Corporate cosplay or, how I learned to mentally move past IRL work performance

Even fortune cookies get after it sometimes.

Hi, my name is Amy, and I am a recovered extreme extrovert. I’m also a former theater actor and current people pleaser.

Before 2020, extroversion was a foundational pillar of my personality. I took my first Myer-Briggs test (insert acknowledgement of its problematic nature) when I was in high school, and took my last Myers-Briggs test online right before the pandemic. Across all of those tests, my E (extroversion) was off-the-charts high. We’re talking 99 percent E and up, with a mere trace of I.

Prior to the pandemic, I never worked from home. I had a stubbornly embedded sense of where work occurred, and where it didn’t. I considered an office an office and my apartment my apartment.

But it wasn’t like my line of work has ever truly required an IRL 9–5. Beyond lunches and in-person brainstorming and late night strategizing over cocktails, PR and communications can be done nearly anywhere. Give me a smartphone, some AirPods and an internet connection, and I can probably do my job. Even though I loved college because I’d thrived with a different schedule everyday, a million places to curl up and read or write, I’d somehow adopted an office lifestyle: I was an early riser who’d be one of the first people at their desks, and I’d often be last out, or at least be one of the ones to go for drinks after work. Every morning, I’d proudly slap on my armor (read: red lipstick and cute shoes) and head out to the content mines to earn my keep.

Then, 2020 hit. And we all stayed home, because we had to. After a couple of months of staggering around Microsoft Teams like a newly-born giraffe, I settled into building relationships via excited IMs with colleagues, regularly-scheduled one-on-ones with no set agenda, closely-monitored comments in Word docs and tightly-run meetings. Instead of the hour I spent getting ready, and the hour spent commuting, I threw on a button down and soft pants, and showed up to work in my own living room, with a lovingly curated art wall behind me. I built close connections with colleagues in Chicago and NY and LA because I could, and a cross-country call had as much efficacy as a crowded conference room of locals.

And, to my surprise… I loved it.

Now, I work at a proudly fully remote company (you may have heard of it). I’ve invested in cute athleisure wear and one of those meditation chairs, and I spend most of my works days smiling into a lil’ web camera and chatting with my colleagues on Slack.

Despite everything that has happened over the last four years, I am less anxious about work and more confident in my decisions. In thinking on why it was this way, I recognized an IRL defense mechanism I’d never considered.

While in office and hyper cognizant of everything happening around me, I wasn’t fully present.

I was cosplaying.

What is corporate cosplay?

Costumes matter. The armor we suit ourselves up in every morning sends a signal to the world at large that we mean business, whatever that business is for us. Think about it — would you get into a river raft piloted by someone sporting a tuxedo? Would you pick up prescriptions from someone in a clown suit? Would you trust someone to represent you in court if they were wearing cutoffs and crocs?

I performed in theater until my early 20s, and I always ascribed to the “character shoes make the character” school of thinking (that is, insisting on wearing character shoes or costume pieces as early as possible in the rehearsal process to start to get a feel for what it is like to literally walk in someone’s shoes). And in college, I would show up to exams with a full face of make-up and a pulled together ‘fit. (Fake it until you make it, right?) When I started my job as a VP at a bigger comms agency, I started wearing suits more often, even though I lived in San Francisco where suits were the distinct domain of lawyers and (some) politicians — I just loved the certain swagger I had when I wore them.

Along with costumes come the other, more subtle aspects of performing: knowing your marks, showing up prepared, and, most importantly, reading your audience. Like improv, a day in corporate America requires a keen sense of where you are in space, inner curiosity about your status in a group, and, most importantly, finely honed listening skills.

Beyond that, so much of in-person work is theater. It’s how your desk is decorated, your proximity to the principal players, how much (or little) you speak in meetings. It’s overhearing context for plans that help you jump in when needed. It’s the performance of work in front of people higher on the food chain than you, getting face time with the deciders who can bump your paycheck with one appreciative note to HR.

