Managing Your Career (HBR Working Parents Series) by Harvard Business Review

Author:Harvard Business Review
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
Published: 2020-08-12T00:00:00+00:00

Section 5

All in the Family

Manage Relationships

12

Bring All of Your Identities to Work

by Carrie Kerpen

Quick Takes

Set the tone for your team

Share parts of yourself other than your work self

Don’t be afraid to share failures

Consider policies or events that build a culture of openness

For years, working parents have discussed and debated bringing our “whole self” to work, or meshing our professional identity with our personal one. Should we try to hide our pregnancies until the third trimester? Should we talk about our children at work? Should we ask for accommodations when we need to go to a parent-teacher conference or soccer game?

A Deloitte study found that 61% of employees “cover” their identities in some way and downplay parts of themselves (such as their identity as a parent) due to fear that they’ll be discriminated against or seen as not taking their work seriously enough.1 And unfortunately, there are studies that support these concerns. One study from Cornell University shows that mothers (but not fathers) are often discriminated against in workplace evaluations.2 And of course, the perception that mothers are less devoted to their jobs than childless employees is so rampant, it has a name: the “motherhood penalty,” or the “maternal wall.”

Well, no matter how much we’ve tried to hide the “other side” of ourselves from our colleagues, Covid-19 has essentially given us no shelter. Aside from essential workers fighting the pandemic on the front lines, many of us are working at home—from weather forecasters and news anchors, to the cast of SNL, to the CEOs of the world’s largest companies. Did you ever think you’d get to see a corner of Stephen Colbert’s home office? I certainly didn’t.

This new normal of working from our homes has merged so much more than just our “parent” and “employee” identities, though, because all of us are far more nuanced than that. I’m not just “Work Carrie” and “Home Carrie.” I’m a CEO, a mentor, a wife, a mother, and a daughter, too (and most recently, a teacher, chef, and birthday party planner). We’ve been forced to reveal all of our layers, and as scary as that seemed for so long, it’s actually been, in my opinion, a major turning point.

Here are some tips for unveiling more of your identities at work, along with some ideas to encourage your team to do the same.

Lead by Example

When my company instituted a “work from home” mandate, I started filming a Facebook Live video every morning in my team’s Facebook group as a way to keep them up-to-date and establish some sort of routine. Through these daily videos, my team has truly seen every side of me: the frizzy hair, the pajamas, the kids running around in the kitchen, and everything in between. I do talk about work—I recognize accomplishments, give motivational speeches, and keep my team informed on the status of the company. But I don’t just talk about work. In fact, I talk much less about work than I do about other things, like what I’m baking,

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