How to Bring Yourself to Work

I was VP of HR, reporting to the president. My thirty-seventh birthday fell on the day of my weekly meeting with my boss, Brian.

BRIAN: Happy birthday, Ryan.

ME: Thanks.

BRIAN: What's your plan? What's your goal, now that you're thirty-seven?

ME: I have one, but you'll laugh at me when I tell you.

BRIAN: Go ahead.

ME: I want to learn Italian.

BRIAN: For business?

ME: Not really. Our team in Italy speaks English.

BRIAN: For opera, then?

ME: Kind of. I took Italian diction in school, but I didn't really learn grammar. I'm okay talking about passion and revenge and jealousy, but those topics only take you so far.

BRIAN: So learning Italian will let you understand what you're singing?

ME: That's a small part of it. I translate everything I sing, anyway. Every singer does. My wish to learn Italian isn't that practical.

BRIAN: Then it's random.

ME: It doesn't feel random. I need an archetype. I haven't been 37 before. I don't know how to do it.

BRIAN: Big problem, sounds like.

ME: But seriously, when I learn Italian...

BRIAN: What?

ME: You know how learning a language lets you see the world differently? I want to have that feeling. I need an archetype to guide me now. I'm split up. I'm one person at work, then I race home and try to be a different person for my family. I never feel on top of things. I'm tugged in all directions. I carve out time to sing, but when I'm onstage or in church or wherever, I'm grateful to be there but so, so carved up and split into pieces. I thought if I had an archetype to follow, a woman about my age, a mom but not only a mom - I don't know how to describe it, Brian.

I need a role model, and I have an idea about an Italian woman, not necessarily real but maybe there are millions of them -

BRIAN: Presumably in Italy.

ME: You know what I mean, an archetype? I picture a strong Italian woman, looking after children and fixing nets on the beach or something - someone strong and maternal but also sexy and competent and vibrant and smart. Someone who knows who she is and isn't split into pieces.

BRIAN: You are actually crazy.

ME: I knew you would say that.

BRIAN: Well, it's true. It's hard to balance life and work. That's the way it is. I don't think learning Italian will change that. You just have to suck it up. You're one person here, and then at home you're someone else. Just get used to it. And don't say crazy things.

Of course, I wasn't crazy. I was split into pieces. I didn't know how to put Humpty Dumpty together again.

Three months later Brian told me the company was being acquired. I left a few days after the deal was completed. I set off to figure out why going to work had to mean carving off pieces of myself. Fifteen years and a few turns of the crystal later, here we are, you and me, building the Human Workplace together.

It was not a simple journey. I consulted at first, and because every company around was racing to build an online division and I knew that world, I got plenty of work. Self-exploration fell by the wayside as people offered me big sums of money to help them with problems I'd already solved. Okay, I said. This is cool. I'm a consultant. I make my own hours. I get to block out my calendar when I want to sing or do kid-stuff. Maybe this is the answer.

It was, for a while, but I could see my work plastering Band-Aids on gaping wounds would not sustain me. I did the obligatory vc-funded start-up and launched an online community for professional women. I traveled around the U.S. and abroad speaking to women's groups.

Men said to me "What you're talking about is not a women's issue. It's everyone's issue."

I got flack for suggesting in 1999 that the word "I" could and should appear in a resume -- a branding document for a person, after all. "Please, never write another column!" furious keepers of the Godzilla flame implored me over email. Geez Louise, I thought. Why are people so in love with the broken, inhuman status quo?

I wrote a column for Business Week called the Corporate Provocateur. At first I liked that title, and then I didn't. What's the point of flinging spitballs over the castle battlements? Is that my function, to point out what's broken without fixing it?

My colleague Molly said "You come from inside the castle walls yourself, from the throne room. Why not stride in there and show people how to do business the human way?" That's how Human Workplace was born. We are re-writing the employee handbook, the compensation plan, the recruiting materials, the leadership development program and every kind of internal communication there is, from the CEO's podium to the employee's paystub.

We put a human voice into all of it. We teach people to find their voices and sing their own song on a job search and on the job.

It's wrong to leave your personality at the door when you go to work, and no amount of money can make it right. It's wrong for anyone to ask you to do that, much less to expect it. Customers and shareholders don't benefit when we bottle up our thoughts, feelings, creativity and passion because those things don't fit in the little cube called Me on the Job.

