Watch yourself in the seconds before you share your screen. The messy draft gets closed. The spreadsheet with the wrong numbers gets hidden. What appears is the version of your work that is ready to be seen.

Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey spent years studying that reflex at organizational scale. They concluded that most people are working a second job nobody hired them for: managing impressions, covering limitations, looking composed while catching up. In most organizations, they argued, it is the single largest drain on energy, and it appears in no budget.

The strange part is that the hiding rarely works. Colleagues map each other’s weak spots within months. Concealment doesn’t make a weakness invisible; it makes it undiscussable. So the one resource that could actually develop you, other people’s honest observation, stays locked away. And the effort compounds: every polished surface raises the cost of being the first unpolished one, so the gap between how a team looks and where it struggles widens a little each quarter.

People describe their weaknesses to me in two versions: the one they tell their team, already half-solved, and the live one, which has usually never been said in a group.

This week, keep a private tally. Each day, notice how much of your effort went into the work, and how much into how the work would look.

What has your team already noticed about you that you’re still spending energy hiding?