Organizational Dynamics

Come Out at Work: With Depression

Haig Chahinian

With depression? It might seem totally natural to hide this aspect of your internal world from coworkers.  That is, until The New York Times Magazine featured the complexities of depression in a cover story early in 2010 and called it “Depression’s Upside.” Yes, there are positive aspects to depression, including how it can affect your work.

According to the story, “every year, approximately 7 percent of us will be afflicted to some degree by [depression].” Moreover, a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins found that “successful individuals were eight times as likely as people in the general population to suffer from major depressive illness.”

So if you look around at work, there’s a certain probability that someone is depressed, regardless of their level of success. And it’s not impossible for that somebody to be you. How’re you feeling today? We ask so as to stir some self-reflection on the matter.

What’s so great about being depressed? To be sure, to live with depression is to suffer, badly. Still, when you accept this state of being, and work with it rather than fight it, the few bright spots become increasingly visible. Let’s look at 6 perks of being depressed at work, directly from the Times article:

1. You’re able to concentrate entirely on your work as you withdraw from the world. We’ve experienced this first-hand during these dark days of winter, and so did Charles Darwin. We’re in pretty good company, right?

2. You may understand interpersonal relationships better. Ruminating as a function of being depressed can help you realize you need to be more gentle with people around you, for example, or that listening more attentively to friends helps everyone involved feel better. You’re also less likely to stereotype strangers.

3. You’re not so sidetracked by irrelevant stimuli around you. Being pinged by colleagues throughout the day, terrible news headlines flashing across screens everywhere, and even the pressure to multi-task won’t distract you from what you’re intent on doing. This type of zen energy is otherwise very difficult to come by.

4. An extremely analytical style of thinking can result from increased activity in a certain part of the brain of depressed patients.  The tendency for the depressed is to think in a more deliberate fashion, breaking down a complex problem into its simpler parts. The bad news is that this thought process is really slow.

5. You have a more accurate view of reality and are better at predicting future outcomes. As well, you’re better at judging the accuracy of rumors and recalling past events. So if you feel up to attending that meeting, you’re primed to make significant contributions.

6. Your writing may improve.  According to a social psychologist at the University of South Wales in Australia:

Negative moods “promote a more concrete, accommodative and ultimately more successful communication style.” Because we’re more critical of what we’re writing, we produce more refined prose, the sentences polished by our angst. As Roland Barthes observed, “A creative writer is one for whom writing is a problem.”

Detractors of the upside of depression argue that people with significant depression usually ignore daily hygiene and can neglect giving people around them immediate attention. True, this may be a recipe for greater hardships at work, and which increased ability to focus and problem-solving skills won’t necessarily help.

Ultimately, knowing the benefits of your depressed episodes at work can help you embrace these natural occurences, and even open up to your workmates about them. In turn, you may find yourself more relaxed in the workplace, and more productive. Now why would you want to hide that?

Yes, to be depressed at work may be a messy experience, and yet  upon closer inspection, what part of being human in the workplace isn’t? It’s a rhetorical question; still, if you’d like to answer it in the comments below, we welcome it.

When It’s OK not to Talk About It

Haig Chahinian

Superstar race car driver Danica Patrick shuns talking about bringing her whole self to work. And we’re OK with that.

We know that many benefits come from learning about how our reference groups–meaning our gender, race, ethnicity, religion, socio-economic status, sexual orientation and physical ability–influence the way we work. Sometimes, however, talking about these ideas can distract us from our primary job.

Patrick has many achievements, including  winning the 2008 Indy Japan 300, and placing 3rd in the 2009 Indianapolis 500. She’s making a successful go of NASCAR racing in addition to IndyCar.  And at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, she has raced faster, and finished higher, than any other woman.

Yet she seems uninterested in focusing on the feminist themes of her rise in the race car ranks. Or she may simply prefer to dedicate her energy to becoming a better racer, as her male compatriots do, although without the typical haranguing about how their gender impacts their sport. From her New Yorker profile:

When reporters asked Patrick if [her win] had made a point about women in racing, her answer suggested that the burden of history did not weigh heavily upon her. “I made a hell of a point for anybody, are you kidding me?” she said.

And then, in reference to steamy photos of her widely broadcast:

Patrick says, “It helped me get the ride. The bottom line is, it takes money to go racing. If there’s money there, and it puts me in a really good car, then I can go show what I can do.” Regarding the objectification of women, she said, “I think people say that it takes away from what I do, it takes away from the driving, because people see that side of things, and it kind of overpowers what I’m doing. So, yeah. I catch flak. And I totally don’t care.”

