THE AUTHENTICITY CODE: The Role of Power

by Casey Erin Clark and Julie Fogh

This is part 7 of a multi-part series. Read more here.

MYTH: We misunderstand or do not acknowledge the role of power in creating the conditions for or against authenticity.

TRUTH: Power is the secret ingredient that acts as both visible structure and unseen foundation. Organizations have the power to promote or discourage authenticity.

“Let me tell you what I wish I'd known

When I was young and dreamed of glory

You have no control

Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?”

— Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda

If you follow enough influencers on Instagram, you’ll begin to notice quotes like these fairly often: 

“It is safe to be successful.” 

"There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve - the fear of failure.”

“You are the sole author of your story.” 

They’re meant to be empowering—and for some, they are. But to a striving individual who isn’t succeeding, personal development culture can start to feel like an indictment. Maybe if I just HUSTLE harder, I’ll get somewhere. Obviously, if I’m not paid a fair market rate, I need to work on my money mindset. If I can access the best version of myself and show up authentically, I’ll be “undeniable”...right?

Encouraging people to access more authenticity is meant to be empowering too. Indeed, it can be. When we get to show up without feeling the need to hide parts of ourselves, we have more access to mental and emotional energy. We feel less physical tension when we’re not looking for potential predators in our environment. When personal authenticity meets fertile ground, magic can happen.

But we’re NOT the sole authors of our own story.  In fact, we all have co-authors, editors, illustrators, publishers, and sometimes . . . book burners. 

Glorifying authenticity as the key to personal success is yet another manifestation of Myth of the American Dream. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps and you’ll succeed. Be authentic, and you’ll succeed.

But authenticity happens in front of an audience, and sometimes that audience has a great deal of power over your life.

The Power of Policy

Remember the idea that authenticity can help with integration of our work lives and personal identities?   

In the last few months, working Americans have seen more integration of their work lives and home lives than ever before as vast swaths of the country went into lockdown. How’s that going? Bluntly – not great. Not for working parents, especially mothers. Not for people of color. Not for people whose homes don’t function well as an office environment.   

But even before COVID-world, work-life integration wasn’t supported for many people in the workplace: people with disabilities. People with dependents who need specialized care. People without stay-at-home partners. Pregnant people. 

A lack of policy support for parents enforces gendered expectations around domestic care, perpetuates the gender pay gap via the mommy penalty, and is a major part of the “broken rung” on the advancement ladder for women. No wonder women often hide pregnancy as long as possible—even from male bosses who are fathers themselves—and discourage other women from displaying family photos on their desk. And now, as the debate over whether or not to open schools this fall rages on, some workplaces are forbidding employees from working remotely while caring for children.

None of this supports work-life integration, let alone authenticity. But often, what’s even more powerful than official policies in the workplace are the implicit, unofficial, unspoken rules that guide our behavior.

The Power of Culture

We’ve already established that people whose lives outside work – and the authentic personas they bring to them – don’t “fit” with the Dominant Culture spend an inordinate amount of energy adjusting their behavior to fit in.

What attitudes, values, and behavior are we incentivizing? What attitudes, values, and behavior are we punishing? And where might we be incentivizing behavior on one person and punishing that same behavior on a different person?

Earlier we spoke of how the “One True Self” version of authenticity was not really possible, because we all adjust our communication to suit the different arenas of our lives. In our work as consultants, we call those arenas “communication micro-societies”. Your family is a communication micro-society. Your team is a communication micro-society, within the larger micro-society of your office. And even if it’s unwritten, someone is setting the standard that others must adjust to.

A recent debate in the Twitter-sphere about whether the dress code is “dead” (perhaps exacerbated by the fact that many of us haven’t worn non-stretch pants in months) is a perfect example of how coded rules work, and why a LACK of official policy doesn’t necessarily serve the function we think it does.

Human beings have used clothing to signal status and tribal belonging since the beginning, whether that’s a suit and tie or a black hoodie and jeans. To deviate from the dress code (explicit or implicit) is to mark yourself as “other”. There is no question that dress codes can be sexist, racist, classist, and enforce ludicrously old-fashioned standards. They can also function as a gatekeeper against anyone outside the dominant culture.

It is tempting to believe that eliminating explicit rules could level the playing field. Eliminating the dress code technically allows for fashion diversity. However, from what we’ve seen in our clients across industries, we’ve yet to work with the female executive who doesn’t still feel pressure to dress up and look put together (with the added pressure to make sure you don’t look TOO dressed up). Women who wear makeup (but not too much) are seen as more trustworthy. Now that our meetings take place via video, there’s a plethora of advice on how to look fabulous on camera, lest someone perceive you as tired or uninvested. Should makeup be a workplace requirement? Of course not! But who doesn’t want to be seen as trustworthy? Mark Zuckerberg can meet President Obama in a T-shirt. Can you?  

