HR Peep Show

Authenticity At Work

• HR Peep Show • Season 1 • Episode 1

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HR Peep Show podcast hosts AnnE Diemer, Claire Baker, and Krista Lane delve into the complexities of authenticity in the workplace. They discuss the unrealistic expectation of bringing one's whole self to work, the impact of masking and code-switching on psychological safety, and the consequences of rigid professional norms. Highlighting the controversial stance of Coinbase on social issues, the hosts examine how personal identities and political issues intersect with professional environments. They also share insights on how empathetic leadership and authentic management can create a more inclusive and productive workplace. Through real-world examples like Airbnb’s empathetic layoff approach and challenges faced by individuals trying to fit into prescribed professional molds, the episode emphasizes the importance of understanding and addressing authenticity for better organizational culture and employee well-being.

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Authenticity At Work - Show Notes & Transcript


Acknowledgments

This episode appreciates all the contributions made by participants in our live event series called Team TuneUp, but especially those by Tali Ramo, Elizabeth Onyeabor, Jillian Majka, and Jennifer Cassidy. 

Team TuneUp brings together People-minded folks who want to nerd out on the big and small of topics we don’t always get to think about in our day jobs: juicy, underappreciated, or sometimes existential questions that affect employees and employers alike.

The HR Peep Show podcast is produced by Krista Lane and hosted by Claire Baker, AnnE Diemer, and Krista Lane. Music was composed for the Royalty Free Music Library by Rik Pfenninger.

You can email us with feedback, questions, or topic ideas at team@hrpeepshow.com. If you’d like the chance to contribute to a future episode, we encourage you to join our next Team TuneUp event. You can find out more at hrpeepshow.com.

We also thank our friends who listened to early takes and gave feedback, and those we spoke to about making a podcast— especially Kamrin Klauschie, Kevin Landucci, and Jenna Lane for their invaluable expertise, advice, and encouragement.


Listener Support 

Until we’re famous and sponsored, your support makes producing this podcast sustainable. That can look like continuing to listen, sharing this podcast with friends and colleagues, or buying us a coffee. 


A Disclaimer

While we hope you’ll take away useful ideas that help your careers and/or workplaces, what we share in this podcast should not be construed as advice specific to your situation. But, if you like what you hear, feel free to consult with us!


Additional reading 

Articles we recommend, if you want to keep nerding out on this topic:


References 

Links we read/watched during the writing of this episode, in chronological publication order. Note, we did not remove references whose original direct mentions were edited out of the episode, in case their influence is relevant to remaining discussions: 



Transcript 

[theme music underlying voiceover text]


[KRISTA] Welcome to HR Peep Show, where we pull back the curtain of life and human resources in The United States. 

[ANNe] I'm AnnE Diemer. 

[CLAIRE] I'm Claire Baker. 

[KRISTA] I'm Krista Lane, and we are your hosts. This may be our first podcast rodeo, but not when it comes to People work. We are each fractional consultants at the intersection of people and operations with a collective several decades of experience both in-house and consulting under our belts. 


[theme music underlying voiceover fades out over the first half of the next sentence]


Today, we're talking about authenticity at work with three stories at different levels of impact:  What a company culture of “workers” and not “humans” looks like, how fitting in made one team member blunt her strengths, and how leadership styles affect the team overall. 

To set some context on this topic, for a while, so called People-forward companies said bring your whole self to work. To us, that is an absurd standard, not only because some parts of your life aren't appropriate for work, but also that you should have some agency to decide what overlaps with your work life.

Being a quote unquote professional requires a certain degree of discretion and self censorship. But as people leaders and managers, it's not our job to tell people who to be at work. Our role is to ensure they have what they need to meet the requirements of the role. 


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Let's look at authenticity in the news. Back in fall 2020, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong boldly and publicly declared they [Coinbase] wouldn't participate in the social justice movements on behalf of their employees like many other companies were at the time.

But they didn't just stop there. They also forbade employees from talking about political or social causes at work and said anyone who didn't agree could leave. 5% of the company took an exit package. 

