Which One Is the Real You?

Many leadership problems are just human habits of containment.

She ran a tight meeting. Clear decisions, no wasted minutes, not a lot of warmth. If you'd asked me to describe her as a leader that day, that's what you'd have gotten.

Then the assessment surfaced how she is with strangers.

Someone she'd met later that same day, at a party, no stakes, no script, walked away changed by something she'd said. The most alive, precise, generous version of her I'd come across. And it had never once shown up at work. The capacity wasn't missing. She'd decided, somewhere back, that it didn't belong in the office, so she filtered it out and called what was left "professional."

Tidy enough to make me believe the real self always lives outside the job.

Then I sat with a leader who has an incredible gift of making a room feel safe. At work he does it without thinking — people leave his office lighter than they came in. At home, that same warmth had quietly turned into logistics and a bit of scorekeeping. He was more himself in the building he commuted to than at his own kitchen table.

So which one's the real you?

I used to think that was a real question. The assessments keep suggesting it isn't — or at least that the answer isn't fixed. We assume there's one true version of us hiding under the masks, and that work is usually the mask. But different environments seem to give different parts of us permission to show up. The office isn't always the performance. Sometimes it's the only place a person gets to be the whole thing.

Many leadership problems aren't leadership problems. They're human problems that happen to show up at work.

We're rarely wrong that we perform somewhere. We're usually wrong about where we stop.