Whether we are advising external clients or our own senior management, whether we are in the role of strategist, planner, marketer, seller, developer, implementer, or general manager, we are called upon to act and behave “professionally”. So what does that mean, and more interestingly, how can we grow in this important aspect of our careers?
I think about professionalism in three fundamental dimensions: presence, values, and intellect. And I think it is entirely possible to grow in each of these aspects over the course of a career.
Presence is the most straightforward dimension and the easiest to master. At the simplest level, this means not slurping our soup. It means showing up on time and dressing appropriately. It means treating everyone with courtesy and respect. There is a form of professional behavior for virtual interaction as well, or what I have described elsewhere as one’s Virtual Intelligence Quotient (VQ).
Values represent a more nebulous dimension, because situations - and our behavioral response to them - are rarely categorized in purely black and white terms. As professionals, though, we are called upon to behave truthfully and courageously. We should be prepared say what people need to hear, not simply what they want to hear. And we must do this constructively and tactfully, often in the face of subtle or not so subtle pressure to go along with the crowd and not make waves. We are likely to face situations, over the course of our careers, when the only real choice we have is whether we make a career decision early, or whether we will be forced to make one later, but we will be making a career decision. We can learn to recognize those situations and act early and professionally.
And finally, there is the dimension of intellect. Sometimes this is referred to as thought leadership. One organization I know is using the term “eminence”. Both terms imply that we must do two things.
The first is to have a point of view. It is not enough to merely be smart. You have to be smart about something, in a way that not many others around you are. You must use your smarts to develop insight.
Second, it’s not enough to have insights if no one knows you have them. “Thought leadership” implies that you are operating in some arena and in some fashion to have people perceive you as an intellectual leader. “Eminence” implies that some audience has deemed you as being eminent in some field. So we need to learn how to convince others we have something to offer intellectually.
In fact, this is not so hard to do. There is usually some local chapter of some related professional organization that would be willing to let us speak at their next meeting. Or perhaps there is a professional publication for which we could write an article, or at least a letter to the editor. Within our organizations, there is likely some form of a knowledge management function who would be delighted to receive a submission describing some best practice or sample product. Some might even consider going the route of blogging!
Yes, but what if we do that, and someone finds a hole in our argument, or points out some aspect that we hadn’t fully considered? That, in fact, is the real beauty of the dimension of intellect. Every time we get a response like that to our point of view, we have an opportunity to build a better, more robust one, in a way that we couldn’t if we just sat by ourselves and contemplated our professional navel.
We used to say, in the consulting world, that we didn’t know anything of value that we didn’t learn from a client.
And so I come back to my contention that in each of these three dimensions of professionalism, we can aspire to achieve new levels of behavior and performance.
It just takes a bit of self-awareness and a willingness to work at it.
