Self-Disclosure at Work

An interview with Katherine W. Phillips by Amanda Kersey

Self-disclosure is a key element of authenticity at work, but finding a balance with it can be difficult. What is OK to share? How much? To whom? And how do you share personal details without oversharing?

In the following conversation, I talk to Katherine W. Phillips, who, before her death in 2020, was a professor of leadership and ethics at Columbia Business School. We discuss why sharing information about our personal lives helps us build professional relationships and why individuals from underrepresented groups might hesitate to open up to their colleagues.

Amanda Kersey: What does research say about self-disclosure in the workplace?

Katherine W. Phillips: I’ve been doing research on diversity and inclusion in teams for the last 20-plus years. One of the major findings in the literature is that diverse groups tend to be less cohesive than homogeneous ones. I started thinking about that and took two or three steps back to think about how teams actually become cohesive. What is cohesion? And how do you build it?

As I started having conversations about that with some colleagues, we began looking at the literature and realized that a lot of cohesion is relationship. It’s connection, trust. It’s building real relationships with the people that you work with. And that requires some self-disclosure. You have to share things about yourself.

I had some personal experiences that drove me to think about that. I thought about how uncomfortable I sometimes was sharing personal details with colleagues that I worked with every day, that I thought I trusted, and that I thought I had great relationships with. I found myself censoring some of the information I was willing to share. That gave me the insight I needed to understand a little bit more about how to build relationships across boundaries in the workplace, because it’s going to be critical for helping those diverse teams reach their potential.

You have a story about when one of your colleagues asked you what you did over the weekend. Could you share it?

This story actually started this research stream. I was having a birthday and was very excited about it. It was a Friday, so I had the whole weekend to celebrate. Everybody knew that it was my birthday.

When I showed up at work on Monday, all happy-go-lucky, one of my colleagues asked, “How was your birthday? What did you do this weekend? How did it go?” I said, “I got together with some really good friends of mine that I hadn’t seen in years. We went out to dinner, and we went to a concert.” He responded, “Oh, a concert. Who did you see?” And I said, “You wouldn’t know him.” Then I focused again on dinner and the great restaurant.

I kind of swept under the rug who I had gone to see, and it bothered me for a while. Why didn’t I want to share with him that I had gone to see Kirk Franklin, a very popular African American gospel artist? Somehow I felt like my colleague wouldn’t know who this person was, and maybe it would highlight that I’m Black. Maybe it would highlight that I’m a Christian. I just felt like those were things that perhaps I shouldn’t share with him.

But as I thought about it, I realized my colleague never would have hesitated to share with me. He’s told me about all these groups he’s seen that I’ve never heard of, and I’d say, “OK, cool, good for you.” I never judge him because of the music that he likes and listens to. It was an aha moment. If I don’t embrace who I am, if I don’t love who I am, if I don’t share who I am, how can I expect other people to do the same?

How does being in the minority, whether it’s due to race or sexuality or politics, come into play with authenticity and self-disclosure?

When we started this research, we wrote a paper called “Getting Closer at the Company Party.” Part of the idea behind the paper was that companies have events—activities, happy hours, Christmas parties, etc.—that they ask all employees to come to with the expectation that it will somehow bring people closer together and create better relationships. When we did this research, we asked people, “Do you go to these events? Who’s there with you? How similar are they to you? How close do you feel to them after the party’s over? And you do see some positive uptick, especially when people share the same identity?”

When people are in the minority, or they’re very different from the people around them, they don’t get that same uptick of positive feelings of closeness with people after they’ve engaged in these things. They were basically telling us, “I go to these events because I have to.” They’re not really feeling like it’s going to lead to something different for them. That was true for anybody who felt that they were surrounded by people who weren’t like them, even if they were part of what we might consider a majority group in the United States.

But then we did some research with African Americans specifically to ask them, “How comfortable would you feel sharing with or talking to people who look different from you in the workplace?” We got evidence time and time again that people were more comfortable with others who look like them and that they were concerned that sharing something about themselves that was different would create more distance between them and others, as opposed to bringing them closer. They were concerned that sharing might have negative implications for their credibility and their status in the workplace.

So it is a real concern. When I’ve written about this, I’ve used stories from executives on Wall Street who say, “Look, my numbers were perfect—they were better than anybody else’s—but I still wasn’t getting the promotion. And when I talked to my boss about what was going on, they said, ‘We don’t know you.’ ” It was important for those people to make a decision about how much they wanted to connect with others in the workplace. It can have big implications.

You have another story, when you had to take a risk on what you were going to tell your colleagues.

Yeah, this story is another aha moment for me, and definitely a risk that I had to decide if I wanted to take or not.

I’m from Chicago, born and raised, and when this story happened I was on the faculty at Northwestern University. My parents were still living on the South Side of Chicago with my very large extended family. I was at work, and I got a call from one my nieces saying, “You need to get down here to the South Side right away, because Mom and Dad have been arrested.”

I was frazzled—I was like, I’ve got to go. I had to leave very quickly.

Of course, when I came back to work, my colleagues asked, “What happened? Is everything OK? Is everybody OK?” I had to decide if I was going to share with my colleagues that my parents had been arrested because the police chased one of my nephews into the bathroom of my parents’ house. Who knows if he had done anything wrong. Things unfolded from there.

I decided to share it, mostly because there was no good alternative in my opinion. The consequence of me saying, “This is too difficult to share with you,” lying about it, or saying, “Oh, it was nothing” wouldn’t be better than just telling the truth. So I said, “This was a very difficult situation. And I want to share with you all what happened.”

They were super supportive. They asked again and again how things were going. Because of going to court and other stuff, it was a year and a half before everything was over with. I think it was really a bonding moment. It gave my colleagues an opportunity to see that although I had made it—here I was, a professor at Northwestern—as an African American woman I was dealing with a life that they didn’t see, and that actually gave them more respect for me.

It seems like sometimes self-disclosure is something we can choose to do. We can choose to share information, and that can be strategic when trying to build relationships at work. But sometimes it happens by surprise. There might be a family emergency, or someone might ask you a question that you weren’t expecting to get.

It’s a very common experience. The reality is we’re all on our own journeys of identity and are deciding how comfortable we are disclosing various things about ourselves. For me, my racial identity is very visible. It’s not something that I’ve ever thought about hiding.

But I certainly have been in contexts where I might want to be careful about how much I highlight it, or how much I let it take center stage. It’s very normal for people to want to belong. We all have a need for belonging, and we often have concerns that if we highlight things that are different about us, that might make us feel like we don’t belong where we are. It’s absolutely normal.