Walk into your next town hall and look around.

Cameras on. Nods in all the right places. The chat is full of "Love this" and clapping emojis.

On paper, that looks like engagement.

In reality, a lot of those people have already checked out. Not because they stopped caring. Because they learned something dangerous.

Being real at your company is a bad deal.

The Day Authenticity Became A Career Risk

Every company says the same thing.

"Bring your whole self."

"We value honesty."

"My door's always open."

Then someone actually tests it.

An engineer raises a hard concern about a launch in a big meeting. A sales leader says the target is fantasy with the current product. A manager admits their team is at capacity and something has to give.

What happens next decides your engagement level for the next 12 months.

If that person gets sidelined, labeled "negative" or handed more work with no support, everybody learns the same lesson.

Authenticity is expensive. Pretending is safer.

From that point on, people still talk. They still show up. They still fill out the survey. They just stop telling you what they actually see.

Leadership research backs this up. Ethan Burris and James Detert found that employees speak up when they believe their input will help them, not hurt them, no matter how many open door slogans you repeat (study).

Once people realize authenticity is punished or ignored, they do the rational thing. They protect themselves and their teams. Engagement takes the hit.

Performance Costumes And Emotional Exhaustion

When authenticity is dangerous, people build a second self for work.

They develop a safe vocabulary. They scrub the doubt out of their updates. They talk in the optimistic tone they know the exec room wants to hear. They smile when strategy changes for the fourth time.

On the inside, they are thinking something very different.

"This will never ship on time."

"That decision made no sense."

"We're calling it agile because we keep changing our mind."

That gap between what people feel and what they are allowed to say is not a minor culture issue. It is a health hazard.

Psychologists call it surface acting. You fake or suppress your real emotions to match what is expected. A meta analysis of three decades of research showed that surface acting is strongly linked to burnout, emotional exhaustion, and lower performance (meta-analysis).

In plainer language, faking it drains people.

Your best people are usually the ones who do it the most. They know how to lead from the front. They know how to put on the brave face when things are on fire. They know how to turn every bad decision into an inspirational talking point for their teams.

So they carry the emotional load for everyone else. They perform positivity they do not feel. Then they go home wrecked.

Externally they still look engaged. Internally they are done.

And here is the kicker. Your engagement survey will tell you they are fine. Because in the five minutes it takes to answer those questions, it is easier to click "agree" than to try to fix a system that will not change.

How Leaders Accidentally Train People Not To Be Real

No leader wakes up and says "Let's crush authenticity today." You train people away from honesty in small, reasonable, respectable ways.

1. You reward the polished version

In your exec meeting, the person who gets praise is the one with the tidy deck and the smooth story. The person who shows up with the messy truth and an unvarnished risk sounds unprepared.

That signal travels faster than any values poster.

2. You celebrate positivity more than accuracy

People who raise hard questions get branded "not on board". People who keep everything upbeat get branded "great culture fit".

Over time, your culture learns that energy matters more than evidence. So people hide their skepticism behind upbeat language.

3. You ask for honesty then instantly defend yourself

You say "Give me the real feedback." Someone finally does. You rush to explain, rationalize, justify.

They walk out thinking "Never again." Everyone else watches and agrees.

4. You let value conflicts slide when the performer is a star

Top seller who trashes other teams. Beloved exec who ignores the process everyone else follows. Product hero who gets to steamroll feedback.

When stated values clash with actual behavior and behavior wins, you just told the whole company what really matters.

Workplace's own research on culture counterfeits shows this gap clearly. When values on the wall do not match daily decisions, people disengage and trust in leadership drops fast.

At that point, asking people to be "authentic" is not just ineffective. It feels insulting.

Authentic Leadership Or Forced Optimism

Here is the hard truth for every CEO and CPO.

You do not fix this by telling employees to "be themselves." You fix it by making it safe for them to tell you when something is broken.

That starts at the top.

Research on authentic leadership shows that when employees experience leaders as consistent and genuine, their basic psychological needs are met and performance rises (study).

Translated into real life, that means three things.

1. Your story has to match the system

If you say "we care about balance" and then reward people who answer messages at midnight, people do not buy the story. If you say "we value fairness" and then hide pay bands and back door promotions, they stop believing anything you say about engagement.

Workplace's work on fairness shows that when process and explanation feel fair, people give more energy and stay longer. When it feels rigged, they pull back fast.

2. You have to go first with the hard truths

Tell your teams where strategy missed. Name the goals you dropped. Admit where you moved the finish line on them.

Every time you do that, you teach people that honesty is not a career risk. It is a leadership requirement.

3. You have to protect the first movers

The first person who raises an ugly fact in public is taking a bigger risk than anyone else. If they pay a price, you just bought another year of silence.

If they get thanked, promoted, or clearly supported, you just unlocked a new level of engagement.

So the real question is not "Are our people being authentic." The real question is "What happens to the person who is."

How To Make Authenticity The Strongest Engagement Driver You Have

This is where most HR content gets soft and vague. You do not need more vibes. You need concrete operating changes a CPO can put on the CEO's agenda this quarter.

1. Install a challenge window before you ask for "all in"

For every big company goal, create a one or two week period where pushback is required.

Tell leaders and critical teams "Your job this week is to challenge the plan." Ask for the ugliest questions. Then publish the top challenges and how the exec team responded.

This does two things. It proves that dissent is part of the job. It reduces the emotional load of being the lone voice of concern in month three when everything is already on fire.

2. Put fairness and rationale on paper

Publish pay bands with real ranges. Clarify promotion criteria in writing. Require short written rationales for major decisions with three lines.

• Why this.

• Why now.

• Who decided.

Colquitt's work on organizational justice shows that these fairness signals predict commitment more reliably than perks or slogans. People can live with tough calls. They will not stay engaged inside a black box.

3. Make truth a career advantage

Change what you celebrate.

In all hands, praise the engineer who raised the risk early enough to save the quarter, not just the team that pulled off the last minute scramble.

In performance reviews, give explicit credit for people who surfaced problems, not just the ones who smiled and "made it work."

When truth telling gets you visibility and opportunity, authenticity stops being brave. It becomes normal.

4. Instrument authenticity before it disappears

You do not have to guess where authenticity is dying. Your culture tells you in the language it uses every day.

Workplace already tracks signals like hedging language, disappearing dissent, decision reopen rates, after hours load, and shrinking curiosity across messages and meetings.

When "I will" turns into "should be fine" across a team, belief is fading. When questions drop and polite agreement spikes, people are done arguing and have moved to self protection.

Put those cultural signals next to your financial metrics. Discuss them in the same meeting. When authenticity indicators drop, treat it like a leading indicator of execution risk, not a soft HR concern.

The One Question Every CEO Should Ask Their CPO This Quarter

Most exec teams still ask the wrong question.

"How engaged are our people."

You already know that number. You can probably recite it in your sleep.

The sharper question is this.

"Where have we made it unsafe or pointless for our most committed people to be honest with us."

If you take that question seriously, a few things happen fast.

You see the teams where updates are always positive right up until failure.

You see the leaders who punish dissent while quoting your values deck.

You see the goals that move so often that people stopped believing any of them are real.

Fix those and you do not have to beg people to engage. You make it rational for them to care again.

Your people already know how to give everything they have. They proved it on day one.

The real test is whether you will build a company where being real is the smartest thing they can do for their career, not the start of their exit plan.

Do that and you will not just see engagement rise.

You will finally see what happens when people stop performing and start believing you again.