Many critics expected this change to affect those with marginalized identities the most, yet Coinbase claims their diversity numbers weren't significantly altered. But it's hard to say if one could even reasonably expect the numbers to reflect true impact because 2020 was a wildly risky time to be on the job market, even with months of severance.

The primary criticism here is that to exist at all is inherently political. For some, like those with visibly different identities, that's more obvious than for others. It's not just about free speech. It's about whether you or even you at work or just a random replaceable worker bee. 


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[KRISTA] AnnE, I know you have thoughts.

[ANNe] Personally, I wouldn't wanna be the HR department that has to regulate what counts as social causes because where's the line? Identities are political in this country. We can't avoid that. So how do we deal with this? 

[CLAIRE] It has to do with lived experience. And in 2020, there were a lot of situations where people took a public stance that maybe was not consistent with their private behavior. 

[ANNe] Yeah. Just doing, like, performativity. 

[CLAIRE] Yeah. And not necessarily seeing how they made decisions in everyday life may be inconsistent with the slogans and the performative activity.

[ANNe] I agree. I'm thinking about, like, wearing a mask or not wearing a mask. Like, that shows up as political. So if my company is telling me you need to be apolitical at work, but a choice I need to make for my health, like wearing a mask, can be interpreted as political. To me, that makes it really unclear where the line is.

And that's obviously an example of something that can be removed. But if you were to show up at work as a woman, if you're showing up at work as black, if you're showing up at work as queer, all of those identities have political implications that we can't just get rid of because we walked through the door. 

[KRISTA] Yeah. Like, even in some of the follow-up that I was reading about the Coinbase story, they said, like, oh, well, of course, you can still talk about recent events, which did not actually clarify anything. 

[ANNe] Why is that an ‘of course’? I don't get it. Where's the line? 

[KRISTA] Exactly. And I'm not sure that they ever really fully clarified where that line was internally, but having made that stance publicly got rid of the people who didn't agree so that there would be a more uniform population of people who supported that general ideology. 

[ANNe] And the folks who stayed were just gonna stay quiet.

Coinbase never explicitly said you can't be black at work. You can't be gay at work. You can't be… they didn't say that explicitly folks who advocate for Black Lives Matter are not welcome here. It was implicitly in there so everyone starts watching what they say a little bit more, walking on tiptoes a little bit more.

No one wants to work like that. So, of course, we're going to interview elsewhere. Of course, we're gonna get other jobs. Even when you don't explicitly say something, it still has an impact, and it still means you lose great people. 

But if we zoom out and give whoever wrote this Coinbase policy a little bit of grace, which I am very reluctant to do, it sounds like the main goal of this policy was to prevent distractions and encourage productivity at work.

And that part's not wrong. It just doesn't seem like an effective way to do it. If the goal is to reduce distractions, how can that happen without these rigid limitations and without these random lines that we're drawing that we're not even clear where the lines are? 

[KRISTA] Yeah. I am all about a problem solving approach. And if that's what the problem is and that's how they wanna solve it… I guess, but I don't think it's gonna be very effective. 

[ANNe] Because not talking about it doesn't make it less distracting. If we're giving the example of Black Lives Matter and I say this as a white person, I was distracted even when we weren't talking about it at work thinking about people being killed by the police because of the color of their skin. That is distracting even when we're not talking about it, and it gets that much more personal when these folks look like you. It's gonna be distracting whether or not you're allowed to talk about it on Slack.

So I think then it comes more to give people spaces to process, allow for conversation, allow for mental health days. That seems way less distracting and way better for productivity. 

[CLAIRE] Or what if you're having a reproductive health issue and you need to bring it up to your manager and you don't know if you have the psychological safety to talk about what you need to take care of your medical issue. Yeah. Is that a social cause then?

Is that something we can't talk about even though it's directly related to your health? I mean, it's already really hard to talk about. And so taking a stance that people can't talk about political issues at work, then in those moments that it is really hard to talk about something, you're gonna be even more likely to silence yourself. 

