Personal and professional identity: dichotomy, trichotomy or multichotomous?
A common theme for questions at recent conferences I have spoken at has been the dichotomy between personal and professional identities. Is it best to keep the two separate or have we reached the point where the blurring of boundaries that takes place so readily within social networks makes this impractical or impossible? If you read around the subject you will find that opinion is mixed. For some the frequent need to share information between personal and professional spaces makes the maintenance of two distinct identities difficult or a hindrance. For others their personal and professional lives are so far apart and so very different that never the two shall meet.
There is, of course, no right answer. I believe it is also far more complicated than a simple dichotomy. At best it is a trichotomy but in all probability is multichotomous: determined by the type and nature of the spaces I use and the way I view my professional self. I’ll try and explain and for the purpose of simplicity I’ll stick to the trichotomous concept of online identity.
Tweet
I’ll start with the terms ‘personal’ and ‘professional’. I imagine, barring a few minor differences, that the majority share a definition of personal identity and the online spaces coterminous with this. Me. My family. My friends. My likes. My dislikes. My hobbies. You’ll understand where I am going with this. You will also see where the boundaries will start to become blurred.
Take ‘my friends’. Over time this will include people you meet through a professional context but who become close enough to be considered friends. You will be comfortable with this and allow them into your personal spaces, after all they already know the people and things they are likely to encounter there. You share, however, a wider circle of professional relationships and your personal friendships or approach to managing connections within social networks will differ. So remember, when you update your personal status telling your friends in clear terms what a dreadful day you have had and one of your work-related friends reply it could in turn be read by one of their ‘friends’ who happens to be that hopeless incompetent senior manager at the centre of the experience you are sharing with your world.
If personal online identity is more complex than it first appears, I think it is the concept of professional online identity where things really start to get interesting. I’m not going to attempt to deconstruct the notion of professionalism in this post, that’s for another day, but I do want to touch on two distinct strands of professional identity by way of explaining my trichotomy.
I have a ‘personal professional’ identity. It is crafted by my work-related experiences: the jobs I have had, the education and training I have undertaken, the reading and research I do, the other people who influence my thinking. It certainly relates to the work I currently do, but it is about me and who I am professionally. The person I am in the spaces I inhabit may be very different from the personal me but is not representative of the organisation I work for or the job I do. This blog is an example of personal professional online identity.
I have a work-related professional identity, directly related to the work that I do and at all times I am representative of the organisation I work for. It may be through a corporate blog, managing social networks, formal statements I make through social media or online fora, podcasts, webcasts, etc. I may be visible to many thousands (hundreds of thousands in my case) of other professionals who know me only through this identity. Over time some may interact with my personal professional identity and a few may even make it through to my personal spaces.
When it comes to my online identity I am a social media tripod. Take Facebook: search for me and you will find three of me – similar pictures, similar biographies, very different purposes. One is the personal me, known to friends and family, managing and contributing to pages and groups far removed from the professional me. One is the personal professional me, known to colleagues and acquaintances, managing and contributing to pages and groups relating to a wide range of professional interests and writing stuff like this. One is the work-related professional me, known to many people I don’t know and probably never will, managing and contributing to pages and groups in my official work capacity.
I believe (and in part this view is informed by an unpleasant personal experience) that I need to try to keep these three distinct identities separate and that in doing so I will need to manage those instances when the boundaries are blurred. Add to this the fact that I am active on LinkedIn, Ning, SocialGo, Twitter, YouTube, SlideShare, bespoke fora, etc, sometimes with separate identities in these spaces, and you get a sense of scale and complexity.
This is where different browsing platforms come into their own. Yes, I have an Internet Explorer me, a Firefox me and a Chrome me to manage the personal me, personal professional me and the work-related professional me. All I need now is a foolproof way for managing passwords and multiple email addresses!
I’ll finish with a nod to a blog post I uncovered when getting my thoughts around multiple online identities. Here Hutch Carpenter discusses how the size of an organisation impacts on the distance between personal and professional identities. Not sure it fits entirely well with a trichotomous or multichotomous model, but I enjoyed reading it.