The idea is that if everyone is allowed to dress how they want, everyone will feel comfortable being themselves (read: authentic), and bias will lessen. But that’s not the usual chain of events. Bias is powerful (remember, our gut brains will fight like hell to maintain the comfort of the familiar/what I already believe). And because people in power will STILL set the standard, striving individuals will still do their best to be seen as part of the tribe.  

A lack of official rules doesn’t mean that there are no rules. It means people have to intuit them. The ability to successfully intuit rules sends a strong signal that you belong. We’ve all heard phrases “like attracts like” and “game recognize game”. Many organizations may as well be telling prospective members or employees that if you can’t intuit those rules, you don’t really “get us” — and that has consequences.

The Power of Affinity

Have you ever met someone and IMMEDIATELY clicked? You shared the same interests and the same pet peeves—maybe you both grew up in the suburb of a major city—maybe you went to the same college or pledged the same fraternity or love the same baseball team. The conversation flowed so easily, you hardly noticed the time passing. Maybe a couple of months and a few dozen fabulous conversations later, you decide to start a company together. You make your next hire, and your next—more people who just “get you” . . . who share your core values and your aspirations and goals. You might even find yourself referring to your “work wife” or how “we’re a family.”

We can spend upwards of a few thousand hours a year with our coworkers. There’s certainly nothing inherently wrong or unnatural about wanting to do business with people you really dig. (Hey, it worked for Ben and Jerry).

The problem arises when we start to mistake affinity bias (the quality of ‘they just get me” that arises from similarities) for either objective reasoning or “my gut never lies.”

“In the context of attitudes, System 2 [the reasoning brain] is more of an apologist for the emotions of System 1 [the gut brain] than a critic of those emotions – an endorser rather than an enforcer. Its search for information and arguments is mostly constrained to information that is consistent with existing beliefs, not with an intention to examine them.” - Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow

When the people in power—those doing the hiring, matching mentors and mentees, and tapping future leaders—don’t continually challenge themselves to see the potential in people who aren’t like them, we stifle diversity, and we reinforce status quo systems of power and privilege. “You went to Stanford? I went to Stanford! Welcome aboard! We’re like family here!”

As we attempt to build company cultures that support diversity, equity, and inclusion, it’s important to create systems that don’t rely on a person’s intuition and affinity with the dominant culture to succeed. It takes work.

We often see this at play when small companies started by good friends expand rapidly. Some reject the need to add “too many rules” and attempt to hold onto the same “relaxed” atmosphere that worked with that homogenous group, but company culture develops whether you attach rules and systems and values or not. Culture exists, whether you are a tight group of friends or a multinational organization with 100,000 employees worldwide. 

It’s important to be transparent about systems of incentives and accountability, and vital to “walk the walk” on your company values. If your employees don’t trust you, you cannot ask them for authenticity.

The Power of Trust

Without trust, we cannot develop or maintain relationships, and we most definitely cannot withstand storms like the one we’re currently in. Building trust is a process. It relies on consistency between word and deed. One false move—a micro-aggression, the shaming of an idea, dissonance between stated policy and behavior—can put us back at square one. An organization that claims to value authenticity but punishes those who violate unspoken rules cannot engender trust. 

We build trust on multiple levels. Our reasoning brain can decide to trust someone or something, and our gut brain can agree or disagree. We call that deep, gut brain-level trust “nervous system trust.” 

What is nervous system trust? It’s a phrase we use to describe the opposite sensation of Fight or Flight. It happens when your body knows it’s safe to let down your guard. Unlike intellectually-based trust, we cannot make ourselves develop nervous system trust. For better or for worse, it acts as a canary in a coal mine in environments that, on some level, we perceive as unsafe. At work, nervous system trust relies on a feeling of agency and respect for boundaries—and it’s a prerequisite for real authenticity.

The ability to be authentic is often misattributed as a cause rather than effect of trust. If we encourage authenticity without creating a healthy environment to receive it, we can actually undermine even the most herculean efforts to build trust. We demonstrate that it is not safe to be authentic.

An employee that does not trust or feel trusted cannot feel psychologically safe. According to Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School, psychological safety “involves but goes beyond interpersonal trust; it describes a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.” The idea that personal authenticity will allow people to access psychological safety is precisely backwards. We must first create a psychologically safe environment in order for people to access their own authenticity.

All three of these things are inextricably linked: trust, psychological safety, and authenticity. Remove one, and you cannot access the other two.

All of these points of observation together form a tangled landscape of whose authenticity is welcome, and whose is not—and therefore, who is expected to adapt, even if it runs counter to lip service to authenticity. The effect of power, in combination with perception, is why authenticity will never be just an individual’s responsibility. Power is the critical element that determines if authenticity will land in benevolent or hostile soil.

Does it all feel like a mess? With all of these complex elements at play, is authenticity at work just . . . impossible?

Authenticity at work is possible, and it’s a worthy goal. It requires all of us - organizations, leaders, and individuals - to work together.

We have to stop thinking of authenticity as an individual pursuit and start thinking of it as a community practice.

This Monday, we'll be releasing the final chapter of THE AUTHENTICITY CODE: The Future. Read more here.