[ANNe] That makes me think of another example. You know, most people in their employee handbook say you can take two hours to go and vote because in the United States, Election Day is not a national holiday, so you have to take time off of work to vote.

In some states, it takes more than two hours to vote. There were lines in Georgia. People were in line for five hours. If there's a rule in your workplace that you have to be apolitical, you can't talk about social causes, but you need to post in Slack that, hey, you're not gonna be back within two hours because you're waiting in line to vote… How do you do that? 

I have one other example of how orgs can allow for authenticity and also prevent distractions and encourage productivity. In 2016, after there was a shooting in an Orlando club that was primarily filled with queer folks, our employee resource group at the org that I was at at the time blocked off a conference room for the day, put some snacks in there, put some tissues in there, put some music in there, and we were just kind of in and out throughout the day, talking to other queer folks, just saying our reactions to it. And to me, that was a really good way to let us show up as ourselves, but it wasn't taking away from anything else.

We weren't forcing anyone to have a conversation they don't wanna have. Some folks don't wanna talk about gun violence. I get that. I don't wanna force them to have that conversation, but some folks wanted to be in community. And so we had that space to go to when we wanted it.

And I felt like that's maybe a better “Have it both ways” than just saying, “No. You can't talk about it” because it was still gonna be on our minds regardless. And this at least gave us some space to process and be in community, feel cared for, but not have it be everyone's problem. 


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[KRISTA] The last footnote of this story is how these seemingly isolated decisions led to where we are today. Technically, from the outside, Coinbase faced no real consequences for their 2020 decisions.

Even a year later in 2021, the CEO doubled down that this was the right decision for them. And they may even have been further rewarded given today's allyship with the Trump administration. 

But I wonder if either of their layoffs in 2022 and 2023, both larger percentages and totals of their workforce than the voluntary exits in 2020, had anything to do with how their earlier people choices impacted surviving workers' performance. 

All of this is to say, regardless of one's own political preferences, people practices can and do set precedents that directly impact the future of work and society itself. It's worth taking the time to be thoughtful about what that could mean.


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[KRISTA] Coinbase's choices in 2020 show how businesses can limit authenticity in workplaces at scale, but it happens in one on one relationships too. We have a friend, let's call her Priya, who dealt with this directly from her manager. This manager seemed to believe that professional recruiters have to be extroverts to be successful. Priya was a budding recruiting coordinator whose career path led to being a recruiter, but she was an introvert. Trying to fight against that introversion was physically exhausting and not working out that well.

Thankfully, she found a new position with a manager who had a more inclusive perspective who encouraged her to be herself instead of trying to become someone else. When she leaned into finding her own path to the job responsibilities, she thrived as a recruiter and eventually was promoted to being a program manager in her organization. It reminds me a bit of a clear moment of authenticity from our team tune up conversation with HR leaders, where Elizabeth Anyaabo, chief people and culture consultant at Intergenuity, described choosing clothes to pack for a business trip to a foreign country with a more conservative professional culture than her own. 

[ELIZABETH ONYEABOR] And I'm still in slacks, and I'm not wearing a suit, but I'm still professional. So I'm doing it my way.


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[KRISTA] AnnE, you know Priya and brought this story to us. So what is this bringing up for you? 

[ANNe] For me, the story makes me think a lot about professionalism and the expectations we set in workplaces. I think about it from an HR perspective, just writing job descriptions. When I'm writing a job description, am I describing a person, or am I describing a role this person will be doing?

I try to make it the latter because if I'm describing a person, that automatically is putting biases in the process. Just like if we say professionalism, to me, that's automatically putting biases in the process that are sexist, racist, classist, etcetera, based on what the expectations of professionalism are in the United States. 

[KRISTA] Yeah. It's more more like professionalism is like a proxy for what we are actually trying to get to, which is shared expectations and actual tasks. 

[ANNe] And we get so lost in the professionalism of even for Priya, you gotta be an extrovert. I imagine that's also recruiters and women. You have to you have to want to talk to people. You have to talk in, like, this is my recruiter voice when I was a recruiter. This is how I talked. And that's not me, and that's exhausting to have to do.

