The Costume We Wear Every Day

Why So Many of Us Show Up to Work as an Edited Version of Ourselves

Issue 288, October 29, 2026

If your workplace does anything for Halloween, you know how the day goes. A few brave souls show up in full costume. Someone in accounting comes as a pirate, a team coordinates as the characters from a show everyone watched, and there is always one person whose costume is so good nobody recognizes them until they start talking. Most of us skip the costume, maybe wear something orange, eat a little too much candy from the bowl at the front desk, and go home to hand out candy to the trick-or-treaters.

Here is the funny part. A good number of the people who skipped the costume were wearing one anyway. They wear it every day.

It’s the parent who doesn’t mention that the early exit on Thursday is for a kid’s soccer game and says “I have a conflict” instead. It’s the person caring for an aging mother who never brings it up, because they don’t want anyone questioning whether they can handle the next big project or assignment. It’s the colleague who laughs along at the joke that wasn’t at all funny to them, who keeps their health or their worries or their weekend plans to themselves, who changes how they dress, how they talk and what they share depending on who they are with. None of them are hiding who they are. Everyone knows they have kids, or a mother, or a life outside the office. They just wear a costume to make sure they present themselves the way they believe the office expects.

The Roles We Play

I have written about this several times before, going back to a couple of issues in 2022, Role Playing and What Role Do You Play?, and the chapter on role-playing in The Truth About Transformation. Human beings can appear to be many different people throughout the day, depending on the situation or environment. We step into one role in a board meeting, another with our team, another with a client and another at home, and we adjust how we act and what we share to fit what each one asks of us. It’s how people get along and how we try to accommodate what we believe is expected. The point I made back then still holds: our core values don’t change from role to role. They stay very much a part of who we are. It does, however, rightly or wrongly, matter a great deal that we recognize which role we are in and what is expected of us in that role.

A role is something we step into and back out of. We know we are playing it, and we set it down when we leave a room, an office or a setting.

The trouble starts when the role stops coming off. When it’s no longer a part we play for a meeting or a situation but a version of ourselves we feel we have to keep up all day, every day, with everyone. At that point, it isn’t just a role we play anymore. It is a permanent costume.

When the Role Becomes a Costume

In 1963, the sociologist Erving Goffman wrote a book called Stigma, about how people manage the parts of themselves they believe others will judge. In it he described something he called covering. It’s different from what one would consider hiding. When you hide something, people don’t know it is there. When you cover, people know, and you work hard to keep it from coming up.

The legal scholar Kenji Yoshino, who built much of his career on Goffman’s idea, likes to explain it with Franklin Roosevelt. Everyone in Roosevelt’s cabinet knew he used a wheelchair. He wasn’t hiding it. But he made sure he was already seated behind the table before they came into the room, so nobody had to watch him get in or out of his chair. That is covering. The fact is known. The effort goes into keeping it out of view.

Years before that, Goffman had spent time studying a small hotel in the Shetland Islands and watched how the staff behaved. In the dining room, in front of guests, they were polished and proper. Back in the kitchen, the manners came off. They joked, complained and talked about the guests. He called these the front stage and the back stage, and he argued that all of us move between them all day long, which is the same idea as the roles we play, seen from the other side. Nobody wants a workplace with no front stage. We don’t need to hear every thought a colleague has, we don’t want to be weighed down by everyone else’s problems, and there is a reason we don’t show up to a client meeting the way we show up to a backyard cookout. Yoshino himself has said the point is not that people should never cover. Some of it is ordinary courtesy, following social norms and good, intuitive judgment.

The permanent costume is what happens when there is no kitchen to go back to.

How Many of Us Are Wearing One

Yoshino wrote a book about covering in 2006, and in 2013 he worked with Deloitte to find out how common it is at work. Their survey of more than 3,000 employees found that 61 percent covered some part of themselves on the job. Ten years later, in 2023, they asked again. The answer barely moved. Sixty percent of the workers surveyed had covered something about themselves at work in the past year.

