Being Authentic — A New Demand
Modern people do not want their workplace to be a theatre stage
After many years of fitting into a role at work, playing some kind of theatre where all the others also had their roles, and the working day being a scene in a Dogme-movie where everybody is supposed to stick to their part of the movie, say their few regular lines and be very careful how they improvise — modern people have had enough.
They want to be themselves and be honest with each other — talk in a language that they identify with and talk about things that make sense for them, and get meaningful responses from their colleagues.
The Hannah Shirley TikTok video
About a year ago, Hannah Shirley, a young woman who until recently had worked at Udemy but apparently quit her job to be free of the business jargon, posted a video on TikTok:
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She asks, “Is it just me?” about being tired of people talking nonsense and at the same time pretending to be interested only in the success and well-being of the organization they are in.
This resonated well with a lot of people in the world, and you can now see this video mentioned in many posts on social media — it went viral.
Hannah Shirley mentions some of the currently popular nonsense phrases used, such as:
Building the plane while flying it
and
Boiling the ocean
Clearly, she has very little respect for the value of such talk, saying that none of us would talk like that when not at work.
Not new
This topic has several facets, but each of them has been discussed over and over again for many years, and at times a writer gains success with a book about it, such as André Spicer with his book Business Bullshit from 2017, which spawned a flood of follow-up books by other writers.
André Spicer argues in the book that the bullshit language removes the attention from more serious talks that could have helped improve the company.
Being yourself at work
Skipping the formalisms and behaving like a real human being, also when being at the workplace or in a meeting with colleagues or bosses is an idea that has caught so much resonance that it has been possible to turn it into a movement, #BeYourselfAtWork — possibly by that, the movement is now itself formalizing what should have been de-formalization but still, bringing the topic to the table.
Is it a generation thing?
You will often see statements such as:
The new generation doesn’t accept all this
or similar, but it really isn’t a generation question — ask around, and you’ll find that a lot of people of all ages and with all kinds of careers behind them or in front of them, all can agree on the world being a better place if we actually talk as we think and consider the talking to be the means to developing more thoughts or finding solutions — real solutions — based on rational thinking and behaviour.
Lots of people want that; just ask them, and you will know, and it looks like the generation thing mainly has an influence on how much people believe that it can actually be done — the younger ones being more optimistic about the possibilities of changing the world.
The blogging revolution
We have had weblogs/blogs and other ways of expressing ourselves to the world for quite many years now, and we even see how different social media is preferred by different groups of people, which to some extent can be boiled down to different ages as a key dividing factor.
But even though different generations prefer different social media, they all like to express themselves.
While I remember how the early social media was very much another theatre play — people didn’t take it seriously, didn’t know how to behave, and often took on “pen names” on social platforms — I don’t see this equally much now.
Instead, there are some people who are very loud on these platforms in trying to stage themselves and establish themselves as “the one who speaks about silence” or “the one who is an expert in Excel macros”, or whatever.
But the bulk of people, those who are not trying to sell themselves on social media, are in general trying to be direct and honest. With the slight exception that it is mostly preferred to tell about all the good things in their lives, and how good they themselves are, etc., rather than expressing the balance of things.
By large, I would claim that the blogging revolution has made room for a voice for each human being, where it previously was mostly a few VIPs who could ever say something publicly. And that has brought the common man into a new focus, bringing into the everyday media shoutout a large mix of common thoughts and feelings that were rarely heard before.
Conclusion
Authenticity is not a “fad of the month”. While it probably is a relief for some people to be able to have separate personalities at work respective at home, most people do not like it and do not feel comfortable with it.
It prevents many good thoughts from being expressed at work, because they do not fit into the role you are playing there, and it makes people feel dishonest at times.
I could add that this possibly can be related as well to the discouraging feeling of losing all your job friends when changing your job — just my thoughts on it, but it could be that if you are not in the job, you are no longer the role, and it was the role they interacted with, not you personally.
Modern people want to be human beings all the time. They want to be persons, not roles. And recognizable as such, known for their way of thinking, and their points of view, not for their job role.