Do you bring a version of yourself to work – a polished, carefully curated version? More to the point, do you leave certain parts of you behind? Like the part of you whose marriage is failing or is grappling with a major health concern. And what happens when your colleagues get a peek at who the real person is behind the ‘professional’ mask? Is it a disaster or an opportunity to grow?

It’s quite a trendy idea, bringing your whole self to work. Is it to be encouraged? If you’d asked me twenty years ago when I was a manager, I’d have said absolutely not, and I wouldn’t have been unusual in that. Like most managers and leaders at the time, I believed in leaving one’s personal and family problems parked outside and bringing the best version of oneself to work. This had always served me well, or so I believed. However, over the past few months at our Peer-to-Peer Leadership coaching forums, I have noticed that the more the group and especially myself as the facilitator can be comfortable with who we are, the better the sessions. More importantly, the members report better results from their efforts to manage change and create a high-performance culture in their businesses.

This does not mean we come to the forums to ‘wash our dirty laundry in public’. In fact, the opposite is the case. We agree to create a safe and confidential place where people are comfortable revealing as much about their life’s challenges as they feel is right for them.

My view on how we develop and grow as a leader has changed as a result of the feedback I’ve received from the leaders I interact with. I have come to realise that our leadership and personal growth does not come solely from our experience gained from leading others at work, from training courses we attend or the books we read but also from navigating difficult situations we encounter outside work, in our personal and family lives.

Whether it’s us or someone close to us, going through a difficult divorce or estrangement from a family member creates opportunities to build resilience and fine tune our emotional intelligence in a way that no training course or business challenge can get close to. However, we often discount the wisdom we’ve gained in this way, favouring management training courses and books to help us make decisions in a very complex business environment.

Using heat to bake bread

Something I have become very aware of is how personal challenges can provide us with a fertile ground in which to fine tune our ability to deal with the complex emotional issues that are often behind the situations we deal with at work. The heat of these family and community situations can be the oven in which wholesome bread is cooked, provided we have the awareness to harvest that wisdom, bread that can nourish the whole community.

Being able to learn from our personal and family challenges and successes can provide us with a foundation on which to build. We can then go into business challenges with a greater sense of confidence in our ability to navigate our way through the situation. But only if we can see the benefits rather than the downsides of having to deal with them, and don’t feel we have to hide or suppress what we’re going through.

The untapped wisdom of our employees

At a recent forum, this topic came up. The leaders present that day recounted how the potential of their employees was not being realised because of a culture of only seeing them through the lens of the role they currently performed. I used to be very much on board with this view as I saw the family issues people encountered as a distraction from their work roles. When many of my female employees went on maternity leave, I saw this as a distraction the business could have done without. As I now reflect on this, I realise that many of my best supervisors developed their leadership wisdom as a result of spending time at home rearing their children.

Even for those who don’t have families to raise, having to save for and go through the challenges of buying their own home, or even being temporarily homeless, which is a real possibility these days, are opportunities to challenge their abilities to make better and more informed decisions. These are all ways to gain wisdom and resilience and these experiences make them who they are.

It’s not about everybody behaving as they would at home; it’s about creating a safe space in which they can be themselves that little bit more. You can just imagine how having permission to be more authentic could transform team dynamics, morale and performance.

How do you feel about your employees being their authentic selves at work? How could you demonstrate that you value the wisdom they are gaining from their own experiences and challenges, and that you welcome their unique perspective?