Your Opinions Represent Your Employer

Image credit: https://www.pexels.com/@freestocks

An important public service announcement: Writing in your on-line profile that what you post does not represent your employer seems like the height of self-delusion at worst and, at best, a misguided notion that such a statement will save you from yourself.

You don’t need to assume a leadership role in organizations or groups to represent the group by what you say and what you do.

If a group accepts you as a member, your comportment—especially in public—says a lot about the nature of the group. This includes your on-line activity: What you place and do on a personal website, on social media, on public forums, and in public demonstrations and events says a lot about you as a person.

Disrupt a Group’s Mission, Get Dropped

Even if the group does not count you as an official spokesperson or issue what you’ve said or done as an “official statement” on its behalf, it will reject you as a member or employee if it finds the statements you’ve made or the actions you’ve taken in contradiction to its ethics, purpose, or function.

The strongest and best organizations have people with multiple perspectives working toward a shared objective; the most robust, most creative, and most successful groups do not have homogeneity of thought.

However, herein lies a lot of confusion and difficulty around where we can differ productively and where we can differ in such a way that we prevent the good functioning of a group.

The line between acceptable behavior and unacceptable behavior for a given group’s or company’s members doesn’t lie in disagreement: It lies in whether the disagreement and discussion further and promote (or at least don’t hinder) the group’s overall functioning.

A Group’s Values and Purposes Matter

If what you do and what you say will hinder the ability of the group to achieve its objectives in some way, you risk exclusion.

The woman who called the police on a birder in Central Park with a false claim about a black man received a termination notice from her employer after the incident went public. Less recently, between the time she sent the tweet ahead of an international flight and her arrival at her home airport, an employer terminated a nonprofit executive who made a joke about AIDS in Africa. Television personalities have received dismissals after unwise tweets. Sponsors have dropped celebrities after they’ve behaved abominably on-line and off-line. (Tiger Woods, anyone? Lance Armstrong?)

These groups have justification in removing their association from and refusing to give association to people who have acted in ways that conflict with their values and purposes.

Find New Friends, Find New Employers

You may not mind if your friends, family, and social and community organizations drop you after you’ve posted something that hinders or counters their progress toward their objectives or their good functioning as a group.

After all, you may not want to associate with people socially or in community who don’t share your mindset.

However, you may have a harder time if you lose your income source. Though a person could counter that you’d function better within a company that aligns with your values, you might find an employer that shares certain values harder to come by than you think—especially as companies that may not disagree with your values still may not want to hire someone who’s overly public on a hot-button issue that could distract from their work.

In short, go ahead and state on your profiles that your comments don’t represent your employer (or other groups). Just realize that they do, in fact, represent them—and that you might experience the consequences of your actions, despite your hollow disclaimer.