As we move into October this year, many of us, particularly those of us who have small children, start to think of Halloween and costumes. When I was growing up, thanks to my Aunt Mary we had amazing costumes. She would spend weeks making ours—like my favorite Cookie Monster costume—by hand. Unfortunately for my kids, I am not that crafty and I often end up having to buy costumes for everyone. We still try to dress up as a family (even the dog) and have fun with it.
While Halloween offers us a fun opportunity to dress up and pretend to be something we are not, I wonder how many of us actually do this on a daily basis. Maybe you don’t think of work clothes as a costume, but how many of us have a home persona and a completely different work persona?
Over the last year and a half, the line between home life and work life has blurred for many. As offices and schools closed, our homes suddenly became both. It became clear to many of us that not only would our office world become aware of our home life—think Zoom meetings with kids suddenly popping into the screen—but our family also became aware of how we work. Suddenly that argument about discovery might be overheard by your children. The way you speak to opposing counsel, your colleagues, and your support staff is now being observed and absorbed.
This new normal, where there is no longer physical separation between work and home, caused many to pay attention to how they act. As we start to transition back to a more formal work environment, I thought it would be good to think of how we changed during this time—and consider ditching the work persona all together.
The research on integrated identities
In a recent study, two researchers found that the more people saw similarities in their different selves, the more “moral” they behaved.
The series of experiments was conducted by Rima Touré-Tillery, a Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management professor, and Alysson Light, a psychology professor at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia. They asked people to describe different roles they have throughout a day—such as mother, wife, lawyer and cook. Then some participants were asked to describe similarities in the way they act through those roles, while others were asked to focus on differences. The groups that focused on the similarities between all their roles seemed to be more honest both on questionnaires and in experiments that looked at actual behavior. The researchers concluded that when you have a completely different persona—at work, for instance—it is easier for you to justify or excuse bad behavior because you really don’t see it as you acting badly.
Maybe you don’t think of work clothes as a costume, but how many of us have a home persona and a completely different work persona?
As some of us start to transition back to the office environment, I encourage us all to think of who we are as a whole. Are we different when our kids are watching? Should we be? It is easy when we are separated from our family for eight, nine or even 10 hours a day to forget that we are parents, spouses and friends. However, it is important for us to remember to not put on a mask and become a new person, but rather to be the same person with some different roles.
