This commentary was originally published on Forbes.com. The views expressed are the author’s own.
Have you ever heard this kind of career advice?
“Never let them see you sweat.”
“Keep your cards close to your chest.”
“Don’t say anything until you have the solution.”
For decades these mantras have shaped how many of us show up at work: polished, composed, carefully edited. The implicit message is that credibility depends, at least in part, on how well you manage what other people get to see.
There are good reasons we learned to follow that advice. Composure matters. Judgment matters. Not every thought or feeling belongs at work. The problem isn’t restraint. It’s when restraint becomes our only way of being with each other and we lose choice. Expanding our range gives us more ways to meet the moment.
What Stays Out of the Room
I see the consequences all the time. A client, student, or executive tells me about an everyday exchange that is bothering them, and they can describe in remarkable detail what they were thinking and feeling while it was happening. They were frustrated. They felt dismissed. They could see the other person becoming defensive. They cared much more about the outcome than they had let on.
When I ask how much of that they actually said to the person they were interacting with, the answer is often: very little.
For years many of us have been learning to polish away the parts of ourselves that seemed insufficiently professional. As machines become more capable of producing polish, polishing ourselves further may be the wrong adaptation.
We can be remarkably articulate about our experience of one another, just not necessarily to one another.
All that potentially useful human information gets carried out of the room. We vent about it to a spouse, debrief it with a colleague, bring it to a coach, replay it in our heads on the way home. The people who might most benefit from knowing it often never do.
What the Red Ink Doesn’t Say
Consider a lawyer who cares deeply about developing the next generation of associates. She reads an associate’s work closely and redlines it with zeal because she wants that person to become an excellent lawyer. She experiences those corrections as an investment.
The associate sees page after page of red ink and begins to wonder whether he has any future in the profession.
The conversation between them stays almost entirely focused on the quality of the work. The lawyer’s investment remains largely invisible, and so does the associate’s growing discouragement. Both people may care about exactly the same goal, and neither has access to what the experience means to the other.
Neither of them is doing the job badly. They are doing what they were taught to do: stay focused on the task, manage yourself, keep moving.
Hiding Is Work, Too
In An Everyone Culture, Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey describe what people are doing alongside their actual jobs: “a second job no one is paying them for,” spent managing impressions, covering weaknesses, concealing uncertainty. They argue that all this hiding represents an enormous loss of organizational resources.
Hiding is one word for it. Withholding is another, and it puts the cost in a different place: not what I am covering up about myself, but what I am keeping from you that you might need in order to understand what you are dealing with. Sometimes what we withhold is information about the work. But we also withhold our experience of one another. That is harder to see, because nothing was technically left unsaid about the task.
There is a relational cost as well. The work of making sense of what happened moves somewhere else: to the hallway conversation, the text thread, the private rumination afterward. The interaction itself stays professionally tidy, and the space between us becomes poorer. Perhaps most tragically, we get used to this kind of social poverty and begin to expect and contribute no more than what the social norm appears to demand.
Letting Yourself Be Known
One way to think about the alternative is self-disclosure: allowing other people appropriate access to some of what you are thinking, feeling, noticing, valuing, or experiencing.
When people hear the term, they tend to think it means more facts about themselves. What I mean is closer in: telling a little more of what matters to you and what you are experiencing with them, which most people find considerably more horrifying.
And what stays hidden is surprisingly ordinary.
“I really want this to work.”
“I was disappointed by that decision.”
“I’m more uncertain about this than I’ve been letting on.”
“I care about your development.”
“I think something is happening in this meeting that we aren’t talking about.”
What is even more unusual is disclosure in the here and now. “I was disappointed by that decision” is a report about an event in the past. “I think something is happening in this meeting that we aren’t talking about” is about you and me, right now, while it is still going on. It tells you nothing about my history and everything about my experience with you. Both can be valuable, but the latter is the kind of disclosure most of us have become especially skilled at avoiding.
Nothing on that list is a confession. Each one gives another person something to respond to, and what happens next may be where much of the value lies. Research on reciprocal self-disclosure finds that disclosure invites disclosure in return, and that pairs who take turns report more closeness and a stronger sense of being responded to than pairs where one person does the revealing. Connection isn’t produced by one person revealing themselves. It develops through what happens next between them.
I know something about the pull in the other direction. Academic distance is a well-trained habit for me, and a comfortable zone. It is also how I can end up a little more separate from the people I most want to feel connected to. Part of what draws me to the practice of self-disclosure is that it gives me more choice.
That mutuality of human connection, the experience of being known and becoming known to one another, is particularly worth paying attention to now. AI can generate the memo, improve the presentation, draft the feedback, and produce language that sounds reassuring, empathetic, even candid. It will keep getting better at the things we have long associated with polished professional performance. For years many of us have been learning to polish away the parts of ourselves that seemed insufficiently professional. As machines become more capable of producing polish, polishing ourselves further may be the wrong adaptation.
The invitation is not to abandon composure, judgment, or authority. It is to reconsider the assumption that being professional requires being less known.
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