The position

The mask, and what it costs

Nothing so conclusively proves a man’s ability to lead others as what he does from day to day to lead himself. Thomas J. Watson, who built IBM. 1939.

How are you measured at work?
Not how your company says you are measured.
How you believe you are measured.

That is what drives your behaviour. More often than not, it has little to do with how your team actually evaluates you as a leader.

Is it the image you project? The mask you wear to every meeting? The calm, diplomatic, on-message you? The you that was created to hide what you really think about yourself?

Does it feel exhausting at times?
Do you feel like an impostor?
Were you even aware you wore a mask?

Over time, many leaders become experts at projecting composure while concealing uncertainty, fear or self-doubt. Everyone is playing the same game, wearing a carefully constructed mask, one for every occasion: work, home, family, friends.

That act compounds with age, but every performance has a cost. In your health. In your relationships. With your happiness.

The other kind of composure

Real composure is not a better performance. It is the absence of one. You are not spending energy trying to appear in control. You are in control, because you have done the work underneath it. The authority does not come from the title, and it does not come from the act. It comes from self-mastery.

True authority comes from biology, not from position or perceived status. A team can tell the difference between a leader who is composed and a leader who is performing composure, even when they could not tell you how they know. They are reading the nervous system, not the job title.

This is not only a corporate problem

Social media has quietly made performers of all of us, and the walls between work, home and social life have come down, so there is less and less of an off-stage where a person can simply stop and be themselves. Even authenticity has become something we curate.

Most of it is not conscious. People perform without knowing that they are performing. Which is why the work begins where it does.

What it means for a career

When I left the corporate world, I believed there had only ever been two choices open to me. Sell out, or shut up. Comply and lose yourself, or resist and be shown the door.

There is a third way. Real composure, built rather than performed, would have given me back my diplomacy and taken the cynicism out of my voice, without asking me to surrender a single thing I believed. It is subtle, it can be taught, and it puts you ahead of the peers who are burning themselves out on compliance at one end and resistance at the other.