Her unwillingness to dialogue and accept the mantle for women pioneers is surprisingly refreshing. She would much rather talk about the races. “I had so much fun in a race car today,” she recently told the press. “I can’t wait to do it again.”

Sometimes it’s critical to explore how our reference groups and our internal life affect the work we do. That’s what this blog is all about. And then, sometimes, perhaps because many are already examining the dynamics of personal identity in the workplace, we all don’t have to talk about it ad infinitum. We can just get in our cars and race.

Have you been asked at work to talk about your race or gender, for example, and effectively been seduced away from your primary task? How did you deal with this?

Image via

What Drives a Superhero to Work?

Haig Chahinian

Today is the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, so we’re thinking about superheroes like Dr. King himself.

Present-day superhero Nathan Wolfe is the director of the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative and a professor of biology at Stanford University. Big deal, so what?  He travels the globe on the lookout for viruses that could cause the next deadly pandemic. Imagine: he tasks himself with the super-heroic job of identifying and stopping the next (write-in your favorite sci-fi doomsday virus) outbreak. And the very real viral outbreak after that, and the one after that, too.

What drives someone to pursue this line of work? Yes, with the Department of Defense knocking at his door for help, and with partners that include google.org, the National Institutes of Health, and the Skoll Foundation, his paycheck is probably not too shabby. Yet financial reward is likely only secondary compensation for him. We expect that he’s driven primarily by the internal gratification that comes from immersing himself in a subject he finds totally fascinating. And maybe also from helping save the world from large-scale devastation.

What led him initially to this field? As an undergraduate, Wolfe became interested in the way animals use plants as medicine, just like humans do. Indeed his interest may have stemmed from his own self-medicating behavior as a cigarette smoker. Then in graduate school a mentor advised him that while this subject would make an engaging thesis, studying the infectious diseases of animals and becoming an expert in viruses would have a greater impact. Wolfe was sold, and “got completely hooked on viruses.”

For the record, when he considers the fundamental questions “Where do major diseases come from?” and “Why are some viruses so much more deadly than others?” his reply is “We have no answers for many of those questions.” As a preeminent expert, he’s open about what he doesn’t know, which reflects what’s not known, period.

What question(s) drive you to solve the problems you address in your work?

Photo via

Being Critical of a Company Can Get You Hired

Haig Chahinian

Harsh thoughts and negative feelings are among the aspects of our internal life that we often strive to hide at work. Yet Sean Ryan, formerly of News Corp, demonstrates that coming out with your true thoughts, however uncomfortable, can advance your career. For Ryan, being critical of Facebook may have helped him land a plum new role at the social networking giant.

Back in April, Ryan blogged about gaming platforms, writing:

I’d strongly recommend producing a great OpenSocial version of your game and trying to strike deals with a set of SNS not named Facebook – there are lots of them around the world with 10 million or more monthly unique users…

Which was published on the Web and became part of his online footprint. Scary, right? Not at all. His sentiments built upon his breadth of knowledge on the subject, and were grounded in careful analysis. He could thus stand proudly behind his articulate trashing of the social network.

We recall Sun Tzu’s words, “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.” The hiring managers at Facebook may be guided by this ancient wisdom.

So feel free to speak your thoughtful mind at work. A new job, or perhaps a promotion may be awaiting you.

Have you attracted someone by criticizing them? What ensued?

Career Talk Live: Jennifer Vidbel Pt. 1

Haig Chahinian

We considered calling this post “Jennifer Vidbel Revealed,” yet we’re starting a new feature focusing on guests of our talk show “Career Talk Live,” and this is the kick-off. The irony of course is that she was one of our most revealing stars to date!

We’re quite proud of ourselves — following our visit to the circus, we reached out to the director of communications at the Big Apple Circus and asked if we could interview Vidbel on the show. His response was yes, and we taped two segments two nights ago.

Through the whole ordeal we laughed, and then we cried. During the taping we giggled at unexpected turns in Jenny’s story, and then we cried when we were dubbing the master tapes to DVD and realized we hadn’t eliminated the tone from the beginning of the second tape. So you can see and hear the interview, along with a deafening ringing from beginning to end. Boo! A transcript of the second show will follow soon.

