Happy Friday! Here’s your weekly tip on how to be more human at work

Get rid of the idea of being “professional”

Well, not entirely but we’ll come to the nuance later.

I’d like to start by asking you to conjure in your mind an image of “professional”. What comes to mind?

How much of that has to do with how someone looks or dresses? How much has to do with subtleties of communication style? How much has to do with subtleties of what work outputs look or sound like? How much has to do with particular ways of working? How much has to do with demeanor?

Now, how much has to do with the objective quality of the work or the contribution it makes?

C’mon, be honest.

Overwhelmingly, the word “professional” is used to describe style not substance. And, I suspect, mostly it’s used by people to describe a standard that usually looks and sounds suspiciously like themselves. People anchor on how they dress, how they speak, how they work — often because that’s how they were trained in another time or place — and they expect others to look and sound like them.

This is bollocks!

Nobody should want this. Let me state that more strongly: We should aggressively root this out of work culture. It closes us off to people and ideas that might be better, and perpetuates cultures of conformity (even worse, conformity to the wrong things).

Check out the dictionary definition of “professional”.

Now to my promised nuance: Mostly, the definition has to do with distinguishing a professional from an amateur. All that is good. We should use the word to refer to the quality of the work and the expertise that went into it.

“Professional” should mean that someone isn’t dabbling. It’s not merely a hobby. They are not amateurs. It’s something they’ve decided to focus on in order to earn their living. They spend the time and energy to learn how it works, to meet the technical standards, to develop some expertise.

We should not use the word to mean (and this is one part of the definition): “exhibiting a courteous, conscientious, and generally businesslike manner in the workplace”.

WTF does a “generally businesslike manner” mean?! To me, it means stuffy people in suits, using a lot of jargon and saying very little, and doing uninteresting work that doesn’t matter to anyone or anything. Boring!

If you want people to dress or not dress a certain way at work, that’s fine. If you want people to communicate in a certain style, also fine. By all means shape the culture you want to work in. But don’t try to mislead us by calling your personal preference “professional” and everything else “unprofessional”. That’s boneheaded and not very human.

This message was brought to you by the humans of Rule No. 1.