And so I think there's, like, other standards wrapped up in that of what it means to be professional and what standards was she being held to that ultimately didn't work out for her because she did better work, and she was a better recruiter when she didn't have to do that. 

[KRISTA] Remember when everybody started learning each other's partner's phone voice? 

[ANNe] Yes. I don't know that I had fully realized that I had one, and that was hilarious to be called out on. But then also hearing my partner's phone voice, call voice, interview voice, hilarious.

[CLAIRE] I have had more than one person, and one of them is sitting at this table, tell me that work Claire is super intimidating, which, I mean, for inside of Claire, they're totally consistent. But I think we also show up to to different situations differently, and we all have our work voice. We all have our phone voice. And I think we we're all kind of switching between these different versions of ourselves. 

[KRISTA] And to be clear, that's okay. That's not inherently wrong. The point is that the authenticity comes from being able to make that choice because that's what you wanna bring to the job. 

[ANNe] And to some extent, like, we live in this white supremacist capitalism world that requires us to make money, and that means play the game. And when folks have to do that, I completely understand it. But I do think workplaces are better when we don't demand that of our people.

When if you wanna opt into it, you can choose to opt into it, as Krista said. But, also, when you're doing it to meet someone else's expectation, I feel like that's when it gets particularly weird. 

[CLAIRE] Yeah. But I think there's a level of respect that you're showing to somebody by playing the game. You know, if your recruiter is like, yeah, this job kinda sucks, but, you know, it pays really well. 

Like, you don't necessarily wanna hear that as a candidate either. And I think it's disrespectful of people's time if you're not showing up with a certain level of seriousness about what you're trying to get done. But that seriousness can present in a lot of different ways. And it's not always what you expect, but when somebody is bringing authenticity to it, it just kinda naturally works.

And, man, there is nothing worse than a phony. 

[ANNe] That. Or I think part of what's hard about someone who's fake if you don't know who you're gonna get when you're working with them, that, like, inconsistency is really weird. And I feel like it's so much easier to be consistent in the workplace if you're being authentic because then you're not having to play as much of a role. And at the same time, sometimes our jobs require it.

So if you can put that hat on this is actually a good example. I have two hats that I wear, literal baseball hats, one of which is pink and it says human resources hat. It was a gift from some colleagues a few years ago. And then I have one that has a black power fist on it. And when I wear my human resources hat, to me, that's, like, a reminder that I'm showing up as human resources first, that I'm prioritizing elements of that role, that I am matching the expectations of professionalism for them.

And then when I'm putting my other hat on that has the black power fist on it, that's when I'm being kind of my pirate self. That's when I'm pushing the boundaries a little bit more. That's when I'm advocating for unions, advocating for employees. That's when I'm gonna, like, push a little bit more. So sometimes I physically switch the hats.

Sometimes it's just kind of an idea of which hat am I wearing right now. But both hats are me. It's just which am I letting come forward the most. Which one I'm leading with? But both are still authentically me.

[CLAIRE] And I've absolutely had things where I've had to say, you know what? You you don't want me in this conversation because I'm just gonna mess it up. And, like, my authentic self is I mean, I wouldn't say it like this, but there have been times that I've been identifying with somebody too hard and have not been in a position to have a hard conversation. And back to that idea of professionalism sometimes meaning not being your full self in a conversation, sometimes it's recognizing that you're at risk for maybe showing too much of yourself, and it's not about you in this moment, and you need to call in somebody who is going to be able to make it more about the person on the other side of the table that just needs you to show up as a professional right now. 

[ANNe] I think that's one of many reasons leaders are a key part of setting the conditions for authenticity among team members so that they can tap in, but they have to be able to do it with authenticity.


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[KRISTA] For our last story, we want to think about opportunities for leaders to show up authentically because they set the tone for the organization. AnnE and I consulted with a nonprofit on culture, performance, and conflict management. We'll call their executive director Brandon. Their problems didn't start out as Brandon's fault, but he dismissed a few smaller issues that escalated into a deeply tangled mess. Brandon was a new leader trying to act like his widely beloved predecessor, and it wasn't working.

