What to Share, What to Hold Back

You're listening to Women at Work from Harvard Business Review. I'm Amy Gallo. And I'm Amy Bernstein. We're starting something new on the show. We're revisiting some of our favorite episodes from earlier years and bringing in some fresh perspective. In 2018, I had the pleasure of speaking with the late Catherine Phillips, Kathy, a Columbia Business School professor's research on diversity, authenticity, and how people work together has been widely cited and deeply influential. She talks about the tension so many of us feel between wanting to connect and fearing that being open might backfire. The reality is that we're all on our own journeys of identity and how comfortable we are disclosing various things about ourselves. We all have a need for belonging, and we oftentimes have concerns that if we highlight things that are different about us, that somehow that might make us feel like we don't belong where we are. The conversation took place at a live taping of women at work. I was joined by my then cohost, Sarah Green Carmichael and Nicole Torres, and by our senior producer, Amanda Kersey, who moderated the conversation. We later published the episode as self disclosure at work and behind the mic. For this revisit, Amanda re edited the conversation to focus on Kathy's voice, her research, her reflection, and the insights that feel just as relevant now as they did then. She opened by reflecting on why self disclosure was part of women at work from the beginning and how Kathy's research helped her see that choice in a new light. Again, thank you everybody for coming. When we were figuring out what women at work was gonna sound like when we were developing the show, One of the things that was important to me was to have stories from the hosts' personal stories, not just from their careers, but from the rest of their life be essential to this show. From my perspective, I knew that these women were full of insights, all of their experiences. They're funny. They are great storytellers. But it wasn't really until reading about your research that I understood that there were more benefits to opening up about ourselves at work. So could you talk about what some of the research says about self disclosure in the workplace? Yeah. So absolutely. So I've been doing research on diversity and inclusion in teams for the last twenty plus years. And one of the major findings in that literature is that diverse groups tend to be less cohesive than homogeneous ones. And so I actually started thinking about that and took, like, two or three steps back to think about how do teams actually become cohesive. I mean, what is that? What is actual cohesion, and how do you build it? And so as we I started having conversations about that with some colleagues of mine. We started looking at the literature, and we we actually realized that a lot of what cohesion …