From Posturing to Realism


While many businesses, especially start-ups, aspire to develop cultures where authenticity, honesty and vulnerability are highly valued, the reality for many organisations is often quite different. For many of us, the “theatre of teamwork”, as the professor of socio- logy Richard Sennett calls it, can feel like an incredibly intimidating stage to step onto.


We are often held back by the feeling that we are impos- tors playing our corporate role rather badly, while our colleagues seem to have received the script well in advance. Impostor syndrome runs rife through many organisations, and ironically, the more prestigious the organisation we work for, the more likely we are to feel that perhaps we have slipped through the interview process by accident. Some work cultures can create an ideal of who we’re supposed to be that—secretly—we sense we can’t possibly live up to, though we might just manage to fake it. In an ironic endgame, we might feel we are “faking” being authentic: we’re pretending to be exactly who we are, all the while knowing that we’re not.


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