Wednesday, May 18, 2016
So, inspired by a comment about Joyce and thinking of Molly Bloom's soliloquy in Ulysses, I started this in the style of Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age by Hrabal, and realized that a single sentence is a difficult way to try communicate effectively for one without Hrabal or Joyce's brilliance, so gave up. I also promised some math, but am not, at this early juncture, certain about where it might turn up…and I don't want to pretend I've read Hrabal, as he wrote in Czech (the title above is a translation), but the book is reported to be one long sentence.
Anyway, the topic is "Professionalism" and what the heck that means. I have been expertly and non-biasedly sampling whatever people I run across, if I think of it just then, about the definition. I usually don't remember to think about it unless somebody else uses the word, but in those instances, I've asked people what it means.
Those three people came up with wildly different answers to each other and to what I would. It is clearly not a word that is useful in communication (communication being what the audience hears) without a more rigorous discussion of what you mean by it, because everyone has their own idea of what it means, so will hear different things!! Or at least those 3 people and I will. Clearly, the word manages to fit an enormous variation of stuff under its umbrella – to the point of near meaninglessness. Anything from dress to comportment to writing style to speaking style to…lots more…can fit in there.
I have theory, which carries the usual disclamer, that I probably took this, in whole or part, from a bunch of people and is "mine" only in the sense that I'm presenting it now, and if you know who deserves attribution to any of it, I'll be happy to edit accordingly and I certainly don't ascribe it to original thought on my part…
The profession that sorta started the whole profession thing (I can't say the "world's oldest profession" here as that would be unprofessional and potentially lead to misunderstandings….or maybe not??) was lawyers. The profession comes out of the world of courtiers of royalty and eventually, to those who are expert in the application and understanding of laws. In a western democratic context, this gets into the whole "all people are equal under the law" and similar part truths - but useful aspirations!! Unfortunately, that "all people are equal thing" leads to very precise, boring, impersonal language.
Our clients are people, and we often have personal, long term relationships with them (at least in the work I do) and legalese is so difficult to read that it is often a punch-line - so why use that model for our writing? I'm not sure why legal-ish language is considered "professional" in that context - To the point that I avoid it, and have been praised by some clients for so doing…Some clients and some situations.
We have other clients that insist on an academic unreadable morass for some reason, maybe because it's what they've been told is professional, so it's what they expect ;) . With the clients that are good with "jargon light" communication, we write with the intent of informing them of the best way forward and why…and we actually want to have them understand it.
So as stated, our clients, and more frequently our colleagues are people we have some larger relationship with in and out of work. This makes "professional behavior and dress" even harder to lock down. Having a client call you out for informal talk or clothing at a meeting is less likely if you know the bruise on their cheek is from them wiping out, drunk and mostly naked, at a party that weekend (a totally fabricated example...really...).
The rule of thumb the HSE folks (at least our HSE folks) handed out at sensitivity training was; if someone takes offence at something you do or say, the presumption is that you screwed up. I really like that (good job HSE folks!!) as a general guide to life. If you piss off your client (or anyone), it's possible they are just unreasonably sensitive about something, but it's more likely you screwed up.
And as I said last week, I have plenty of experience screwing up!! That gets us to a cool "Professional Guide to Behavior" that's "anything that's tolerated is acceptable" which I have at least a small chance of mostly complying with…all right, "tolerated" is probably too low a bar, maybe "anything that's accepted is acceptable"??
With that short preamble (Intentionally ironic, Lucas, you don't need to point it out)
Here's the formal definition stuff…just kept to the adjectives here for brevity (ha, like I do brevity…)
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
adjective
adjective: professional
1 of, relating to, or connected with a profession.
"young professional people"
synonyms: white-collar, nonmanual
"people in professional occupations"
antonyms: blue-collar
2. (of a person) engaged in a specified activity as one's main paid occupation rather than as a pastime.
"a professional boxer"
synonyms: paid, salaried
"a professional rugby player"
antonyms: amateur
•having or showing the skill appropriate to a professional person; competent or skillful.
"their music is both memorable and professional"
synonyms: expert, accomplished, skillful, masterly, masterful, fine, polished, skilled, proficient, competent, able, experienced, practiced, trained, seasoned, businesslike, deft; More
informalace, crack, top-notch
"a thoroughly professional performance"
antonyms: amateurish
•worthy of or appropriate to a professional person.
