Passionate vs Professional — can you be both?

I had an interesting conversation with someone about a tenuous situation that neither of us was enjoying. We both had some issues with what was happening, how it was happening and the outcomes that were coming out. The sentence that struck me that my friend uttered was:

‘I’m just going to be professional as I can about it and get through it’.

It struck me that the definition of professional here was being used to accept detrimental and damaging behaviour to get through to the other side where you felt it was ok to leave it. It was an excuse to avoid confronting it and do what one is told to do until it was over.

I am not like this. Not in the slightest! Everything I do is absolutely rooted in my passionate nature and I am personally invested in every project I do. I don’t do them if they do not appeal to my fiery nature. The result was that my friend stayed quiet and I did not. I saw discrimination and I called it out, with my passion for fairness, equality and empowerment firmly at the forefront of my impassioned response. So who was right? Was anyone?

What does ‘being professional’ mean?

I’ve had a look at several different perceptions and definitions of being ‘professional’ in the workplace and have found various different results. Almost all of the articles I have read denote that competency is a key aspect of professionalism, something I agree with but let’s focus on the behavioural aspects of what we expect from our employees. I found an article from ACCA very thought-provoking: https://www.accaglobal.com/an/en/student/sa/features/being-professional.html

I don’t need to go through the entire article as you can read it for yourself, however, I found the references to personal appearance, self-control and dampening down aspects of your personality that may appear negative rather disturbing.

A lot of universities also generalise the concept of professional behaviour and it is firmly rooted in the same principles preparing their graduates for the ‘professional world’.

Passionate behaviour

Passion, on the other hand, is a very different animal and is described very differently. A quick search on passion and you will be presented with the following definition:

‘Strong and barely controllable emotion’

A bit different from the self-control and measured approach of ‘being professional’ one would argue.

Many companies are now eager to harness peoples’ passion for driving innovation, change and ever-changing the landscape with the art of the possible. Acting with passion can drive us to create and manage with ferocity and fervour to the benefit of the team and business. Often you will see job adverts ask for people who are passionate about their fields of interest and areas of expertise.

From the definitions, behaving professionally and behaving passionately appear to be rather opposite approaches in the workplace. One is perceived to be reserved, controlled and based on others’ judgement whilst the other is unpredictable and rooted heavily in personal values and feelings.

Let’s go back to my previous conversation. This situation happened some years ago at my previous employment where I had been informed that I was too emotional in the workplace. This surfaced because a member of my team who had suffered a miscarriage was being denied compassionate leave and told to use her holiday entitlement for any recovery period. As she had yet to be employed for six months, she was not entitled to company sick leave only statutory so would lose pay if she took time off sick. As her representative, I was wholly unimpressed with this response which in my perception contravened several values of the business. ‘Valuing people’, ‘supporting each other’ and ‘acting with integrity’. Especially as it was a discretionary process that could have been overruled by a sympathetic more senior grade member of staff — and was done for me the previous year when I found myself in the exact same situation…

The person in question displayed her disappointment and shared her upset, albeit in a very ‘professional’ way but felt unable to dispute this. One of my passions is fairness and equality and as her representative, I was doubly negatively impacted by this decision first by knowing I had a member of my team who I knew would come back to work less motivated to work with a business that didn’t take care of her and that I had a member of my team that had had treatment that didn’t meet the values that I was sold at the time of employment or received during my own misfortune. So I said something, with her permission of course. I called the boss in question and gave an emotional speech about the above and how our belief system was being called into question with the treatment of my team member. I also wrote to our dept lead and HR about the inequality my team member had experienced expressing my ‘utter’ disappointment at the lack of investment in the people who provide for us.

I was accused of being too emotional and disruptive to policies that were in place that seemingly no one in the business had control over, however, a compromise was reached with my team member that she accepted so that she could recover without the stress of losing any holiday or having financial pressures. I won. But I didn’t, my reputation was marked.

The same passion on the other side however when it was being used to galvanise and deliver a new and creative solution to an ailing system was perfectly acceptable. Disrupting norms to benefit our customers was wholly based on my passion for empowering people to solve problems (including the customers themselves) and building amazing technology with motivated people. I was and still am a very lenient ‘boss’. I see my role as giving my teams what they need to thrive both as a team and as people so they are vested in the huge part of their lives that is ‘work’. A servant leader as it were. This was great though, totally accepted and encouraged.

What’s the change?

There is a quiet revolution afoot! This can be seen in the trend of ‘quiet quitting’ and people using social media etc to draw their lines in the sand as it were. People are no longer willing to give their all and just accept the negative impact on their lives and careers.

The secret lies firmly within the age-old expression: ‘know thyself’. The ancient greek aphorism is a useful grounding statement with which you can empower yourself through your own understanding and championing of core values and beliefs. By moving your locus of evaluation and validation closer to your own psyche (basically relying more on your own authenticity as a measure of progress), you can gain autonomy over your articulation and presence of your passion and emotions on your own terms. Knowledge is power and knowledge of yourself in challenging situations is powerful.

By accepting your authentic self and investing time and effort into understanding what that means for yourself and others, the responsibility of articulating your whole self becomes a lot easier in my experience. I can manage the expectations of those around me by being able to bring them on the ‘me’ journey. The professional part of this is making sure I invest in others the way I hope they invest in me. Collaboration is the key, not conformity.

So… can you be both?

Of course, you can! Organisations that embrace diversity as a real value rather than as a tagline will hold you accountable for your own impact and embrace your whole self. The whole self is what drives any level of innovation and impact with authentic investment. What really needs to change here is the definition of professional and it has nothing to do with the suppression of passion but with focusing on the whole into a thriving situation for the person, the environment and the product.