Let's talk about covering.
That thing we do where we hide a little or a lot of who we are because we don't feel safe to be all of who we are.
We don't tell our colleagues we're gay because we've overheard too much casual homophobic banter.
We don't talk about our kids because we don't want our boss to think we're not committed to our job.
We don't talk about our religion because everyone else practices the same religion and they talk about it all the time.
We don't mention our invisible disability because it's just not worth the effort to explain to people who aren't interested.
We cover all the time – little things and big things: who we voted for, our favorite hobbies, the TV shows we like, the books we read, where we grew up, our dad's profession, our ancestry, our ethnicity, our arrest record. . . and the list goes on.
The economic repercussions from covering are huge: the loss of innovation, creativity, productivity, efficiency, team cohesion.
All goes down the drain because of the mental bandwidth we use worrying about whether we can be ourselves in front of our colleagues.
And the economic repercussions are nothing compared to the human repercussions.
Maybe if we paid as much attention to humans as we did to economics we wouldn't have to talk about any of this.