It isn’t confined to one kind of person or one stage of a career. Younger workers said they do it more, but nearly half of baby boomers said they do it too. And the people who cover the most are not the ones most of us would guess. In the 2023 study, covering was most common among senior managers and the C-suite, at 67 percent. The higher people rise, the more they seem to feel they have to edit themselves, often to a significant degree. Workers also said they feel the need to cover more when they are dealing with someone in leadership, holding back who they really are to put forward the self they believe is acceptable in that setting. So the people at the top are wearing the heaviest costumes, and everyone else puts theirs on a little tighter when those people walk into the room.

About 40 percent of workers said they believe their team leaders expect them to cover one or more parts of themselves. Only 35 percent had taken the risk of letting any of it show in the past year.

What the Costume Costs

Wearing a costume all day is tiring. Anyone who has spent a long Halloween party in a mask knows how good it feels to finally take it off when you get home. The evening was fun, and the comments on the costume were appreciated, but like anything, it gets old. It had its time and its place.

The research says the everyday version wears on people the same way. Sixty percent of the workers in the 2023 study said the need to cover hurts their well-being and leaves them emotionally drained. It takes a lot of energy to keep the costume on. And 56 percent said it hurts their commitment to the organization.

There is a quieter cost as well, and it runs opposite to what most of us would assume. We cover because we believe it will help us fit in, be part of the group, be easier to work with and be seen in a positive light. Anna Newheiser and Manuela Barreto tested that belief in a series of experiments published in 2014. In their studies, people who kept a part of themselves that others might judge out of a conversation, rather than sharing it, came away feeling like they belonged less, not more. They felt less authentic, and they ended up sharing less about themselves in general. And the people they were talking with picked up on it.

The costume we put on to be accepted can be the very thing that keeps others at arm’s length. We think the costume hides us, but others often sense that something is being held back. Perhaps a friendship cools, or a colleague grows a little more distant, or the invitations to lunch or coffee quietly stop. We may step back and wonder why, but we rarely connect it to our own behavior.

Think about what that means for an ordinary day at the office. Every bit of energy that goes into managing how we come across is energy that isn’t going into the work, or into the people we work with. The parent tracking which meetings it’s safe to mention the soccer game in. The caregiver doing the mental math on whether a late arrival will raise questions. The manager who has never once told the team they were struggling. None of it shows up on a timesheet, and all of that energy gets spent, and we feel it.

Why It Matters Most When Things Are Changing

All of this matters even more when an organization is going through change or a full transformation, because that is exactly when the costumes get heavier.

Change hands people new roles. A few years ago I wrote that change is a team sport, and that everyone involved has to know their role and how that role is going to evolve. But a new role rarely comes with a script. The process is new, the tools are new, the reporting line may be new, and nobody is good at any of it yet. Herminia Ibarra, who studies how people grow into new roles, has written that stepping into one can feel inauthentic, at least at first, and that the people who grow keep “trying on different styles like new clothes” until they find what fits. That kind of trying on is healthy. In a workplace where everyone is already in costume, though, there is no room to be seen trying anything on. You are expected to look like the new role already fits, so you act like you have it figured out, and the costume gets one more layer.

Change also depends on people saying the things a costume is built to keep quiet. I don’t understand this yet. I’m worried about what this means for my job. This new process doesn’t work for how my week actually goes. Those are exactly the things leaders need to hear to get a change right, and exactly the things a workforce in costume keeps to itself. James Detert and Amy Edmondson found that people decide whether to speak up based on unwritten rules they carry around about what is safe to say to the people above them. In their work, whether people spoke up tracked what they expected their boss would do far more than anything the boss had actually done. An open door doesn’t help much if people believe it is firmly closed.

Then there are the leaders, the group that covers the most. In the middle of a transformation, leaders feel enormous pressure to look certain, so they cover their doubts. Their teams feel pressure to look capable, so they cover their struggles. Everyone is performing confidence, and the plan looks on track from every seat in the room, right up until it isn’t. That is how an organization ends up in transformation theater, going through the motions of change while the real conversation never happens.

And it all draws from the same limited supply. Dr. Michelle Pipes put it plainly on The Human Factor Podcast: human capacity is finite. She described walking into a boardroom knowing you have to mute who you are and polish what you report, and how much energy that takes, energy that could have gone into innovating instead of surviving the meeting. During a transformation, people are already being asked to learn new ways of working on top of their regular jobs. Every bit spent keeping the costume on is a bit that can’t go toward the change.

