How does it move you?
Thoughts for a different kind of professionalism
“Tell me about that”, I said slowly, gazing half over my notebook, half towards her face. I was hesitant, because I could feel the tension rising, between me and her, her voice trembling and opening up to her emotion of grief. Finally, I dared to looked up and as she began to share her story, tears started rolling down my cheeks, synchronous to hers.
This intimate moment, you may think, is surely one to be shared amongst friends, colleagues at best, perhaps. But it is, in fact, quite a typical scene from my work life, in this case an interview for a service design project on improving employee experience.
As a researcher and designer, I live and breathe people’s stories, reasons and motivations. By digging deep into them, I can see where change must begin, where a service must support, a product be simplified or a campaign be designed. I use the things that move me to advocate for others. And there certainly is enough to move me in the stories that I hear — if I can go deep, that’s how change and innovation happens.
Emotions that cross role boundaries and go into the personal are perceived as inappropriate and at times, unprofessional.
Alas, in most people’s working lives, scenes such as this are undesired, radical and taboo even. Emotions that cross role boundaries and go into the personal are perceived as inappropriate and at times, unprofessional.
The norm is to create a distance between roles — work and private lifes shall not mix. To ensure this, we have job descriptions, escalation pathways, customer service charters and insurance. These are all good things, of course. Many social and caring professions rely on the segregation of roles, simply in order to do their job (and they still burn out).
For the rest of us, however, who do not work in palliative care or in the child protection system, but rather in glazed office towers, I’ve been wondering whether it’s time to blur these boundaries just a little, given the big mess and the big opportunities we currently all share (health, environmental, fiscal, political and technological).
What would we learn if we could allow ourselves just that slightest bit of rage?
What would actually happen if we started to take our customers’, clients’, employees’ problems a tiny bit more personal? What would we learn if we could allow ourselves just that slightest bit of rage after the retrenchment of our colleague, made that little bit more noise, that tiny bit of fuss when another customer had to jump through bureaucratic hoops? If we raised our voice just ever so slightly when we witnessed another act of micro aggression in the public realm? Or if, in fact, allowing ourselves to cry with our participants was the norm?
My hunch is, nothing bad would happen. At the very least we might feel more connected to our work. On the other hand, we could begin to have more skin in the game. Blurring the boundaries between professional and private could perhaps move us to greater things. Imagine for a moment if ‘being moved’ would be a marker of success for our work, a kind of metric for the degree of change we are capable of creating. ‘Being moved’ is of course not an indicator of actual impact, and I don’t expect this to pop up in a performance review anytime soon, but it does beg the question why we don’t talk about this more often.
I know plenty of passionate people who care about their customer, patient, student or colleagues on a personal level. But in most cases they would not talk about that fact in a team meeting, a conversation with their boss or the board room. When was the last time you heard an executive talk about how a customer’s story moved them to tears?
We talk about numbers, aggregates, segments or groups
Instead, we mostly talk about numbers, aggregates, segments or groups. In language that neutralises, detaches and depersonalises. I myself am privy to this, and sometimes am an accomplice, if I’m not careful. And yet, this is not what moves us humans. It’s that inch below the surface, where it gets vulnerable and raw, where the evidence is a case of one, and our voice starts to tremble, when tears stream down our face. That’s where change resides.
So, the question before beginning to change anything should not be What’s the problem? How do we know? Or What should we do? but instead — How does it move you? Let’s try it sometime, for a different kind of professionalism.
