I’m with Nick Clegg – millennials, stop bringing your ‘authentic selves’ to work

Of all the naff corporate concepts dressed up as liberation, authenticity is up there as the worst. So I’m not surprised to hear that even Nick Clegg can’t take any more of it.

The former deputy PM has revealed, in a speech at Wimbledon Bookfest, that when he arrived in California to work for Meta and Facebook, there were posters around the office saying “Bring your authentic self to work.”

So he announced to his “T-shirt wearing millennial” underlings: Please don’t. “Bring your inauthentic self to work. I’ll bring my inauthentic self to work from nine until five, then you can be as authentic as you like in the evenings, and we’ll all get on perfectly well.” And their reaction was, according to Clegg, “absolute stony silence”, even though he was speaking in a semi-joking manner that he thought worked well “in a rather British, House of Commons way”.

But obviously, he has a point. I don’t want to see your authentic self in the workplace – and I’m sure you don’t want to see mine.

As someone who used to live in California, I know exactly what Clegg is referring to when he says that Silicon Valley is earnest, whereas the House of Commons thrives on “facetiousness and sarcasm”. Honestly, I think I prefer the snark. It’s not as if either system is actually any more truthful than the other – the boss who hears all about your personal problems doesn’t genuinely want to know – they’re just figuring out how to stop it from impacting their profit margins. Silicon Valley is notorious for creating the faux chumminess of social media; these apps that mine us for data and addiction, while pretending to be pals.

I worked in offices in the Nineties when those “authentic selves” with no self-consciousness were the ones who used to grope and leer at us. Make racist jokes that everyone had to laugh at, even if you were the butt of them. But this seemingly casual disregard for feelings, or for personal truths, was and is a shock to the Silicon Valley juniors. And it isn’t just America. It’s happening here too.

I thought it was a good thing that the old British tradition of the stiff upper lip had fallen by the wayside, but dear lord, parenting a teenager has revealed that I was wrong.

Case in point, my daughter recently invited 25 friends to our house for her 14th birthday party. This is a child who vastly prefers small groups and often finds secondary school overwhelming, with all of its noise and drama, so I was surprised. I pointed out her guests wouldn’t even all fit in one room of our small house – shouldn’t we make it a smaller gang, easier to enjoy? Absolutely not – she was resolute, this was what she wanted.

And so it was that at 7pm they all arrived, with instructions to be collected by parents or make their own way home at 10pm. And so it was that at 7:58pm, my daughter came upstairs to tell me she had asked them all to leave, “because I’m feeling overwhelmed”. Yeah, I bet you are, I muttered, trying not to let the words, “so suck it up, buttercup” escape my lips.

This is a generation raised to believe their feelings are paramount. I should know: I raised one. So imagine the bewildered look on her face when I told her to get back down there, cancel the cancelling, and host her guests as promised. She didn’t look cross with me – instead, she looked absolutely fascinated by this brand new approach. “But it’s my birthday,” she added, as if to say that her happiness was more important than that of 25 others. The next day, having done as she was told, she said to me, happily, “You know, I actually quite enjoyed my party!”

So forget being your authentic self – be the self who invited 25 people and is going to deal with the consequences. Be the self who has taken on a job in an office or a workshop but saves their wider passions for home, their loved ones, the dancefloor. And be the self who understands that a poster on an office wall about being authentic is probably as inauthentic as it gets.