"his professional expertise"
•informal derogatory
denoting a person who persistently makes a feature of a particular activity or attribute.
"a professional naysayer"
-copied directly from the first definition google gave me...maybe wikipedia??
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The only one of these that fit-ish under the usage as applied, is "worthy of or appropriate to a professional person". And that leaves you looking for a definition of "worthy" and who gets to define that. What particular behaviors fit under your unique-ish understanding of worthy?
For example, is this writing style, on an internal blog - "professional"?? After all, I've been known to make both direct and indirect disparaging judgements on aspects of the company leadership. Some have said it's unprofessional to do this publically. Others, including some of the leadership so disparaged, encourage an open discussion of "stuff", although, as I am frequently reminded, "stuff" is not acceptable in professional communication…
So let's take that "stuff" thing from a real life example. I'm in front of a room of regulators (6 of them – strength in numbers) trying to get agreement that the clients planned works are in the public best interest. I use the phrase "and stuff" a few times to imply that I know the argument I'm summing up has a bunch of moving parts, but don't feel that detailing exactly where we sit on each detail is helpful to understanding the problems at hand. (If Tad ever read these he'd be saying, with a thick polish accent - "24 times for this 'stuff' before I stopped counting").
The presentation was well received by the regulators and clients (and even Tad!!), and there was much rejoicing. "Stuff" helped make that presentation, which the client happily paid for, so how is using "stuff" unprofessional?? Is it more unprofessional than, say, Monty Python references?? I had a regulator call me back in record time because I had a Black Adder (cunning plan) reference in the emailed question, and she's a fan…and yes I'm much better at remembering sources of funny stuff than I am on technical stuff, even funny technical stuff.
So where do effective and professional diverge? My personal "professional" can be distilled down to
- uses expert knowledge to further the best interests of his clients, with respect for the common good, for pay.
That "for pay" part encompasses the whole "need to make enough money to keep yourself/the company alive" thing. But it is a key part in my personal morality that I don't guide the client to "work the company could get paid for" but to "work that is in the clients best interest" so the company/my best short term interest doesn't come into the equation.
The company hires professional administrators to handle the whole money in/money out stuff and keep the company from blowing up. They accept pay for providing their knowledge of business administration to look out for the company owners' best interests. There is a global issue around how much they pay themselves for providing those services, but I'm not going there today…
There are people in my realm of acquaintance who think that "client's best interest" part is a totally naïve outlook, and that you need to look out for yourself – to which I reply, the trust I build by turning down work I could do, while pushing for the best result for the client, leads to trust and clients for life - so it is in my best long term interest. Does it mean I can get taken advantage of?? Yes. And if I'm taken advantage of, it is not in my best interest to work with that person again. So I don't. It has cost some suppliers millions. That distilled bit above is what I think is the core of professional – language, comportment and presentation are ancillary (not unimportant, just ancillary).
But anyway, what I wear or how I act or write or talk is professional in my humble opinion (Lucas, I can hear your scoff at humble from here, and you haven't even read it yet…again…knowingly ironic) as long as it's effective and moves "things" to a better conclusion than they look to be heading without my intervention. That requires judgement and I'm certainly not always right, cus that judgement thing is hard, but I try. I succeed enough of the time, on a "professional" level, that people still pay me (and the company that puts up with me) for my expert opinions. I even succeed often enough on a "friends" level, that I still have a few, but even those few wish I'd stop meddling much of the time…whatev.
So I propose a contest – what does professional mean to you. Please put your personal distilled definitions, two sentence at longest, of what your "professional" looks like in comments below. I will reply to individual comments as I think is warranted, and we can start an actual discussion, within the constraints of the comments section limitations. The winner will be all of us, as it will provide a better understanding of ideas of our colleagues. And I know that it's a complicated idea with nuance and stuff, and that's my excuse for writing however many sentences are above to put across my definition in total, but you guys can start your own blogs if you want more space! And since I walked away from the one sentence thing, I can't claim this whole thing as distilled, so whatev… and I'll try for some math in the next one – and back to more mental healthy stuff..