The Performance Review

The exhausting business of performing in business

I have rehearsed the answer to “tell me about a time you navigated a difficult stakeholder relationship” more times than I have told the actual story to anyone who knows me.

I know my lines. I know where to pause for effect, when to laugh a little to signal that I have perspective on the hard thing, when to bring it back around to what I learned from the experience. I know when to say “I” and when to say “we” so it sounds like I’m owning it vs. throwing my team under the bus. I know which stories to keep in rotation and which ones — the more honest ones, the hot messes — to leave in the mental filing cabinet.

Every interview I’ve ever had has felt like opening night for a show I’ve been running for fifteen years. What is this, Cats on Broadway? (Which ran for 18 years, by the way. TIL.)

I hate it, but I’m not even that bad at it. That’s maybe the worst part. I’ve gotten good at the performance. I can be warm and competent and funny and curious and just self-deprecating enough to seem like I have healthy self-awareness without actually revealing anything that could be used against me. I can answer behavioral questions like I’m narrating a highlight reel. I can do the voice. You know the voice.

What no interview has ever actually asked me to do is the job.

The things I’m good at live in writing. In the space between the question and the response, where I can think. In a doc with comments and track changes and the ability to revise (and revise, and revise) before I hit send. In a Slack message I’ve rewritten at least three times before anyone sees it. In the slow, iterative, asynchronous way that most knowledge work actually happens. None of that is available to me in an interview. The interview is testing my ability to perform, live, under pressure, with no tools and no time — which is to say it’s testing almost the exact opposite of the skills required for the role.

What an interview is really measuring is your nervous system. How confident you can appear when you’re scared, how smoothly you can surface a prepared answer and deliver it like you just thought of it. Whether you’ve got enough stage presence (… “executive presence”? ugh) to make the panel feel like they’re getting the real deal, and the real deal is a good one.

Now that I think about it, this is exactly what first dates are testing. (I’ve been married for over ten years, so it’s been a minute — but I don’t think the audition has changed much.)

The whole first-date experience is not so different from an interview — the rehearsed lines, the careful revealing, the performance of your best, most dateable self. You wear the perfect outfit that says “I have my life together” but also “I’m not too high-maintenance” and you order something that says “I’m adventurous but not too adventurous if that scares you” and you laugh at the right moments and you don’t lead with the thing about your anxiety. You do your highlights reel. You do the voice.

The difference is that a date can go somewhere real. If it works out, the walls eventually come down. Not all at once, but you get there. Someone sees the version of you that exists on a Tuesday at 8pm when you’re tired and grumpy and out of witty remarks. Someone learns the stories you don’t tell in rotation. Someone knows which answers are the real ones. The performance ends, or at least softens, into something that’s actually you.

Corporate life doesn’t have that third act. You perform your way into the job. And then you perform on the job, while doing your job. You learn to narrate your mistakes correctly and frame your wins and calibrate your visible enthusiasm. Even your competence is a performance — you’re not just doing good work, you’re making sure the right people see you doing good work, making sure your brand, god help us, is being managed.

Here’s the part I don’t know what to do with: I got good at it. Good enough that I stopped noticing where the performance ended and I began. Good enough that I got promoted and praised and eventually laid off thrice with some kind of comment about how it wasn’t me, it was them. “It’s not you; it’s me.” Classic breakup line.

The last almost year and a half not working full time has been nice for many reasons, and one of the big ones was I didn’t have to perform full time. And one of the things that surprised me was how long it took to figure out what I actually thought about things when no one was assigning a grade to my answer. When I wasn’t framing my response for the room. When I could just, like, have an opinion. Without the voice.

I think the corporate world is the most sustained version of the performance. We perform. We’ve always performed. But most performances have an intermission, or a closing night, or some small window where you get to just be the person who’s tired and doesn’t have an answer for this one.

The career ladder doesn’t give you that window. And every few years you go back out for another run, rehearsing your lines again, performing your competence at a panel of strangers who are also performing, everyone pretending this is how you find out who someone actually is.

I don’t know how to fix it. I’m not sure I’m even making an argument. I’m just noticing that it’s exhausting to perform for that long, and a little lonely, and that somewhere in the middle of all those highlight reels there’s a person who does their best work slowly, in writing, with time to think… who has never once been asked to show up that way in an interview.