Customers and shareholders would benefit if our brainpower and humor and energy were in full flower at work. So why aren't they? What keeps those things under wraps?

It's fear, the real health crisis in business and government (let's not leave out religion, higher ed and any institutional setting). We're afraid to step outside the velvet ropes, and that fear hurts our health, our families and our communities every day. It causes heart attacks in 45-year-olds and keeps talented contributors unemployed when companies are clamoring for help.

It's naked fear: If I say what I feel, someone might not like it. That someone might be bigger and more powerful than I am. I'd better keep my mouth shut.

When I speak to groups I preach self-expression and self-reliance. I remind people of their power and the influence they'll never feel if they never use it. I tell them something else, too: I tell them that they're part of the solution and until they take that first step, they're part of the problem also.

Employees say "What can I do? I can't stand up to the boss." They play right into the Godzilla racket. Managers say "What can I do? I have to enforce the rules." Everybody plays it safe, while their mental and physical health and the health of their families deteriorates. Everybody gets to be a victim in Godzilla Land. We get caught in a conspiracy of non-truth-telling, a vortex of deception layered with sanctimony. We justify our complacency by saying "The system has to change first. I'm not going to change!"

We are the system. We feed Godzilla with our acquiescence. We are Godzilla, when we stay silent and allow other people to dampen our flames.

We can break the cycle and bring ourselves to work all the way. Doing that doesn't require any grand declaration or any conflict. We only have to decide that our integrity and voice mean something to us -- that they mean everything, in fact.

We have to be ready to leave a job if our managers don't care for the real us -- and then, of course, when we test our new truth-telling wings, they hold us up just fine. If one boss doesn't like who you are beneath the business persona, a better boss appears, or a handful of amazing clients.

You'll never grow wings unless you try them. Here are a few scripts to get you going.

When the Boss is Mistaken

BOSS: So, the answer is obviously to staff the Eastern region and pull people from the West. The East is the most successful region we've got.

YOU: You know what, Sarah, let's look at that. We have some big accounts in the East, but they're not growing. Our growth is in the Southwest. Shall we pull up that report?

BOSS: Are you trying to contradict me?

YOU: No. Why are you asking that, out of curiosity? Did you feel I was attacking you? I want to make sure we're using the right data.

BOSS: Okay, I know. I'm just frustrated. I'm not sure what the right answer is.

When The Right Answer is "No"

BOSS: Josh, I need you to stay late tonight.

YOU: What's up?

BOSS: We need to do the Phillips proposal.

YOU: When is it due back to them?

BOSS: Josh, why are you asking me all these questions? I really need you to do it tonight.

YOU: I want to make sure we get the proposal in and I'm wondering how we can schedule that. I can move the Inventory meeting tomorrow and work on the Phillips file from at 2:00. Will that work? I'm committed tonight, so I want to back up from the due date for that proposal.

BOSS: What do you have to do tonight?

YOU: Family stuff that I can't change. What about tomorrow afternoon? Do we care if the Inventory meeting is postponed?

BOSS: I guess not.

You have more influence at work than you think. You won't know how it feels to test your voice until you try.

2014 is on top of us, and the Human Workplace is already here.

Who benefits when we say the lines assigned to a made-up character our boss or the shadowy monster Godzilla invented for us, rather than the words our own hearts and brains are dying to speak? No one benefits then.

We can't rest on the flimsy lie "My job makes me say and do things I don't believe" in the Human Workplace. Our fearful left brains will keep the lie alive, but our bodies will resist and then rebel. The universe sends a nudge, then a push, and finally a wallop.

Every day, more people are opting to bring themselves to work and help their colleagues do the same. It only takes a small step to feel like yourself again, whole and human and connected to your power source.

I never learned Italian, by the way. I signed up for Berlitz and quickly learned my teacher was an opera conductor. I sang in his company and got busy with other things, but I held onto the idea that I could be -- must be -- one person all the time. That became my goal - to be the same person no matter where I was, how I was dressed or who was paying me.

That's not too much to ask, is it? I don't think it is too much to ask, not for me and certainly not for you.

Our company is called Human Workplace. Our mission is to reinvent work for people. We work with employers, universities, workforce development agencies and individuals.

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Here's a file (download) of Liz Ryan on vocals and George Tenegal on piano, performing "A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square."