In Defence Of Masking At Work: Four Challenges To The Current Trend

In the neurodiversity and the mental health at work worlds there has been a consistent push towards “bringing your whole self to work” and “unmasking”. As a correction to a culture where people expend emotional and cognitive resources to pretend everything is fine, and relationships lacked authenticity, this has been a bonus. Indeed, in a recent survey of 2000 UK managers by Mental Health First Aid, 89% reported that bringing your whole self to work was important for performance. The managers reported that being open about yourself and your identity was necessary for psychological safety and that this was an essential protection for wellbeing.

However, only 44% of managers reported feeling currently able to share their own personal identity openly at work and 75% reported symptoms of mental distress. To understand this conundrum, we need to unpack the concept of psychological safety vis-à-vis masking at work. Here are four challenges to our current model of psychological safety at work.

In her original concept, Dr Amy Edmondson characterized psychological safety as the ability to communicate openly about failures, risks at work without fear of whistleblowing reprisal. A psychologically safe team can communicate with candour, they are unlikely to shame, chastise or ridicule members for mistakes. A culture where people feel safety to take risks and explore problems has advantages in terms of creativity, but also prevent of organizational failure. A lack of psychological safety has been implicated in a number of high profile disasters such as the Deep Water Horizon oil spill. Google famously found that their highest performing teams had strong psychological safety. The literature supporting the importance of psychological safety is actually very work-focused, less about wellbeing.

That said, it seems reasonable to assume that in a culture where there is an absence of ridicule and shaming for work related tasks, that this would naturally include an absence of discrimination for identity and health characteristics. However, somewhere in the conversation we have detached these features from their overarching goal, and the “authentic self” has become the end goal in and of itself. In the race to be seen as healthy, caring employers, some have argued that we have gone too far: a New York Times article quotes an overstretched business leader:

“A lot of staff that work for me, they expect the organization to be all the things: a movement, OK, get out the vote, OK, healing, OK, take care of you when you’re sick, OK. It’s all the things,” an executive director for an advocacy organization recently told The Intercept. “Can you get your love and healing at home, please?”

Management is increasingly parental, which is actually too much pressure for both parties. It’s not appropriate or safe to have people with little or no training handling in depth conversations about mental health or neurodivergent diagnoses. Managers have a duty to respond within their remit to disclosure, which may involve a specialist referral or time off work. We can act as a pivotal force for good by recognizing when an employee is struggling and signposting, rather than assuming there is an attitude problem. We are not required to act as counsellors and therapists. Our remit is functional performance and talking with candour and kindness about what is, and what is not, working.

Research on race, gender, non-visible disability and sexuality repeatedly notes that masking is necessary for many of us at work. Stigmas persist, and where we have more than one marginalized identity, revealing too much can hinder our progress, making people less likely to take us seriously. Unmasking in this case might reduce psychological safety when we are trying to highlight concerns. Further, masking neurodivergent or mental health traits might be a survival mechanism for Black and Brown people interacting with the police or emergency services.

So how does it land when more privileged counterparts extol the virtues of being authentic at work? In their critique of Authentic Leadership from the position of being Black and Brown academic women, Drs Ngunjiri and Hernandez make the point that as their students used discriminatory tropes to describe them, they would not have benefitted from authentic communication. Bringing your whole self to work seems only to apply when that self has a positive message in their case.

How much is too much vulnerability? We each have very different markers for what is considered oversharing versus being masked. And therein lies the difficulty: as we move the dial of what is considered a “normal” amount of sharing, we risk opening line of communication that is not healthy in a workplace. Some people come to work specifically to forget things that are happening or have happened in their personal life. Others simply think it is no one else’s business. The “whole self” movement has inserted itself into professional narratives. Linked In posts have become more like Facebook, circa 2016, with tales of woe retold as inspiration, acting as bait for algorithms. It is hard to avoid explaining yourself in public forums, and those who refrain, for reasons of stigma, trauma, emotional fragility are not invited. Holding too many personal details about each other can cause the opposite of psychological safety – where we are frightened to tell our colleagues about a serious risk in case we upset them during a difficult time.

Being afraid of people finding out who you are is not healthy at work. But this is not the only purpose of masking. We mask all the time at work for really good reasons – to avoid knee jerk reactions to decisions, to avoid placing undue emotional labor on colleagues by overspilling, to rise above difficulties in order to get the job done. Psychological safety is not risked by holding appropriate, professional boundaries.

You can publish guidance on this and talk about it in meetings. A lot of people go into an awkward, self conscious mode when colleagues are over or under sharing at work. They avoid talking about what’s happened, and it can hang in the air, making everyone feel tense. You are allows to manage expectations here by providing some guidance on business etiquette, with examples of what is, and isn’t acceptable. These are unwritten rules, usually, which are kryptonite to neurodivergent people and those coming from outside the majority culture in terms of gender, age, race and more. It might feel like overkill to provide a steer, but you would be surprised to know how many people would appreciate it.

There is a time and a place for authentic exchanges, but there is also a time and a place for holding back.

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