I spent quite a few years (decades, actually) in the business world, and found that many senior businesspersons delighted in using metaphor. Perhaps it was because the more strategic the thinking, the more limited technical language (or language in general) becomes in communication concepts. Metaphor can often provide a structure, a paradigm, with which to view (or review) the world or frame a decision.
In the movie, Men in Black, the lead characters, as a rite of passage, put on the black suits and shades that both identified them and set them apart. As business professionals, whether female or male, we are no different – and it doesn’t just stop with fashion.
As we play our roles (or enter into new roles) in our business or organization, we too step into a suit that identifies us. It may be the suit of a consultant’s quiet detachment, the suit of the business developers’ energy and passion, or the suit of guarded demeanor and steely eyes of the senior executive as they are leading their organization into battle with the competition.
The suit we put on each day is that set of behaviours, protocols and appearances that we believe defines our role within our organization.
Sometimes, we wear the suit. But my experience is that most times, the suit wears us.
The suit both defines us and delimits us. It protects us, but it blocks us from being real, being authentic, with those around us and even (and most especially) with ourselves. In conforming to the dominant culture within which we work, we run the very real risk of becoming a caricature of our position, and losing awareness of who we really are. We focus so much on the role we play that we become the role and find it increasingly difficult to see ourselves apart from our role. And many become unaware that they have become the suit they wear.
What ‘suit’ do you slip into each morning as you head to work? How does this suit block you from being real, being authentic, with those you encounter? What is the consequence of this in your worklife? homelife?
Seems to me that those are questions worth pondering.