Is bringing your personality to work a good thing?
Since the Enlightenment movement in the 19th century, businesspeople have aspired to create organizations that work like machines. Henry Ford was an advocate of this philosophy too. When he established his factory at 450 Amsterdam Street, it was designed on the ethos of making men machines.
This is how the social commentator Thomas Carlyle reported on the consequences of the Industrial Revolution seeing the ‘machinery of organization’ forge a new society.
“Were we required to characterize this age of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call it, not a Heroic, Devotional, Philosophical, or Moral Age, but, above all others, the Mechanical Age. It is the Age of Machinery, in every outward and inward sense of that word; the age which, with its whole undivided might, forwards, teaches, and practices the great art of adapting means to ends. There’s no end to machinery. With individuals, in like manner, natural strength avails little. No individual now hopes to accomplish the poorest enterprise single-handed and without mechanical aids; he must make interest with some existing corporation and till his field with their oxen.” (Signs of the Times, 1829)
The Curriculum Vitae
A CV these days is meant to be a filter to reduce the pile of job applicants. It’s framed on the traditional ideal of a worker being a cog in a machine. Employers look for repeated examples of the worker ‘being the cog’ throughout their lives. This would be great if businesses still wanted cogs.
Workers are not cogs today
In the modern workplace, if you want a machine to do a job, you can buy a machine. We have physical robots, software robots, AI…
The role of humans is to be human
This raises the issue of how workers present their credentials in the modern era, and how employers decide what they need to succeed. There is a school of neurotypical thought that employers need employees ‘like them.’ This creates groupthink and a weak culture. There is another that believes workers should be able to bring their whole selves to work. And another that doesn’t want to be obliged to expose their full personality — arguing that some things should remain personal.
The question is, what do you think?
About the Author
Ian Tomlin is a seasoned marketer, entrepreneur, and business leader with a 30+ year career at the intersection of strategy, technology, and marketing. As the founder of successful businesses, including Newton Day Ltd, Ian brings a wealth of expertise in guiding companies toward compelling brand stories. Reach out to Ian via LinkedIn to transform your marketing approach and tell your brand story effectively.
