Are you losing yourself at work?
Women are disappearing in their careers. We should all care.
We’re all feeling it: The collective identity crisis.
Between our shifting ways of working and the irreversible convergence of our personal and professional lives, nobody knows how to define themselves anymore.
But have you noticed what’s happening to the women? Because for them, it goes much deeper, and it’s a much bigger concern.
Women have been losing themselves to their careers for decades. The further they rise, the more we ask them to change, to project the identity of their company instead of themselves.
Over time, this leads to an identity conflation. Women adopt the identity of the company they represent and their role or function in place of knowing who they are separate from - and related to - their job.
Increasingly, leaders are starting to tackle this by finding their voices once more.
We call it ‘personal branding’ but for senior women, it’s so much deeper than that. It’s repair work.
Today’s executive women have come so far by being wildly adept at externalizing their sense of self to mirror what everyone else cares about. As a trade-off, they lose all touch with what they actually want for themselves.
In short, here’s what’s happening:
The loyalty paradox. In the advent of the growing focus on corporate culture, the ideas of finding purpose and passion at work has unearthed a more sinister trend. We expect employees to care so deeply about work that they put the company’s purpose over their own needs. Women leaders, well known for being especially gifted at promoting and conveying purpose in the workplace, are especially prone to falling into this trap. We give ourselves over completely, and feel shocked when we are laid off, pushed out, or treated like exactly what we are – transactional employees.
Outdated corporate cultural norms. While our private and public lives have become irreversibly entwined, cultural norms have been slow to catch up. Yes, it’s common to see a cat or a baby appear on remote conference calls, but we still don’t like it when our employees use their personal voices too loudly in public forums. Stand out a little, but not too much, we seem to say. You need look no further than the “about me” language used across LinkedIn to see how milquetoast and “deeply humble” we're all supposed to be (see: this video by the amazing 💥 Amy Kean 💥 very accurately skewering this very serious trend).
We’re out of practice. Much like meditation and mindfulness, knowing yourself is a skill that must be practiced with regularity and intention. We’ve spent so long discouraging people – women, namely – from focusing on themselves and what they personally believe or want, that when they reach that mid-career identity crisis they find they have no idea how to get back to themselves.
For evidence of this trend, look no further than the agendas and topis of any women’s leadership group. Everyone is interested in personal branding, because they feel a combination of all these factors at play.
But isn’t just a women’s problem. We all need our women leaders to be connected to who they truly, authentically are, and to know how to talk about who that person is and what they believe.
The alternative is that women will exit, they will disappear, or they will stop being fully present at a time when we need truly authentic leaders.
Together, we need to recognize that, while we all benefit from women are able to succeed in corporate leadership, these women belong to nobody except themselves.