It got so bad, the team saw him physically avoiding them by networking off-site with funders and staying silent when group meetings got out of hand. Attrition was on the rise, and productivity was at an all time low. But as outsiders, we saw another side of his leadership. His avoidant behavior was about shielding his team from difficult financial realities and feeling unsure about how to support them through their many other challenges. Just like with Priya finding her own way, Brandon had to also.

But he didn't get there or become confident in his leadership style until he listened to the team's feedback. In that same Team TuneUp conversation mentioned earlier, we also discussed ingredients that create conditions for authentic culture, starting with leaders who are self aware, empathetic, receptive to feedback, and relatable. It may sound like a simple ingredient list, but many of us know the recipe is a bit more complicated than that. Jennifer Cassidy, senior leader of HR in the life sciences and biotech industry, points out one tricky caveat to avoid: 

[JENNIFER CASSIDY] I've seen leaders that will say they're open to feedback and will even sometimes try to put themselves in positions to really obtain that feedback.

But once they actually get the feedback, if it's not positive, then it just gets swept under the rug. And all that does is create less and less trust. Right? Because you ask for it, you put yourself out there to say that you're open to it, and then nothing changes from it, and it's just completely ignored. It creates more damage than if you didn't ask in the first place.


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[KRISTA] Claire, I know you didn't work with AnnE and I on this project, but what is hearing Brandon's story bringing up for you given your work with other leaders? 

[CLAIRE] Well, I mean, being a leader is really hard. Everybody is looking to you, and it brings a degree of self consciousness. And no leader has all of the answers. Sometimes leaders don't show enough of themselves, and it really presents as them being out of touch.

And a lot of times, I will be in the room with a leader having these tough conversations, getting their hot takes on the situation, and it is a lot more nuanced than how it presents in front of the team. But because they feel like they need to walk this line, they are not being their authentic selves, and it turns people off. 

[ANNe] And now there are more leaders that are just kind of showing up as they are. You see a lot of millennials. You see a lot of Gen z, and their version of leadership is gonna be less polished.

And I think there's pluses and minuses for both. You probably want something in the middle. You want authenticity. You want vulnerability, but you don't want to create a sense of uncertainty for your team. So, yeah, leaders definitely have a tough balance to strike. It's not easy. 

[KRISTA] But I think if you've built up enough trust with your team, there's a lot you don't have to tell them. A lot of leaders struggle the most with what they can't share. But if you have trust built up, it's a lot easier to say, there's more I can't share, but we have done the best we can with the information that we have. 

[ANNe] Yeah. I think trust is the key there. 

[CLAIRE] And what I'm hearing is leaders are locked into their own perspectives, and trust often comes from acknowledging the experience of the team and that it is different from the boardroom. You're making decisions as a leader that have a profound impact on people's lives. The leaders that are really good at this maybe aren't necessarily talking about their own perspective and how hard it is to be a leader, but more saying, you know, we had to make this really tough decision. This is why we had to make the tough decision.

We understand that this is going to have an impact on people, and here's what we're doing to try to make that impact less severe, help you land on your feet, whatever it is. 

[ANNe] Acknowledging the individual in those situations, I feel like, is so key. And that's what I'm hearing there is, like, recognizing you're not just out for the shareholders. This isn't just about the profit. Like, individuals are impacted by the business decisions you're making, and that's what we wanna hear from our leaders more. That is authenticity. 

[CLAIRE] Have you all ever heard the email that Brian Chesky sent out when he announced the layoffs in the pandemic.

[ANNe] Which company was that? 

[CLAIRE] Airbnb.

[ANNe] Yes. I liked that one, I think.

[CLAIRE]  And it was, like, thousands of words long, which maybe do not recommend. I should pull it up, but he really expressed gratitude for everything that people had given to the company. He acknowledged the circumstances, and he was very apologetic for what he was doing to people. He made sure that he was giving folks really good severance packages and talked about the life impact, how they'd made that decision.

