Suezette Yasmin Robotham wrote a book about authentic leadership. Then she put "pre-work" at the beginning.

There's a question in Beyond Titles that will stop you cold: Where do you see alignment or dissonance between the real you and the work you?

When I sat with this exercise, I thought I had it figured out. I've built my career on teaching people how to negotiate, how to advocate for themselves, how to show up boldly. Authentic? That's my whole brand. But Suezette Yasmin Robotham leadership consultant, former education reformer, author doesn't let you off that easy. Her questions are designed to catch even the people who think they're self-aware. The ones who've convinced themselves they're bringing their full selves to work.

We're talking about covering that Deloitte study that found 61% of people hide aspects of their identity at work. The study came out over a decade ago. Ten years later, that number hasn't moved.

Think about that. Sixty-one percent of people are spending some portion of their workday managing how they're perceived instead of actually working. And the kicker? Companies that champion authentic leadership perform 147% stronger per share than their competitors. Not a feel-good stat. A performance stat.

Suezette started Beyond Titles with pre-work because she knew something most business book authors forget: reading about authenticity won't make you authentic. You have to actually look at where you're performing.

Her girlfriend roasted her for it. "Not you started the book with pre-work!" But that's exactly the point. If you're not willing to do the self-assessment, you're not ready for what comes next.

The real you versus work you exercise isn't about surface-level authenticity wearing your natural hair or having pink nails or saying whatever you feel. "That's not what I'm talking about," Suezette says, cutting through the noise. "What I'm talking about from an authentic leadership lens is, are we creating the conditions as leaders that allow not only ourselves, but the voices of our teams, the experiences of our teams, to be one where people are powering the work from a place of comfort and safety?"

Early in her career, Suezette was in education reform, sitting in rooms with senior executives at 23. Her mentor told her: people are always watching you, so show up as the best reflection of yourself.

She took that advice seriously. Maybe too seriously.

She wasn't just uncomfortable. She couldn't have the impact she wanted because she was spending too much energy trying to conform to someone else's leadership style. The dissonance between who she was and who she thought she needed to be was costing her and the students she was there to serve.

Then came tech. Google recruited her through LinkedIn when Google Cloud was taking off. She knew how to talk about the transferability of her skills full spectrum of talent acquisition, learning and development, building teams, creating rubrics. But what surprised her about tech was this: title didn't matter as much as impact.

She was sitting in trainings next to employee number 8 at Google. She shared an idea in a meeting, and Urs—Google's employee number 8—asked if she knew Eileen, the chief people officer. "Yeah, I know Eileen," she said. "Who doesn't know our chief people officer?" He emailed Eileen anyway. The next thing she knew, the CPO was making time to meet with her about her idea.

"What I loved about the gray of tech is that within that gray, your impact wasn't limited because you were L5, or a program lead or a program manager," she tells me.

Chapter 6 is about alignment. It's the one where Suezette talks about rolling a boulder up a hill versus being in flow. You know that Greek mythology reference—Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the mountain, only to watch it roll back down. That's what it feels like when you're trying to force something that isn't aligned with who you are or what you actually want.

"There are those moments when things line up synchronistically for your best good and your best possible outcome, and those things just flow naturally," she says. "We know when we're in flow."

But here's the part that lands for Black women especially: we've been taught that hustle is the only way. Work hard. Make it happen. Do more than everyone else because you have to. That mentality gets imprinted so deep it becomes unconscious. Sometimes covering becomes unconscious too it just becomes habit.

Suezette's questions in chapter 6 help you pull back the layers of that hustle mentality. Not by telling you to stop working hard, but by giving you permission to ask: Is this actually me doing it because I'm intended and meant to do it and it's aligned to what I want? Or am I doing it because somebody else has said that I need to do it?

"We sit in armor," she says. "You have to have the titles, and you have to have this experience, and you've made it, and you're now in big tech, and you build this armor around you that gets heavy. And if we don't do the work of saying and pausing and being like, 'Hey, but is this what I want?' You look up and you've lived a life that looks good to other people, but doesn't feel good to you."

There's a moment in our conversation where Suezette says something that makes me pause: "Why would you choose an environment that doesn't find you palatable?"

It's not a rhetorical question. It's an actual evaluation criterion. If you're twisting yourself into shapes to be acceptable in a workplace, that's data. Not about you about the environment.

The business case is clear. The performance numbers are real. But the personal cost of covering is something you can only measure when you stop doing it.

"I think the thing that we owe ourselves is to be able to look back on life at 80 and say, 'I lived to the full extent of my life, and it was doing things that made me actually feel happy, and I found success my own way,'" Suezette tells me.

She's not saying quit your job and follow your bliss. She's saying: do the work of figuring out who you actually are, what you actually want, and whether the place you're spending 40+ hours a week allows that person to exist.

Because you can't heal what you haven't identified. And you can't lead authentically if you don't know who's actually showing up.

Beyond Titles: Fearlessly Leading as Your Authentic Self by Suezette Yasmin Robotham is available now.

Connect with Suezette:
Website: www.suezette.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/suezette
Instagram: @suezette

Listen to the full conversation on the Winning Season podcast, hosted by Jacqueline V. Twillie.