Lean In

beingprofessional meant being organized and focused and keeping my personal life separate. Early on at Google, Omid and I would have a one-on-one meeting each week. I would enter his office with a typed agenda and get right to it. I thought I was being so efficient, but my colleague Tim Armstrong (who later became CEO of AOL) kindly pulled me aside one day to give me some advice. He told me that I should take a moment to connect with Omid before diving in. Since Omid and I were the only people in those meetings, it was clear who had mentioned this to Tim. I made the adjustment and started asking Omid how he was before leaping into my to-do list. It was a good lesson. An all-business approach is not always good business.
    It has been an evolution, but I am now a true believer in bringing our whole selves to work. I no longer think people have a professional self for Mondays through Fridays and a real self for the rest of the time. That type of separation probably never existed, and in today’s era of individual expression, where people constantly update their Facebook status and tweet their every move, it makes even less sense. Instead of putting on some kind of fake “all-work persona,” I think we benefit from expressing our truth, talking about personal situations, and acknowledging that professional decisions are often emotionally driven. I should have learned this lesson years earlier. When I was graduating from business school in 1995, Larry Summers offered me a job at Treasury. I wanted the job desperately, but there was an issue: I did not want to move back to D.C., where my soon-to-be ex-husband lived. One of the hardest calls I’ve ever had to make was to tell Larry that I could not accept the job. Larry pressed me on why, and I thought about telling him that I really wanted to try consulting in Los Angeles. Instead, I opened up. I explained that I was getting divorced and wanted to move far away from D.C., which held too many painful memories. Larry argued that it was a big city, but it didn’t seem big enough for me. A yearlater, when enough time had passed and I felt ready to return to D.C., I called Larry and asked if the opportunity was still available. It was one of the easiest calls I have ever made, in part because I had been honest the year before. If I had told Larry that I was passing on the job for professional reasons, I would have appeared impulsive when I reversed that decision. Since the real reason was personal, sharing it honestly was the best thing to do.
    People often pretend that professional decisions are not affected by their personal lives. They are afraid to talk about their home situations at work as if one should never interfere with the other, when of course they can and do. I know many women who won’t discuss their children at work out of fear that their priorities will be questioned. I hope this won’t always be the case.
    My sister-in-law, Amy Schefler, had a college roommate, Abby Hemani, who is a partner in one of Boston’s most prestigious law firms. The line between personal and professional was erased for Abby when her seven-month-old daughter was diagnosed with Dravet syndrome, a rare and severe form of epilepsy. Abby explained that her mostly male partners got used to seeing her cry at the office and their response was heartwarming. “It was as if they envisioned me as one of their own daughters and wanted to comfort me,” she said. Abby insists that her public emotion improved her work situation both by turning her colleagues into a source of support and by leading to more flexible hours. “I know several men at my firm who have had similar experiences with sick children, but they didn’t feel they could be as forthcoming as I was,” she said. “So, in the end, I think my female manner of relating served me well.”
    Not every workplace and every colleague will be as generous and caring. But I do think we are moving toward at least blurring the line between personal and professional. Increasingly, prominent thinkers in the field of leadership studies likeMarcus Buckingham are challenging traditional notions of leadership. Their research suggests that presenting leadership as a list of carefully defined qualities (like strategic, analytical, and performance-oriented) no longer holds. Instead, true leadership stems from individuality that is honestly and sometimes imperfectly expressed. 4 They believe leaders should strive for authenticity over perfection.