Set Shifting, Masking and Emotional Work in the Workplace: Part Four

I saw a tweet go by a while ago from someone who identifies as autistic and they were calling out the common concept that autistic people cannot read the room. Instead, this person was pointing out that autistic people are horrified at all the lying and faking that is common in day-to-day neurotypical work situations. That is likely a very good take, however they went one step further to suggest that neurotypicals behave in these ways because they are this way.

I suspect that the only individuals who truly are designed to comfortably lie and fake things are psychopaths and they are a very small minority of the cerebral variation in humans. And that is not meant to be a flippant comment that writes off the complexity of a brain with psychopathic traits. Some interesting research suggests that a psychopath can be trained to develop highly ethical and virtuous decision-making traits by having their innate sense of their superiority twinned with an emphasis that superior individuals are ethical and virtuous. But I will need to leave psychopathy for another day.

Suffice to say lying and faking are tools that most average brains pick up and use, but the motivation to do so is complex and using these tools comes at a cost for almost everyone.

We know that most children begin to lie when they are able to identify that what they want or need is counter to what they recognize their parents or guardians might want or need. Basically, lying keeps the peace and maintains a connection with the parents or guardians where honesty might risk a possible rupture.

Lying is a form of self-preservation. And human beings, as they develop, refine their understanding that lying (a little bit) and honesty (a lot) help maintain trusting relationships that are essential for survival.

Cathal Morrow chose to live a year not telling one lie. I am not sure if his adventures in truth-telling ever did end up as a book. I can remember thinking at the time, when reading of his experiment, that it was ultimately a self-absorbed exercise. Even if someone genuinely asks an opinion of you – “Does this dress look good on me?” – what makes you think that your honest opinion is truly of value one way or the other? Of course, what drives the other person to ask them to provide an honest opinion in the first place is a whole other thing!

Cathal Morrow does believe that there are morally right reasons to tell a lie—for example, to save the life of another. 

But back to giving an honest opinion when it is asked of you…is it about you or them? The answer is it is likely a bit of both and therefore lying might be to spare them and/or you a painful rupture or dispute, and telling the truth might be to have it reflect well on you and/or provide them with some hard but useful insight.

Lying and faking in personal relationships can obviously be damaging and toxic to both yourself and others. It can also be kind and supportive. The differentiator is whether the motivation is to protect yourself from the fallout of the truth, or to protect the other person. And it is not always easy to be honest with ourselves on whether we are lying to protect ourselves or the other person.

It is complicated at the best of times, but when we walk these human complexities into our jobs there is a huge inanimate intermediary: the organization.

You have probably heard the terms: office wife, work dad, work husband, etc. These are memes to denote that you have a very close relationship with someone you work with—akin to a close personal relationship (life partner, family member) but with the prefix denoting that the relationship is bounded by the workplace.

You have also heard the oft-stated phrase by teammates, colleagues and bosses: “We are like family here.”

In the middle of all these close relationships is the company. It is an inanimate construct that is designed to rupture and tear apart human relationships in the interests of, primarily, money (yet another inanimate construct).

Work dad has to fire you, office wife gets promoted and you do not, or work twin leaves the company and did not give you any warning they were going. We expect the same mix of lying (very little) to honesty (a tremendous amount) in our close relationships on the job and it is not wise to expect that mix or offer it.

We lie and fake things at a far greater rate in job settings knowing that the intermediary in all of our interactions is the company. We do this to protect ourselves and others from the company but in doing so, we undermine our natural tendency towards a far higher rate of honesty.

Dunbar’s number, 150, is the maximum number of individuals with which a single human being can hold close stable relationships. This well-known limit might not be quite as ingrained as we think, and it ranges widely between 2 to 520 and averages out to far fewer than 150. Dunbar’s number is often used in workplace settings to speak of optimal sizes for projects, divisions, work units and the like. But it is a supposed human cognitive limit the does not incorporate the challenge of an intermediary in the mix, namely the organization.