It always comes back to the human factor, the ingrained programming that feeds our thoughts, behaviors and actions. Yet it always seems so uncomfortable to step back and recognize what really drives human behavior, and how much it matters to what we are trying to achieve.

Taking It Off

Halloween is the one day a year that we openly put on a costume, and for a lot of people it’s also the most relaxed day at the office all year. Maybe that’s because everyone can see the costume. Nobody has to pretend the pirate is anything other than the person from accounting.

The other 364 days, the costumes are harder to spot, and that’s what makes them so easy to keep on. They don’t come with a candy bowl or a group photo. They come with a quick change of subject, a laugh that isn’t quite real, a “conflict” that is really a soccer game.

So this Halloween, when the pirate walks by your desk, it might be worth asking a slightly different question than whose costume is best.

What are you wearing to work the rest of the year, and who would you be if you took it off?

Related Reading

What Role Do You Play? (Issue 72). From 2022, on the many roles we step into through the day, and why it matters to know which one we are in.

Role Playing (Issue 45). The roles we take on in the boardroom and the expectations that come with each of them.

Change Is a Team Sport: We All Play a Role (Issue 118). Why everyone in a change has to know their role and how it is going to evolve.

Transformation Theater. The elaborate rituals of change that produce everything except change.

The Authenticity Paradox in Transformation Leadership. On the leader’s dilemma of sharing doubts or projecting confidence they don’t entirely feel.

The Permission Paradox (Issue 269). On why people hide the very things leaders say they want.

The Truth About Transformation. Chapter 32, “Role-Playing: The Board Room,” covers the roles we assume and the human dynamics that come with them.

On The Human Factor Podcast

Measuring What Change Feels Like, Part 1, with Dr. Michelle Pipes. On finite human capacity and the energy people spend muting who they are. Part 2 is out now as well.

Research Sources

1. Goffman, Erving (1963). Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Prentice-Hall. The source of the term covering.

2. Goffman, Erving (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Anchor Books. The source of front stage and back stage, drawn in part from his fieldwork at a hotel in the Shetland Islands.

3. Yoshino, Kenji (2006). Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights. Random House. The Roosevelt example is Goffman’s, as Yoshino recounts it in his book and interviews, including Hidden Brain, “Dropping the Mask,” March 3, 2025.

4. Smith, Christie, and Yoshino, Kenji (2013). Uncovering Talent: A New Model of Inclusion. Deloitte University Leadership Center for Inclusion. Survey of more than 3,000 employees. The 61 percent figure as reported by NYU School of Law.

5. Deloitte and the Meltzer Center at NYU School of Law (2023). Uncovering Culture: A Call to Action for Leaders. Survey of 1,269 U.S. workers at companies with at least 500 employees, conducted by SSRS. Figures as summarized by HRO Today, November 20, 2023: 60 percent covered in the past 12 months, 49 percent of baby boomers, 67 percent of senior managers and C-suite leaders, 40 percent believing team leaders expect covering, 35 percent uncovering in the past year, 60 percent reporting harm to well-being and 56 percent harm to commitment.

6. Newheiser, Anna-Kaisa, and Barreto, Manuela (2014). Hidden Costs of Hiding Stigma: Ironic Interpersonal Consequences of Concealing a Stigmatized Identity in Social Interactions. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, volume 52, pages 58 to 70.

7. Ibarra, Herminia (2015). The Authenticity Paradox. Harvard Business Review, volume 93, numbers 1 and 2, pages 52 to 59. The “like new clothes” phrase as quoted in People Matters.

8. Detert, James R., and Edmondson, Amy C. (2011). Implicit Voice Theories: Taken-for-Granted Rules of Self-Censorship at Work. Academy of Management Journal, volume 54, number 3, pages 461 to 488. The finding that speaking up tracked expected rather than actual boss behavior as summarized by Steven Kelman, Federal Computer Week, April 18, 2012.

9. Pipes, Michelle, on The Human Factor Podcast, Episode 037, October 15, 2026, paraphrased from the episode transcript.

10. Novak, Kevin. The Truth About Transformation: Leading in the Age of AI, Uncertainty and Human Complexity. Chapter 32, “Role-Playing: The Board Room.” See also Ideas and Innovations Issues 45 (March 3, 2022), 72 (September 8, 2022) and 118 (July 20, 2023).