Are you an office chameleon? Why our professional and private selves are often very different

Have you ever wondered what your close friends, or your partner, are like at work? Could your best mate, normally kind and gentle, be a total tyrant in the office? Is it possible that your boyfriend, usually the life and soul of the party, is awkward and submissive in meetings? Many of us are career chameleons, editing our personalities and behaviours when we enter the professional sphere – or feeling ourselves change under pressure. At best, it can lead to career progression. At worst, an identity crisis.

We’ve been editing ourselves at work for centuries. A footman to a king might have flattered a monarch they truly despised. Soldiers in the Second World War would have tried to put on a brave face in the trenches each day. Now, we have city boys dialling up the banter to fit in and get ahead, and receptionists adopting sunny dispositions. It’s a key part of human nature, says cultural anthropologist Dr Alex Gapud, who references socialist Erving Goffman’s theory that life is theatre, and people are like actors on a stage, each playing a variety of parts.

“At work, we play roles,” says Gapud, “whether it’s the role of the boss, or someone that’s client-facing, for example.” Goffman’s theory refers to a frontstage mentality – when we’re “on stage” we behave a certain way, the clothes we wear can be compared to an actor’s costume, and we speak with particular terms or acronyms, almost like a script. Gapud recalls working in a call centre when he was young and using his “phone voice”, which was an octave higher than his own. “That’s not how I normally am, but I was performing the role of the customer service rep,” he says. Margaret Thatcher, on the other hand, famously took lessons in the 1970s to lower the pitch of her voice, to make her seem firmer. These are typical frontstage behaviours. Then there’s the backstage version we all have – when we’re behaving more organically with our equals at work, or our peers in usual life.

“There’s a degree of us putting on a mask,” says career coach Alice Stapleton, explaining that other changes might include adjusting our posture or using less slang. “It’s all about curation. It’s about our reputation and doing what we need to do for a promotion, or to be the sort of leader that we think we need to be.” It goes deeper than just wanting to succeed at work, though. “It’s a need to belong,” says Stapleton. “We’re a species and we want to be part of the tribe. But sometimes when you zoom out and look at what goes on in offices, you think, ‘Why are all these people playing all these parts, then they go home and they’re completely different people? Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could all just be ourselves and get on with the job?”

But these chameleonic tendencies are useful. “The upside is being adaptable,” says Stapleton. “It’s being able to be whatever and whoever you need to be in that circumstance, which will mean that you perhaps get ahead, or are well liked, or you perform well. Sometimes it can be self-preservation – a coping strategy when you’re having to make quite tough decisions.” If you need to sack somebody, for example, take on an intimidating challenge, or carry out a task that you feel ethically conflicted about, you can tell yourself: “Well, that’s just my work self, that’s not really me.”

Gapud says people adopt different selves to “detach” themselves from situations, “for their own sanity”. “It can get really messy otherwise,” he says. “Maybe it’s one of your mates at work who’s a subordinate and you have to let them go. Then you feel the pressure to step into that frontstage role.” The same could perhaps be applied to surgeons, who often try to remove emotions from the task at hand.

It’s not as simple as our professional selves being a complete separation from our private selves, though, like they are in Apple TV’s workplace thriller Severance – where employees’ memories of their work lives and personal lives are surgically divided. At work, we present one of our many personas, and it can still be authentic and sincere. “Who I am on a night out on Saturday with my mates is not who I am in the Monday stand-up,” says Gapud. “That’s not to say that actually one of those is disingenuous.” Stapleton suggests “we all have multiple selves”.

To constantly be editing yourself at work can be exhausting and unhealthy, though. And it’s when your professional self begins to feel inauthentic, or you struggle to recognise yourself, that there’s a problem. Gapud says shyness and anxiety at work tends to happen when there’s “a mismatch between what you feel like you can be and the role you have to play in that organisation’s culture”. “Who are the dominant personalities or demographics? Because if they place an intense pressure on people to conform to a certain behavioural role, I think that’s quite telling about the culture.”

Stapleton has worked with many clients who want to change careers because they feel like they can’t be themselves. “It’s not just the job, it’s what the career or industry says about them, and the people that it might attract,” she says, adding that her clients in their twenties, especially, can feel “timid” at work and struggle to “find their voice and be the more assertive person they are outside of work”. “I see it in myself as well,” she says. “I’m quite an introverted person and I’ve chosen a career where I’m talking to people all day and need to bring a certain amount of energy.”

She has especially noticed that people in high-pressure, prestigious industries such as the legal sector might struggle to be themselves at work. “When you’re young, it seems to carry such status,” she says. “There’s an idea of how you need to be in order to become a partner, for example, so sometimes people have a hard time seeing how they could progress in that way, but still be people-oriented and hold on to their values.” Stapleton adds that when people are editing themselves for a job they don’t actually believe in or get fulfilment from, it can lead to an identity crisis. Especially in places like London where many people define themselves by their jobs.

Of course, it’s not just in industries full of Oxbridge alumni that people can feel out of place at work. A popular Reddit forum on the concept of the “work self” sees one construction worker opening up about feeling like a “fish out of water” and hiding his true self on building sites, where his colleagues make mean jokes and have political views he finds concerning.

Dr Alex Gapud, cultural anthropologist

And there are people whose uglier sides might come out in the workplace, too. We know, especially after the MeToo movements in numerous industries, and increased awareness around bullying culture, that there are many people in positions of power at work who exploit their position, and whose families at home might not recognise the person they become at work. Gapud says that sometimes, “if there’s cruelty or brutality, it’s not just playing self – I think there could also be an issue with the wider organisational culture that places an implicit expectation that that’s how a leader should behave”.

It can’t just be down to the workplace culture, though, because some people at toxic companies can still be unerring agents of good. “Sometimes people think that cruelty is a necessary part of leadership,” says Gapud. “And there’s also the possibility that it comes from something in their life or personality beyond the workplace.” He says that bad behaviour often emerges when a manager hasn’t been taught how to manage, and so “when we’re in new and unfamiliar situations, we often revert to type or follow examples we’ve learned elsewhere”. He compares it to turning into our parents if we become one ourselves.

The crossover between our professional and private selves, however, has never been more blurred than it is today, with the uptick in remote working. Now, we see our CEO’s cat plodding across the keyboard during a Zoom meeting, hear their baby crying upstairs and get a glimpse of their bookshelf. Stapleton points out that, even when people put a filter over their background to stop others from having a window into their lives, the choice to do that is revealing in itself: “That’s curation, isn’t it? That’s saying, ‘I don’t want people to be able to see a bit more of me.’” She says remote working has made it harder for us to play a role, as we see more of our colleagues, but that it’s also created a distance. “It’s such a strange tension,” she says. “I’ve certainly heard from clients that they’ve found it harder when they start a job to establish their professional self or even put their usual self across.”

Gapud also highlights how an advantage of having multiple selves is that it helps you to switch off at the end of the working day. Another big way we disconnect from the stresses of work is by literally taking off our suits, overalls or uniforms. Remote working has changed that. It can also prevent us from showing our “backstage selves” to our colleagues more. “If you’re in the break room at work, a very backstage kind of area, socialising there is organic – you can chat on a coffee break. But remote working complicates that because that friendly interaction becomes a Teams’ message instead.”

So what does Stapleton, as a career coach, advise people to do? While she acknowledges there are always going to be expectations to edit ourselves slightly, she advises her clients to “strive to be in a workplace where you can be yourself as much as possible”. “If that seems impossible, then I’d be asking questions about that career – it may be that you need to move somewhere where there’s a different ethos.”