Human beings are always capable of being reserved and cautious (lying even) in complex social settings when it is unclear what motivations are at play and whether it is safe to be “authentic.” However, the innate drive is to develop a good sense of what motivations are at play in order to develop increased levels of trust. Why? Because trust is required for co-operation and co-operation is necessary for the survival of the species. In all work settings, the drive for all of us is still there to suss out motivations to get to better levels of trust, but the motivation is ultimately to leverage trust between human beings to extract profit. Hell is clearly circular in design.

Can you make and keep close friends on the job? Of course. However, they likely become far closer to you once you are not working together at the same place. You can also meet your future partner on the job. But the closeness is really developed outside of work and that is how the relationship enters your personal and authentic world. 

Companies are designed to leverage and manipulate our natural tendency for connection and authenticity with each other.

You will naturally increase your levels of set shifting, masking and emotional work in the workplace as you witness the betrayal of people’s trust and realize that everyone is ultimately expendable in all work-for-money settings.

Set shifting, masking and emotional work exact a toll on all brains in the workplace with the exception, as I mentioned, of possibly those with psychopathic traits. While sporadic, periodic or short-term set shifting, masking and emotional work is likely rewarding for most brains, as it is most often used to move towards higher levels of trust and co-operation, the constant levels required in workplaces are damaging.

The brain and body are designed to be challenged at intervals, but in the absence of rest and recovery, the damage mounts.

As with everything in the human condition, we are not all damaged equally because our environments (situational, inter-relational and internal) are all unique. One of the biggest mistakes we will all make at some point when we are truly struggling in a workplace environment is to look around at everyone else and wonder why we are the only ones who appear to be struggling. It is a mistake to think this way because we are overlooking the fact that everyone is heavily set shifting, masking and applying heaps of emotional work to make it all look seamless. Just because the cracks may have started to show for you, does not mean that the majority are thriving; it is merely a matter of time for them.

If you identify that your tolerance for set shifting, masking and emotional work in a workplace is low (for whatever reason that might be – and all reasons are utterly valid), then look to what is in your locus of control and work on that.

Do not go down the rabbit hole of the human-resources-driven training pathways of “managing difficult people.” Difficult people are never in your locus of control. Most of these corporate training pathways will undermine your boundaries as they are designed to extract further emotional work from you.

There are only two things truly in your locus of control: boundaries and quitting. Often setting the boundary will precipitate being fired or pre-emptively quitting, but sometimes the boundary holds and the whole environment becomes more comfortable for you.

There are also a host of other things that may be in your locus of control of course—looking for a new job, lowering your debts thereby maybe adding flexibility to the type of new job you might be able to pursue, asking for help from family members or friends, taking leave (if that is even available to you), going back to school, etc.

Getting to know what your personal set point is for reasonable levels of masking, set shifting and emotional work is also in your locus of control. This will be helpful to you for choosing what companies to join and, more importantly, how to move on long before you are feeling too exhausted and helpless to help yourself escape.

If you feel utterly ground down and trapped then you will not have any additional energy to expend on setting boundaries or on planning to quit in a way that is not reactive or destructive for you. In circumstances like these if you have any work colleague in which you confide – perhaps you have lunches together and gripe about the misery of the job – then suggest to that colleague that you work together to shift from griping to helping each other plan your escapes to new jobs elsewhere. Having someone who builds you up a bit for looking for new work is a powerful antidote to the deflating and demoralizing aspects of focusing on the trapped misery of the current situation. Family and friends can also help build you up to start looking for another job, but work colleagues have the added connection with you of truly knowing how important it is for your wellbeing to move on because they live the same workplace demands as you.

Remember that if you are struggling with the draining aspects of set shifting, masking and emotional work in your workplace you are a) in the majority, and b) experiencing valid distress because you are a human being (regardless of where you might sit on the broad spectrum of neural expression).