What did we discuss on air? In the first show Vidbel talked about the elephant who lay on top of her during childhood circus performances; hiking up mountains and going to the beach with her entourage of horses, dogs and goats; and how to run away with the circus, natch. Plus plenty more — her candor was engaging and charming, and she was fearless in answering our prodding questions.

Catch the first segment when it airs Tuesday, January 4th at 6:00pm ET (GMT-5) at mnn.org on MNN2. Just press play.

Have you ever dreamed of joining the circus?

Photo of Vidbel via. Video footage of Big Apple Circus used with permission.

Come Out at Work: With Two Jobs

Haig Chahinian

The New York Times recently missed an opportunity to talk about bringing your whole self to work, as writer Michael R. Gordon wrote a piece about the work life of David Richardson, yet didn’t challenge the subject’s assertions that his two professions are mutually exclusive. Here’s the story.

Lt. Col. David Richardson in his own words is a “painter who fights.”  He’s an artist showing his colorful Expressionist paintings in a Georgetown gallery through the end of January, and in February he’ll be deployed to work with Afghan security forces. Unfortunately, he doesn’t view his disparate occupations–artist and Marine–as integrable, even though they’re both extensions of himself.

Directly from “Faithful to Two Worlds: The Marines and the Artistic Life”:

Colonel Richardson does acknowledge the considerable influence of his tours of duty in Asia on his painting. During a tour in South Korea, for example, he had small canvases made for him by a local carpenter, hauled them back to his studio on his bicycle, painted symbols on the individual squares and then clamped them together to form larger works, which comprise part of his “R Series” on display in Washington DC. The faint arrows, similar to the directional markings on a tactical map, are one of the rare carry-overs from his military world.

Interestingly, his mother is an artist who paints landscapes and flowers, and his father had been a Navy diver in World War II.

Now, the catalog for the show mentions his travels to Japan and Korea, but at his request never suggests that his military service took him there. As well, during the long lulls between patrols when he and his Marines were holed up with Iraqi troops in a dilapidated soap factory in Fallujah, he never hinted that he had a passion for art.

By his own account he has long led a double existence. “It’s been pretty compartmentalized,” he said about his two lives.”  “My father taught me to talk the talk. You don’t talk about art with the Marines, and you don’t talk about the Marines with artists.”

So it sure would be tidy to blame his father for limiting his worldview. Yet as an adult, he bears some responsibility to challenge what he’s been taught. At the same time, his gestalt smacks of the restrictions imposed by “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”

Clearly, these two distinct areas of work are related — within Colonel Richardson. Yet it’s difficult for him to work openly as a Marine and a painter. While we acknowledge that the stress of war impacts each troops’ state of mind in complicated ways, we have a hypothesis that if Col. Richardson were to come out in both worlds, his openness and mindfulness would make him a better artist and a better Marine.

Do you lead two or more distinct professional lives? What are the challenges you face in integrating them?

Image via

Indra Nooyi Speaks About Bringing Your Whole Self to Work

Haig Chahinian

Bringing your whole self to work isn’t a brand-new idea, people have been talking about this concept for years. What’s often missing from the discussion, and which this blog addresses, is how specifically to bring your self to work. It’s a subject dear to our heart, and the title “Whole Wide Work” captures some of its essence.

PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi often speaks of the concept of engaging your full self on the job, and at the 2008 Catalyst Awards Conference she dove into some detail . She says:

You absolutely have to bring your whole self to work. You cannot create a persona for yourself [at] work that’s different than the person that left the house. You just can’t do that because if you try to do that you’re living a lie and I’ll tell you from my perspective maybe it’s PepsiCo, I don’t know but I don’t believe that I walk in to work and sort of a shield comes in front of me because if I have an argument with my daughter at home, okay and I have lots of run ins with my older one, I’ll walk in to the office and tell everybody “half an hour decompression. I just had a blow up with my daughter. Leave me alone.” So they say fine…

It may be easy for her to proclaim these sentiments, because she’s the boss of everyone at PepsiCo! Yet her words feel genuine, and she makes a compelling case. From her story, we see that sometimes bringing your whole self to work relates directly to productivity, and other times it’s a prompt for support or accommodation. In every instance, feeling free to reveal your whole self helps keep you grounded in the present.

Does anybody in your workplace talk about the benefits of bringing your whole self to work?  How do their ideas impact your job?