“Thrilled to collaborate.” “Excited to announce.” “Honored to be part of this team.”
It’s not that celebration is bad. It’s that it sounds less like people talking to each other, more like people posting about each other. The workplace is becoming LinkedIn with Zoom squares and cubicles.
I’ve sat in multiple meetings where the biggest debate wasn’t about a missed deadline or a community we’d let down. It was about how to frame the update for the board.
The work wasn’t the problem — the story about the work was.
That’s what happens when branding takes over culture:
Sound familiar? Scroll your LinkedIn feed and you’ll see the same logic at work.
LinkedIn has trained us that every experience should be a story with a lesson. Every failure should end with growth. Every announcement should land like a mic drop.
Now that energy is spilling into offices. Leaders turn every problem into a “learning moment.” Teams feel pressure to be polished in real time. People are curating themselves instead of connecting with each other.
But life isn’t always a narrative arc. Sometimes you’re just tired. Sometimes you don’t know the answer. Sometimes you’re angry and it doesn’t resolve. Workplaces that only make room for polished endings are workplaces where the truth gets buried.
Layer race on top of all this and the pressure multiplies.
Black professionals already carry the weight of representation. Every win is under a microscope. Every mistake gets amplified. Every boundary risks being coded as “unprofessional” or “angry.”
So what happens? We brand ourselves to survive. We polish every sentence. We make sure our LinkedIn self is also our workplace self. But even then, the stereotypes creep in.
On Not 4 Prophets Podcast, Trenia and I talk about how this branding demand shows up in nonprofit leadership all the time. Black leaders are expected to be LinkedIn-ready in real life, smiling, polished, and composed even when the house is burning.
Workplaces, like LinkedIn, love the “mental health” post. “We care about well-being.” “We added a mental health day.” “We hosted a meditation session.”
But if workloads are unmanageable, if HR weaponizes policies against people who speak up, if therapy stipends vanish by March, that’s just branding.
It’s a post, not a practice.
Did LinkedIn shape the workplace, or did the workplace shape LinkedIn?
Probably both. Workplaces were already representative/performance-driven. LinkedIn just gave that culture a stage. Then we started importing the feedback into the office, until you couldn’t tell which was influencing which.
Either way, the loop is complete. And it’s costing us honesty.
When everyone is a brand, the human part of work shrinks.
We lose the colleague who admits, “I’m lost.” We lose the leader who says, “I need help.” We lose the team member who risks, “This is messy, and I don’t have an answer yet.”
Instead, we get curated updates that sound great and fix nothing.
I don’t have a neat conclusion; and maybe that’s the point.
But here’s what I know: workplaces don’t need to be LinkedIn. They need to be places where you can bring your unfinished (notice how I didn’t state “authentic”) self. Where you don’t have to narrate everything into a “proud to share” moment. Where truth matters more than optics.
Because if we keep branding each other instead of connecting with each other, we’ll miss the point of working together.
#WorkplaceCulture #MentalHealthAtWork #BlackWomenLead #NonprofitLeadership #EquityInAction #WorkplaceTruth #Not4ProphetsPodcast
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