Think about what your day used to consist of: Get to work, get coffee, say hi to neighbor, catch boss’s eye, try and do an hour of deep work, fail after five minutes, sit in meetings where only one person talked, gossip with colleagues about how meetings are stupid, wait until your boss leaves for the day, commute home. Often times, the IRL theater of work rewards proximity, not talent or hard work. And that reliance on physical presence to work together can lead to massive power discrepancies between people, teams and even offices.

Taking that performance online

But all that performative work reveals clues, or helps a new professional gain skills via osmosis. I was very good at IRL performance, but I would come home exhausted. My ability to read cues from colleagues and gather context from the comings and going of an office were a very real skill. But it also meant that I spent an inordinate amount of energy observing others, adjusting my presentation, and trying to figure out how to do my job without ever having to ask for anything.

So why were my first few months of working from home difficult in 2020? Because all of those “theatrical” skills weren’t possible when you were logging on and logging off. I couldn’t gather helpful information by overhearing conversations, or going to lunch, or merely observing who was in the office that day. I wasn’t gathering passive feedback by noticing body language or facial expressions outside of meetings.

And because of that lack of data, I found myself at an informational disadvantage.

So what did that mean? I had to get a lot better at proactively building relationships and asking for (and providing) clear feedback. I had to pay close attention to how I digitally present myself. I had to build in unstructured one-on-one time to build empathy. I had to block off time on my calendar to make sure I was kibitzing with colleagues, or finding other ways to serendipitously find out things.

But in order to do that, I had to determine exactly which information would be important for me to know. Which meant getting a better sense for the org chart, of other teams, of other working styles. It meant asking for introductions to the appropriate people, insisting on being in certain meetings. It meant a hell of a lot more work on my end up top, but it also lead to stronger partnerships than I’d had before.

Clarity is kindness (i.e., the absolute importance of ask culture for management)

Last year, former colleague and all-round amazing human Jean Hsu wrote a profoundly informative piece on Ask Culture vs. Guess Culture. You must go read the whole thing, but the absolute extreme TL;DR on the whole thing is that you can expect colleagues to anticipate what you want or need based on passive information or context clues — or you can just come right out and ask for it.

In-office corporate cosplay supports a guess culture. It builds a culture in which information is communicated to leadership via costumes and proximity and ability to project your voice (or presence), versus one in which leadership must better enunciate expectations and how best to work with them.

When you can’t learn and lead based on passive information, you have to be much more deliberate in figuring out what you need to know, where you can learn it, and who you ned to ask to get it. For a remote working environment to work, instead of expecting a junior staffer to “just know” how you like to work because they’ve overheard you on the phone, a manager must clearly lay out instructions and preferences and ask that their employee adhere to them.

But it’s still all drag, isn’t it?

My new style of remote work doesn’t mean I’ve got anything remotely figured out, or that I don’t fall back on some of those bad habits and assumptions I made in the before times.

But getting out from behind a role has forced me to ask myself what I really want out of my job, my colleagues, my career. It’s made me gently separate who I used to present myself as from the person I am and what I bring to my workplace. And instead of projecting leadership, it’s made me sit down and name exactly what I want and need from the job that I have, helping create a more-lasting digital record of goals and expectations.

Working from home has also given me more empathy for the people I see virtually every day: Remote work has made me look beyond the costumes we all attire ourselves in and dig deeper into motivations, habits, personal complications and working styles of my colleague. Because I get to meet your dog, or hear your baby cry, or find out that your new Taylor Swift double album has arrived (I see you, corporate Swifties), I’m less likely to read something into something that isn’t there, and give everyone the benefit of the doubt.

But I’ll still bring a bit of theatricality to my Zoom meetings. So if you see me show up to an early morning session with bright red lipstick, just know that it’s armor, and I’m doing it to psych myself into kicking ass that day.

Fake it ‘till you make it, right?