Where the F is Kate and Other Problems of Authenticity
Or, how do we find privacy in a world that demands the naked truth?
Last week I found myself falling down a conspiracy wormhole. I was in bed, knocked out by illness and with nothing else to do but listen to podcasts and scroll the internet. It was while awake at 2am that I found myself on the portion of TikTok that seamlessly blends a love of the Royal Family with a commitment to conspiracy theories. Before I knew it, I was deep in the “Where the F is Kate?” wormhole, as slightly crazed Americans dissected Kate Middleton’s photoshop skills and pondered whether she and William were in fact part of a global elite who have a secret bunker above the Arctic (seriously).
I was not the only one infected by the madness. My Whatsapp groups filled up with people suddenly wondering what had happened to the Princess of Wales and what exactly a bland statement about abdominal surgery was hiding. It was only when one friend responded to my request for her take on the situation with a shrug and a, “maybe she’s just had surgery, is feeling rubbish and wants some time to herself” that I took a breath and realised, I’d gone so far down the wormhole I couldn’t see the light.
It’s part of the human condition that we want to make sense of things. When we’re missing information, our brains will try to fill in the gaps. When I talk to companies about why bias exists in our hiring and promotion processes, I explain that this need to believe that we have all the information (even when we don’t), is what leads to us making assumptions and, inevitably, mistakes. I was given a taste of this many years ago in a management training course.
As part of the course the group was split in two. One part would be “the leaders” and the other part would be “the employees”. The only information we were given was that the employees had to go into a separate room and wait there, when they returned the leaders would communicate something to them. I was part of the employees and as we sat in that side room waiting to hear from the leaders, speculation about what we would be told went into overdrive. By the time we were able to return to the main room, no more than 15 minutes later, we had formed a union and decided that whatever happened we would simply refuse to do whatever was asked of us. We’d convinced ourselves that the thing that would be communicated was going to be bad and we had to be ready for that.
In the end we walked into the room and found a puzzle with some simple instructions on how to complete it laid out on the table. There was nothing more to it than that. The point of the exercise hadn’t been to communicate anything to anyone, it had been to show us how powerful (and how dangerous) a lack of information can be. If we’d known that we’d be asked to complete a simple game, we probably wouldn’t have even talked about it while we waited. We certainly wouldn’t have unionised and planned our first protest. The communication vacuum, the silence from the leaders, had sent us a little bit crazy.
This is exactly what I’ve seen happen in the last few weeks with the Royal Family. The silence has left space for all sorts of theories to grow. If I was advising the Princess of Wales about how to handle this, I would have suggested giving out more information but the question that raises is: in a world that’s powered by communication, how do we ever maintain our own privacy?
I think this is a question not just for the Royal Family and celebrities but for all of us. If you’re a leader in a company today, you will almost certainly have been on some form of training which encourages you to be your authentic self (and I’ve run these trainings so I do believe in this!) but what does that mean when something happens in your life which you can’t talk about? How do you maintain that authenticity when you have to lie to your colleagues about taking time off for medical appointments, for example? Or, if there’s something going on in the business which you’re not allowed to talk about but which will impact your team, what do you say to them?
When I was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, I had a regular radio show. I had to call in sick for two weeks as I was still getting used to my diagnosis. I wasn’t ready to talk about it with anyone else so I just explained that I wasn’t well and would be taking time off. When I got back everyone was exceptionally sweet and gentle to me. I quickly realised that they’d all made the assumption that I’d had a miscarriage (because what other assumptions can we make about women in their 30s?!) and so I had to explain what had happened. I probably would have been quite happy to not talk about it for a bit longer but that just didn’t feel like an option.
I asked my Instagram followers how they balance openness and privacy in their working lives and the responses varied. One woman explained that being open about her cancer diagnosis had actually allowed her to access more support and keep relationships that might otherwise have fallen away if she hadn’t been so transparent. Several people told me how uncomfortable they felt when talking about their private lives in the workplace but how also they feared their reluctance to do so had led to them being labelled as cold or unapproachable.
One story, however, stood out. A woman shared how much she admired her boss for holding her boundaries when it came to her private life while still maintaining deep relationships with her colleagues. She explained how it had taken her about 18 months to realise that the close relationship she thought the two of them shared was actually more one-sided than she’d realised. Her boss’s ability to listen and ask questions meant that she had opened up to her and felt they had a strong bond but actually she knew very little about her boss in return. Interestingly, this realisation hadn’t damaged their relationship. If anything she admired her boss more for finding a way to make her team feel connected to her without having to give away all of herself to do it.
There is a big push these days for leaders to be “relatable”. I would argue that this is more so for women than men, we find it easier to accept male leaders having terrible social skills or little interest in people so long as they’re financially successful. But for both sexes, the ability to find a way to connect with your team and show your “human side” has become a default assumption of leadership. I support this. I want to know the people I’m working with beyond just what they do in the office. I want to understand a little bit more about their lives and see their struggles as well as their successes. But what I, and the rest of the world, need to temper this with is the acceptance of other people’s boundaries.
One of the worst days of my professional life is when I’d been in a meeting with a colleague who I felt was dropping the ball on my project. I assumed it was because he’d decided my project was less important and so was giving it less time and attention than other people’s. I was pissed off about this and told him so. Half an hour later I found out from another colleague that he was actually going through a divorce and was in a bad place mentally. I felt terrible.
Perhaps if I’d known him better as a person I would have known about the divorce but also, maybe I wouldn’t have. Maybe he would have wanted to maintain that boundary, to have work as a place where he could show up and not have that part of his life front and centre, just for a little bit. Maybe I could have taken the situation less personally, I could have assumed that he was trying and found out how I could have supported him, rather than assuming he’d just written my project off.
Our desire for eternal authenticity and openness tricks us into believing we know all sides of the story. It forces us to find solutions to problems that are none of our business and which really, we don’t need to know. It makes it impossible for us to sit in silence and quietly support those around us. And it creates a culture where we feel if we’re not sharing everything with everyone all the time, then we’re letting them down. Which, when you think about it, makes Kate’s silence a radical move. She’s taken back control of her own boundaries and isn’t going to be forced into lowering them for anyone. Long may she continue.
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Fantastic piece. I generally don’t talk all that much about health at work, but have been dealing with some fatigue which has meant I’ve not been keen to travel over the last couple of months. Now I’m medicated (‘if your body doesn’t make enough thyroid hormones, store bought is fine!’) and back on track, I have mentioned that in team meetings, but it is so awkward and difficult to know how much to share.
this is excellent writing and a really well made point. kudos on bringing something fresh to this very worn path (how the path has gotten this overworked in just 2.5 months is wild to me).