Don't Be Yourself

6 Career Advancement

Despite the near-universal promise of authenticity as a “magic bullet” for accelerating your career success, scientific evidence refutes this idea—regardless of whether we measure career success in objective or subjective terms.¹ The research evidence on this is quite unequivocal: Career success depends on doing the very opposite of “just being yourself.” This is not to deny that some people may identify with their professional self once they have attained higher levels of career success, but the causal direction here is reversed. As chapter 7 will illustrate in greater detail, status and power do provide people with more freedom to “just be themselves,” albeit to everyone else’s peril. But, for everyone else, the rules ...