Hanneke Willenborg, CEO of Olly
“Authenticity” is a buzzword across social media, leadership trainings, and brand-building workshops. Be authentic, be yourself, it’s your superpower!
It’s true: numerous studies have found that masking our real selves at work makes us unhappy, hampers performance, and can lead to burnout while “being yourself” leads to better relationships, a higher level of work satisfaction, and more breakthroughs.
But if your true self happens to be not like the others, you risk being judged, fired, or not hired in the first place. So we instinctively adopt a work persona, and save our authenticity for friends and family. We cover our gray hair, code switch, wear uncomfortable clothes.
When many of us spend the majority of our lives at work, it seems like a worthy goal to help employees feel safe to talk the way they talk and wearing what they love to the office. But how?
One answer is for leadership to model it, and send a strong message that everyone’s true self is welcome (and that ostracizing isn’t tolerated).
That’s what Hanneke Willenborg, CEO of Olly, which makes vitamins and supplements for physical and mental wellbeing and is owned by Unilever, hopes to do. She strives be her true self at work and encourage others to do the same, even when it’s uncomfortable.
“It’s hard work,” Willenborg said. “Sometimes I just want to put my own mask on and pretend that everything is okay and not bring my full self, because it's tiring. But I strongly feel that I owe it to this company and the mission of this company to show up real.”
If corporate America ever hopes to make strides towards inclusivity, leaders must create an environment where employees feel psychologically safe, said Willenborg, who has also held leadership roles at other Unilever brands including Ben & Jerry’s and Seventh Generation. And it just makes sense at Olly, since the company’s products promise to improve wellbeing.
Willenborg remembers feeling like the odd person out in previous jobs where she was called too emotional or too passionate. Colleagues were skeptical about her business sense and ability to make tough calls.
“It took me a while to understand that at the end of the day, my passion and my feelings and my emotion are my superpower. It's not something I should hide, it’s something that I should lean into,” she said. “And that really hit me when I started at Olly, because I realized that if I wanted to promote a culture where everybody could show up as their real self, as a CEO, the only thing I could do is show up as my real self, and and be vocal and transparent about my mental wellbeing, be vocal about my imposter syndrome (which is bigger than this building), my sexual wellbeing and my menopause, and all of the things that are not conversations in a business environment.”
Akilah Cadet, founder and CEO of Change Cadet
A healthy relationship with being uncomfortable is key, said. Dr. Akilah Cadet, CEO and founder of Change Cadet, which helps companies adopt anti-racism, diversity, inclusion, equity, and belonging.
“The value goes up considerably when you have someone like a CEO say ‘my goal is to make sure that people can be their authentic selves.’ But it can only happen with the willingness to be comfortable being uncomfortable.”
In 2016, Google discovered just how true that is. The company’s Project Aristotle found that the most successful teams were those where employees felt free to speak their mind and be themselves without fear of judgment, a state of affairs known as “psychological safety.” They could put the smartest employees on one superteam, but if members felt afraid to speak up with creative ideas or questions, all those smarts didn’t lead to breakthroughs.
One team leader shared his stage 4 cancer diagnosis, which dramatically changed the dynamic of the team for the better. Other members followed by sharing their own personal struggles, and afterwards the team felt more comfortable taking creative risks or voicing concerns.
"Study after study has shown that more diversity helps create better business outcomes,” Willenborg said. “Real diversity will only emerge when people feel safe to show up as their authentic selves. So it’s no surprise that when people feel happy and supported at the office that this is also reflected in their day-to-day work.”
Indeed, research on the benefits of psychological safety at work goes back decades. But the trick is finding ways to practically make it happen since that’s not always part of a business plan.
“We want to make sure that our systems, our organizations, our policies, practices, and procedures are in place to allow people to be their true uplifting selves,” Cadet said.
Cristina Poindexter, co-founder and co-CEO of Parable
Too often, the “old professionalism” as Cristina Poindexter, co-founder and co-CEO of brain health company Parable calls it, is still firmly in place. She recently posted on LinkedIn about her experiences trying to raise venture capital.
She described “playing the game” in investor meetings, where she often looks and behaves differently from the rest of the room, which is filled with serious men and the occasional woman in stiff suits with tough demeanors—all the while knowing less than 2% of venture funds go to women-led startups.
“The startup world, despite its emphasis on innovation, can all too often run according to the unspoken rules of old professionalism,” Poindexter said. “Conformity, pattern-matching, power games, and exclusivity dynamics course through the underbelly of this beast.”
The payoff of her LinkedIn post was immediate: it generated more than 100 comments, 80 reposts, and more than 600 direct messages. With one post, she motivated hundreds of women who felt the same way.
Like Willenborg, Poindexter is determined to model the openness and inclusiveness she’d like to see in the workplace—and she agrees with Willenborg that it’s not easy.
“To role model authenticity is actually really difficult, because by nature, authenticity feels (and is) riskiest when the stakes are high. There is a risk we’ll be ostracized, devalued, or mocked,” Poindexter said.
Willenborg and Poindexter are both white, CIS gender, heterosexual women—and they acknowledge that the stakes are higher for BIPOC, trans, and other less-represented individuals.
And that’s an inherent problem with the need for change to come from leadership, Cadet said, because most leaders are white men. When you add intersectionality to the mix, that can mean even more return on the investment of putting yourself out there, but also presents more risk.
“There's a really high possibility of being othered,” she said. “If people don't value you—as a black person, or a disabled person—then that return on investment is othering because people feel they can't relate to you or they don't like the way you're delivering something.”
That places a lot of the comfort-making responsibility on leadership—to model behavior, to encourage acceptance, and to speak up if othering happens.
At Olly, Willenborg hosts a weekly “Hanging with Hanneke,” a casual coffee meeting where employees can get to know her and their coworkers better. The company also hosts a monthly “Family lunch,” a relaxed, virtual company-wide event where employees can ask questions and get company news.
Just as importantly, employees need to feel O.K. about opting out if they want to just show up and do their job. It’s about making your team feel safe, not pressured, Cadet said. Past trauma from a discriminatory environment might mean some individuals will never feel safe bringing their real self to work.
“No organization can determine safety for everyone,” she said.
