The personality swap

As much as we make things at work, work quietly makes us — and, happily, it can remake us too

Years ago I worked on a small project with one of the pricklier people I've come across. Hard work, and not much fun – he seemed to hate his job, the work, the company, and, on a bad day, us. Actually, he didn't need the bad day. I remember wondering, as you do, whether people like that turn up that way or are slowly made that way by the places they spend their days in.

A few years later I took a consulting gig at a different company, walked into the team, and there he was.

I was dreading it. And then I didn't recognise him. Same face, same voice, same everything – and a completely different person. It was as though someone had swapped him for a cheerier twin.

Over a glass of very nice Pinot Noir in the bar after work, the story came out. He'd left the old place for the sake of his health – mental, physical, the lot – and the new workplace had been a revelation. Not every company, it turned out, is the same. Not every company keeps you in your box. Some of them treat your time, energy and attention as things worth looking after, take a genuine interest in what you might yet become, and organise the whole climate of the place around doing good work rather than merely getting ahead.

I left that same old company too, as it happens. I've a rule as a consultant: the day you catch yourself behaving like the outfit you were brought in to help, it's time to go.

Which brings me to a rather lovely idea, depending on where you're sitting right now. As much as we make things at work, work also makes us.

Every interaction leaves a mark. Every meeting, rule, incentive and priority is teaching us how to behave – what gets noticed around here, what gets rewarded, what's tolerated until it's simply "how things are." We read the room and calibrate, because we're social animals and that's what we do. And work is one of the most powerful rooms most of us ever stand in. It isn't neutral. It's shaping us more or less all the time, usually without asking first.

Spend long enough somewhere that pulls the wrong way and it tells in your own self. Patience becomes brittle. The odd shortcut starts to feel reasonable. You stop raising the thing that ought to be raised, because raising it hasn't gone well before. You start, if you're not careful, to bring those things home too. And soon, if you're really not careful, you become a shadow of your former self.

My prickly friend wasn't born furious, disengaged and unfriendly. He'd been taught it, over years, by a place that rewarded the wrong things – and he couldn't have told you the day it happened.

Here's the cheerful part, though, and the reason this isn't a gloomy field note. It runs just as strongly the other way. Move someone from a draining place into a good one and something rather wonderful happens: the energy comes back, the curiosity returns, the judgement softens.

The person everyone had written off as difficult turns out to have been responding, quite sensibly, to a climate they were working in – and when the climate changes, so do they. My new friend was the proof, sitting across the table with his Pinot, packet of dry roasted peanuts and genuine smile. Work can diminish people. It can just as easily give them back to themselves.

Which is a positively lovely thing to carry into a Monday. The colleague who seems checked out may not be a lost cause; they may simply be in the wrong climate. And anyone who shapes even a small part of how work feels – a team, a meeting, the way a mistake is met – is shaping the people inside it, a little, whether they meant to or not.

Nobody's usually watching that happen. But it's happening all the same. And every so often, when the conditions are right, you get to watch someone become themselves again over a decent glass of red.

As an aside, this note on work making us, is one of many chapters in the Take a Day Off book.