🔗 Share this article

Within the opening pages of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, writer the author raises a critical point: commonplace directives to “be yourself” or “bring your full, authentic self to work” are far from well-meaning invitations for self-expression – they’re traps. This initial publication – a blend of memoir, investigation, cultural critique and discussions – aims to reveal how companies appropriate personal identity, transferring the weight of institutional change on to employees who are often marginalized.

Professional Experience and Wider Environment

The impetus for the work originates in part in the author’s professional path: different positions across corporate retail, new companies and in international development, interpreted via her perspective as a disabled Black female. The conflicting stance that Burey experiences – a back-and-forth between expressing one’s identity and looking for safety – is the engine of the book.

It emerges at a moment of collective fatigue with corporate clichés across the US and beyond, as resistance to diversity and inclusion efforts mount, and numerous companies are scaling back the very structures that earlier assured change and reform. Burey delves into that arena to assert that retreating from corporate authenticity talk – that is, the corporate language that reduces individuality as a set of aesthetics, quirks and pastimes, keeping workers preoccupied with controlling how they are seen rather than how they are regarded – is not a solution; instead, we need to reinterpret it on our personal terms.

Underrepresented Employees and the Act of Self

Via vivid anecdotes and conversations, Burey shows how underrepresented staff – people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, female employees, disabled individuals – learn early on to modulate which persona will “fit in”. A vulnerability becomes a disadvantage and people overcompensate by working to appear palatable. The act of “showing your complete identity” becomes a projection screen on which all manner of assumptions are placed: affective duties, disclosure and ongoing display of gratitude. In Burey’s words, employees are requested to reveal ourselves – but absent the protections or the trust to survive what comes out.

As Burey explains, we are asked to share our identities – but without the protections or the reliance to withstand what comes out.’

Illustrative Story: An Employee’s Journey

The author shows this dynamic through the story of a worker, a deaf employee who took it upon himself to educate his colleagues about deaf community norms and interaction standards. His eagerness to discuss his background – a gesture of transparency the organization often commends as “genuineness” – temporarily made daily interactions more manageable. Yet, the author reveals, that progress was precarious. Once employee changes eliminated the unofficial understanding he had established, the environment of accessibility vanished. “All the information departed with those employees,” he comments exhaustedly. What was left was the weariness of needing to begin again, of being made responsible for an company’s developmental journey. In Burey’s view, this is what it means to be requested to share personally absent defenses: to risk vulnerability in a system that praises your openness but refuses to codify it into procedure. Authenticity becomes a pitfall when institutions depend on employee revelation rather than structural accountability.

Author’s Approach and Idea of Resistance

The author’s prose is simultaneously understandable and expressive. She blends intellectual rigor with a manner of connection: an offer for readers to engage, to challenge, to oppose. According to the author, dissent at work is not noisy protest but moral resistance – the practice of rejecting sameness in settings that require appreciation for mere inclusion. To dissent, from her perspective, is to question the accounts companies tell about justice and inclusion, and to refuse participation in customs that sustain injustice. It could involve identifying prejudice in a discussion, opting out of unpaid “equity” work, or defining borders around how much of one’s personal life is provided to the company. Resistance, the author proposes, is an affirmation of self-respect in spaces that frequently encourage conformity. It represents a practice of integrity rather than defiance, a way of maintaining that a person’s dignity is not dependent on organizational acceptance.

Redefining Genuineness

She also refuses brittle binaries. Her work does not simply toss out “sincerity” entirely: rather, she urges its redefinition. In Burey’s view, authenticity is far from the unrestricted expression of personality that corporate culture often celebrates, but a more intentional correspondence between individual principles and individual deeds – a honesty that rejects alteration by institutional demands. Rather than considering genuineness as a mandate to reveal too much or adapt to sterilized models of openness, the author encourages followers to maintain the elements of it grounded in truth-telling, individual consciousness and principled vision. According to Burey, the aim is not to abandon genuineness but to shift it – to remove it from the executive theatrical customs and into connections and workplaces where trust, equity and answerability make {