MY WORLD OF TRUTH

Michael Friedrich is is following the career advice of the moment – 'be yourself'.

The Berlin-based vice-president of ScribbleLive, a Canadian software company, wears shorts to work and has no problem telling prospective clients that he’s sleeping on a friend’s living-room floor while he finds a home of his own. 

“I don’t worry about image in the traditional sense. I am the way I am,” says the 44-year-old. “I accept what I’m like and I celebrate it.”

'Be yourself' is a mantra of successful people and a staple of graduation day speeches – it's so common it's even a hiring tool for some companies.

Playing by his own rules has worked well for Friedrich. Instead of university, he spent years travelling. But thanks to the foreign languages he picked up, and well-honed intercultural skills, he’s landed well-paying jobs. And, despite his unconventional behaviour at ScribbleLive, he’s won a major promotion.

But is ‘be yourself’ good advice for everyone? Just how much of yourself should you reveal to your colleagues? And, are some of us more suited to this ethos than others?

Blurred boundaries 

Professor Herminia Ibarra is an expert in organisational behaviour and leadership at London Business School and Insead in France. When she asks MBA students what career advice they’ve been given, ‘be yourself’ is their most common response.

But ‘being yourself’ can backfire – especially if you’ve been promoted, says Ibarra. Her research suggests that new leaders striving to stay true to a fixed idea of their own personality are at risk of failing in their new role. Rather than adapting their behaviour to fit their changed status, they carry on exactly as before. For instance, someone who sees themselves as open and friendly may share too much of their thoughts and feelings, thus losing credibility and effectiveness, she explains.

“A very simple definition [of authenticity] is being true to self – but self could be who I am today, who I’ve always been or who I might be tomorrow,” she says.

Self-monitoring

People can use authenticity as an excuse for staying in their comfort zone, says Ibarra. Faced with change, “oftentimes they say ‘that’s not me’ and they use the idea of authenticity to not stretch and grow”.

Typically, this happens with people from a technical background or with people moving from their own area of expertise to a management role, says Ibarra. “They get into senior levels where all people care about is the presentation, the three bullet points or the anecdote and they feel like that’s a violation of their professional values. But in fact it’s a set of communication skills that they need to learn.”

The ease with which you adapt your behaviour to fit new situations depends to what degree you’re a ‘chameleon’ or a ‘true-to-selfer’, according to Mark Snyder, a social psychologist at the University of Minnesota. He created a personality test to measure this, called the Self-Monitoring Scale.

Chameleons treat their lives as an opportunity to play a series of roles, carefully choosing their words and deeds to convey just the right impression, says Snyder. In contrast, true-to-selfers use their social dealings with others to convey an unfiltered sense of their personalities, he says.

The problem with ‘be yourself’ as careers advice is that chameleons have a bit of an edge, says Snyder. That’s because a lot of jobs, particularly ones that are at higher levels in corporations, call for acting and self-presentational skills that favour people who change their deeds to fit the situation.

Earning your stripes

Other research suggests it's only as you progress up the career ladder that you have the licence, power and opportunity to be authentic. It takes time to earn what sociologists call “idiosyncrasy credits”.

“Senior people have tried, experimented, trial-and-errored different versions of self, found whatever works for them, and consolidated a style,” says Ibarra. “They advise students and junior staff to ‘be yourself’ with good intent, forgetting that it’s been a 30-year process.”

The other pitfall is that it’s an instruction open to misinterpretation. “It’s not bad advice. It’s just not particularly useful advice,” says Jeremiah Stone, a New York-based recruitment specialist at Hudson RPO.

“It doesn’t mean that you go into an interview or a workplace environment and you behave in the same way you would with your mates. It means that you are engaging authentically with other people, that they get a sense of who you are and what’s important to you and what your values are.”

Part of the danger in simply telling people to ‘be yourself’ is that they might think that’s all they need to do, warns Stone. “You can be confident and at ease and speak authentically as long as you’ve done the baseline preparation and have the work behind it to back it up.”

Even Friedrich is unconvinced by ‘be yourself’ as words of wisdom – particularly for younger people. “The advice ‘be yourself’ – that’s starting in the middle. How can you be yourself if you don’t know yourself?” he says. “Get to know yourself and find out what makes you happy.”