing more of our “backstage selves” to our colleagues. “If you’re in the break room at work, which is very much like the backstage area, socializing there is natural – you can chat over coffee. But remote work makes it harder because that friendly interaction turns into a Teams message.”

What advice does Stapleton, as a career coach, give people? While she acknowledges that there will always be expectations that we edit ourselves a bit, she advises her clients to “strive to be in a workplace where they can be themselves as much as possible.” “If that seems impossible, then I would question that career—maybe they need to move somewhere where there is a different ethos.”