And I think a lot of other companies kind of followed this model but they basically acted as a recruiting firm to place their team in other companies. And I heard him interviewed about this recently, and he got a little choked up just even, like, reading that email now in 2025. And I think that maybe there are people listening to this who were affected by that layoff and may have their own opinions. That being said, you would hope that a leader who made a decision like that about your life would still feel the emotion of it and would acknowledge the impact that it had on other people. 

[ANNe] Absolutely. And I think that brings us back to Jennifer's point a little bit about how leaders really need to be open to feedback and getting additional perspectives. Because another thing that I remember about that layoff is I believe he did get a lot of additional perspectives and really leaned on his people team for, like, how can we take care of our people in these circumstances. 

[KRISTA] Yeah. I mean, I think about those really seminal moments in a company's history and how they can define what a leader is. We heard of an example earlier today about Brian Armstrong and his choices and how that really defined his company and his leadership moving forward.

And maybe that's not an example we particularly love so much as we might appreciate Brian Chesky's, but the bad times are what can often define who a leader is, how they meet a moment. And there are many ways that you can meet a moment. 

It's not the “what” that you have done, but the “how” that really is what people remember. It's what people talk about. It's the goodwill that it brings, which may not have tangible benefits immediately, but it will often have tangible benefits for years to come as we're even still talking about this email five years later.

I think that says a lot about how leaders can be and, what kind of style they choose to follow. 

[CLAIRE] Well, I found the email. 

[KRISTA, overlapping CLAIRE] Oh, you did. 

[CLAIRE] It was not sent to me. I was not at Airbnb in 2020, but it's very long, and it ends with: 

“to those who are leaving Airbnb, I am truly sorry. Please know this is not your fault. The world will never stop seeking the qualities and talents that you brought to Airbnb and that helped make Airbnb. I wanna thank you from the bottom of my heart for sharing them with us.” 

[ANNe] I like that because it's deeply human. We've been having this whole conversation about authenticity at work, and I feel like if we wanted to summarize what we're asking people to do when we say be authentic at work is be a human.

That's what we want from our leaders. That's what we want from our colleagues. That's gonna make all of this better. And I feel like he encompassed that right there, just being a human while doing this very hard thing. 

[CLAIRE] Well, and all of our stories are about people who were not able to bring their best work performance because they were not able to be themselves at work.

And part of your job performance is yourself and what you bring to the job and those strengths that you bring your unique perspective. Part of authenticity is acknowledging that even though you work in the same place working toward the same goal, not everybody even has the same perspective on that. 

For example, if you don't have children or you are earning enough to pay for your dependence premiums, it's very easy to set your company's benefits for dependence very low. And I think that creating an environment where people can give you feedback rather than churning out and you wind up with just a bunch of maybe young healthy single people on your team and you wind up with blind spots because of that, not just in, say, your benefits plan, but also your product. 


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[KRISTA] To wrap us up here, what do all of these stories have in common?

In our experience, all of these angles are different sides of the same coin. Authenticity is essential to sustain effective leadership and employee experience. 

Authenticity is a vague and muddy term like professionalism, because it's a proxy for all the subjective ingredients that add up to it. It's obvious when someone has it or doesn't, and it looks different from you to me. But there's shared language that is implicit to some and we believe should be explicit to all.

And finally, all this “soft” stuff is actually important. Internal cultural decisions can and do have ripple effects that implicate our industry or even society at large. How many of your bosses, funders, or collaborators have said, well, what are other companies doing when you wanna make a change? Your decisions impact that collective data. 

That's it for today. Thank you for listening and to our guest contributors, Elizabeth Onyeabor and Jennifer Cassidy. 

Stay tuned for future episodes offering both hot takes and practical advice for engagement surveys, hiring, and more.

If you'd like to contribute to a future episode, you can visit hrpeepshow.com to join our monthly live virtual event, Team Tune Up. These facilitated events bring together leaders who care about improving their workplaces for lively real talk discussions and support. You can also engage Claire, AnnE, or me directly to support your organization.

To find out more about our specialties, bios, and links to each of our websites are also available at hrpeepshow.com.

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