Online exclusive
Sandy Burgham is a principal at Play Contemporary Leadership CoLab, a consultancy practice specialising in leadership development and organisational culture. She writes for listener.co.nz about her observations of modern corporate life.
I recently faced the inconvenience and frustration of being locked out of my Facebook account. It wasn’t due to violating their standards, but rather, trying to reset my password after drinking a third glass of wine, with quite a heavy pour.
Our practice’s assistant was more annoyed than I was, because I was supposed to be posting enticing titbits of information for our business page. I told her I held Mark Zuckerberg personally responsible and would not post on Facebook out of principle. But that would leave me with LinkedIn, which I have always found a tad embarrassing.
We’ve all seen the LinkedIn posts that play to the not-so-hidden agenda of self-promotion:
“So blessed I get to work with this great bunch of people!”
“Thanks, team, for another amazing team building-event” ie, team-oriented messaging embedded in a sea of individual vanity posts:
“Here I am at the [opening of an envelope]!”
“So honoured to be invited to speak at [insert forgettable conference here]”
“Proud to be…”
“Excited to attend…”
“Honoured to be nominated…”.
Younger family members as well as our enthusiastic millennial assistant infer that my allergy to oversharing is to do with my age. But I beg to differ. I’m all up for promoting goods and services but “personal branding” encourages performance about being a successful executive.
Furthermore, scrolling through a LinkedIn feed one could be mistaken for thinking everyone is having a great time in corporate life. But most people are not. Yet even “having a bad day” itself gets used to showcase vulnerability and humanity as an important part of this concept of “personal brand”, encouraging messages of “kia kaha” from people they met once at a conference.
In a previous incarnation I was a brand strategist, and so in 1997, when management guru Tom Peters wrote what would become a seminal article, “The Brand Called You” for Fast Company magazine, I lapped it up. It all made total sense: to actively manage self-image in a market-driven society, to promote oneself, to stand out from the crowd … to win!
When I went consulting, I agonised about my personal website and logo, which remains languishing in cyberspace with a photo taken seven years ago, before I stopped dying my hair. Please don’t look.
The secret to personal branding is to look positively self-actualised. In Facebook terms this is “living your best life”. In LinkedIn terms it is looking like an “authentic” leader.
The latter are supposedly so centred and secure in knowing who they are, they naturally err towards a team orientation. But herein lies the problem. Extensive research shows that in large organisations, most managers and leaders are at a stage of adult development where they are both individually motivated and externally validated.
This validation in contemporary organisational culture comes from being, or at least looking like, or even convincing yourself and others that you are . . . a team player! Collaboration is IN, individualistic command and control is OUT. But very few people are at a level of conscious maturity where they can actually collaborate effectively, let alone truly say that the team is more important than moi.
This is not because they are narcissists. But rather, it comes down to how human beings develop. Learning how to foster one’s expertise and then act on it to get ahead of others, is a rite of passage and part of how we learn about ourselves.
The trouble is, because there is so much validation around ‘winning’ and ensuring that a social media audience sees them as a happy, self-actualised successful leader, people don’t seem to grow out of this phase which is wholly individualistic. They want to promote the team in principle, but not if it means being completely anonymous. This is true even for those who shy away from the limelight.
How do we know? Often through the answer to this question: if your organisation delivered on something truly ground-breaking and you were a key part of making it happen, how would you feel if your contribution remained unknown or unacknowledged?
Yeah, I didn’t think you’d like it.
