The case for bringing your ‘whole self’ to work
Spend enough time in corporate America, and somewhere along the line you’ll hear the refrain: Bring your whole self to work. It’s become the mantra of modern management—printed on culture decks, repeated in leadership off-sites, and embedded in HR rhetoric.
The idea traces back to management thinker and author Frederic Laloux, a former associate partner at McKinsey & Company, who argued that the most progressive organizations invite employees to show up fully. Not as cogs in the machine, but as the complex and multifaceted humans we are.
We invited Eric Solomon on the From the Culture podcast, where the PhD-trained cognitive psychologist who’s led research for YouTube, Spotify, and Google explored this idea further—the benefits and unintended consequences of it all.
The promise of bringing your “whole self” to work is simple: When people are free to be themselves, extraordinary things happen. To that end, Solomon provides a compelling case study. A self-proclaimed “dork” who grew up in NYC and became a DJ, Solomon brought his understanding of humanity, skills as a communicator, technical know-how, and love for music to work—which enabled him to build Spotify’s brand architecture and launch the company’s super popular Wrapped annual campaign. Not bad, right?
The intersection of his “full self” unlocked an opportunity that might not have been available to “Eric Solomon the psychologist and tech guy” alone. The DJ in him provided an understanding that his “work self” likely would have missed. And that’s the promise of bringing your “whole self to work”: When people are free to be themselves, extraordinary things happen. However, this also opens the floodgates to the rest of our whole selves that may not seem so congruent with the actual work.
The Problem With “Whole Self”
While Solomon was making breakthroughs at Spotify, he was also dealing with the traumatic loss of his father and all the accompanying grief that spilled over into his work. The grief, the anguish, and the inability to manage it all naturally seeped into his work life and made work a challenge, despite his many successes. That’s just a natural consequence of life, right? Our full selves have to deal with all the intricacies of life—some good and some bad. Consequently, when we bring our full selves to work, we’re bringing all of that with us.
Is this the “whole self” that Laloux advocated for? I’m not so sure. The organizational psychologist Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic has famously pushed back on the “whole self” narrative. He argues that we shouldn’t bring our whole selves to work because many of us are still figuring ourselves out. We’re carrying unresolved grief. Unprocessed experiences. Unrealized anxiety. The unfiltered authenticity of our full selves can potentially spark chaos in the office rather than creativity and connection. So, perhaps it’s best that we separate the two: our work selves and our personal selves. But now we have the plot of Apple TV’s hit show Severance, and surely, that’s not the reality we want either.
The Myth of Separation
In the dystopian world of Severance, employees undergo a surgical procedure that divides their memories between work life and personal life. The result? An “innie” self that only exists within the office walls, and an “outtie” self that carries on in the outside world, completely unaware of their work life. And never the twain shall meet. As far-fetched as this work of fiction may seem, it’s not as far removed from our work reality as we might think.
Many of us have become masters at compartmentalizing our lives—creating distinct personas for work and home. We put on our “professional” self when we clock into the office, leaving our personal lives at the door and switching on our “innie” selves. A LinkedIn version and a living-room version. A boardroom persona and a weekend human. But here’s the thing: We don’t have a “work self” and a “home self”—we just have a “self.” Any attempt to sever the two is not only fiction, but it also robs our work of the depth, creativity, and innovation that comes from our whole selves.
The modern workplace loves the phrase “bring your whole self to work,” yet it resists the interrogation of the conditions underneath it. Wholeness. Bringing your whole self assumes something important: that you actually have a whole self to bring. Often, we don’t. You can’t bring your whole self if you’re not working toward wholeness. And that’s where the deeper human work comes in. Grief. Reflection. Identity. These aren’t distractions from professional life. They’re the raw materials that shape it.
In our conversation with Solomon, one theme surfaced repeatedly: Organizations are asking more of leaders than ever before while giving them fewer structures for growth and support. The result? Lonely leaders. Burned-out managers. Fragmented identities. People trying to operate like severed halves of themselves.
The Real Opportunity
So, what’s the alternative? It’s not about separation of self or switching on and off, but about integration. Realizing that the person who shows up in the meeting should be recognizably the same human who shows up at the dinner table. Not identical, but coherent. The truth is, we never separate the two; we negotiate which parts of ourselves show up. We toggle between identities the way a DJ toggles between records or a producer mixes a song—boosting some frequencies while muting others. Sometimes the polished professional appears. Sometimes the complicated human leaks through. Embracing this truth is the reality in which we should engage.
When we do this work—striving for wholeness while simultaneously creating environments that support it—that’s when extraordinary things happen. We unlock levels of creativity, empathy, and innovation that simply aren’t possible when we’re operating as fragmented versions of ourselves. So, let’s retire the notion of leaving part of ourselves at home when we go to work. Instead, let’s focus on becoming more whole and more integrated individuals, while creating workplaces that not only allow but encourage us to be us. After all, we’re not just employees; we’re humans. And it’s about time our workplaces reflect that reality.