Recently, I wrote a posting for Discuss HR entitled To what extent is it really OK to be human in the workplace?  My aim was to explore the extent to which we feel able to express ourselves fully and authentically in the workplace and to explore some of the reasons why we don’t.  In this posting I highlight what I’m calling “Reason 2” and expand on it.

Yesterday, I wrote about the fears we have of being wrong – a subject I also addressed recently in a posting entitled On being right – or wrong.  Like many, I took my own fears of being wrong into my first job when I entered the workplace.  Later, I learned of a second challenge when it comes to the authentic sharing of our human selves:  it’s actually rather hard work!  

Perhaps the first experience I had of working in an environment in which such sharing was encouraged was as a volunteer, supporting Ian McDermott and his colleagues in training large groups of people in neuro-linguistic programming (or NLP) with his organisation, ITS.  This was set up with the expectation that, as a member of the support team, I would have as much learning opportunity as participants.  As a team member I was allocated a learning partner, for example, and supported both by a team coach and by a team leader.  I used to love the morning “huddle”, in which we came together at the beginning of the day to check in and to prepare for the day ahead.  I felt supported in being myself as well as relishing an environment in which people were looking out for my successes.  This was quite new to me.

At the same time I quickly learned that, as much as it was safe to share what was going on for me, the invitation was always for me to learn.  This was quite different from what I often experienced in the workplace where the invitation was to collude.  This was the difference between “yes, your colleague was in the wrong” and “so what’s the learning for you?”  I came to welcome this approach which led me quite quickly to recognise my love of coaching and still, it required of me a willingness to take responsibility for myself and for the quality of my experience which was new to me and for which, initially, I was ill-prepared.

It’s not difficult to see that Reason 2 is intimately connected with Reason 1.  In a culture in which we widely hold the belief that there is a right and wrong answer to everything, it seems likely that, in order to feel OK about ourselves, we will seek to prove that we are right and that others are wrong.  Talking with our allies about those people we believe are in the wrong is a relatively safe way to maintain our position that we are right.

Being human in the workplace invites us down a different path.  On this path, the invitation is to own our feelings, our experience and our own limitations at a given point in time as well as our strengths and our successes.  It is an approach which is compassionate and which, still, requires commitment, discipline and the willingness to learn.  It is an approach which implies staying on our own side of the street (yes, I wrote about this recently – just follow this link) and leaving others to do their own learning.  Once we have embraced this approach we are constantly in process and inviting new learnings.  It is hard work.

I wonder which approach do you favour?