How Important is Professionalism Really?
Why even ask this question?
I want to propose a scenario and I want you to follow along and pay attention to your responses. It’s a Wednesday night and you have just gone out to a staff appreciation night with some coworkers and your manager/supervisor/anyone higher up than you. There are free food and drinks paid for by the company as well as games at an arcade. It’s been a great week so far and everyone on the team is hitting goals and working well together, so everyone is happy at this appreciation night.
From here on, I will propose 2 different scenarios:
- Your supervisor has become drunk and is acting very friendly with your peers and is only having conversations about the food and the arcade, no thoughts pertaining to work. Obviously they are a person too so it makes sense that they would want to cut loose but you’ve never seen this side of them before.
- Your supervisor does not drink in this scenario but they still keep things fun and light with everyone. After a bit you notice them having separate conversations with multiple team members very briefly. They make their way to you and start asking you how your week has been while they relax with you, and see if you need any help going into the latter half of the week. The conversation is brief but constructive.
These 2 scenarios are situations many people have been in regardless of the profession. Having fun with coworkers improves team work and keeps everyone close, therefore incentivizing people to come to work. The big difference in these scenarios is obviously how professional the supervisors were. One used the time to show a side of themselves that their team had never seen before in a professional setting. The other built trust and assessed where their team needed work for the next half of the week.
The issue with showing your team a side of you that you wouldn’t show during work hours is now you’ve torn down a barrier that establishes why they look to you as a leader. It’s perfectly fine to have fun with your team but leading them to believe there are no boundaries creates an atmosphere of few consequences for any actions. If they see you act that way, they’ll believe they can act that way.
Develop your own sense of professionalism
The reason I bring up those scenarios is because they apply to anyone in the workplace, not just supervisors. Even if you aren’t in a leadership position, who would want to follow you once you become a manager, if they know you get drunk at the arcade every Wednesday? A lot of us think of professionalism as keeping yourself clean, being on time, showing work ethic, etc. These are all accurate but it doesn’t stop there. You can be a professional while also being yourself.
You want to stand out among your peers as a leader, someone in entry level, or as someone looking for a job, so let’s deconstruct the idea of professionalism.
Adding a personal style
When it comes to your job or applications to said jobs there are certain rules everyone must adhere to, and those are company rules. Whether that be a certain dress code or formatting documents. Just because the norm is to wear a certain kind of suit or dress, doesn’t mean you can’t spice it up. For instance LinkedIn has recommendations for what kind of things to put on your profile, like your picture: A close up of your face in a nice top with little going on in the background. This works fine and is recommended so there aren’t a lot of people who do different. In this attempt to stay “professional”, they’ve made their profile picture look exactly like anyone else’s. To make yours stand out while appearing professional, you could wear something a bit fancier, strike a slight pose, add some color to the background, or whatever creative things you want to do that don’t break any guidelines.
Use respect, not control
Many interpret the idea of professionalism as a means to control people on a team. This is definitely true in certain aspects but a good professional can get around without using it that way. Becoming a true professional means that your team and coworkers will respect you because you embody an example of what it means to be a professional. Using your power as a supervisor alone will get results, yes but the team won’t follow you because they believe in you. They will follow because they believe they have to.
It’s easy to respect someone who has been through the position you’ve been through because you can relate with that. So as a leader or someone aspiring to be a leader, relate to your peers. In the scenarios listed above, the second manager made sure to see how their team was doing during the week and relating to them. Even though it was after hours the second manager made sure to keep the relationship professional and also show the worker they were interested in their progress and ready to provide help and resources should they need it. This is how you gain respect while maintaining your own personal level or professionalism.
Usher in a new era
In modern times a lot of old aspects of professional behavior have become painfully outdated. Practices such as banning certain religious wear in the workplace, some hair styles being deemed “unprofessional”, and so on and so forth. These forms of “professionalism” were not there to bring people together as a team, but rather to prevent certain people from ever being on said team. These types of standards to still exist to some extent but are getting looser every year as more and more young people take over the professional world.
Nowadays you can jump on a professional zoom call in a button down shirt and tie, without pants on. The landscape has changed in so many ways and it is important to remember that as you progress as a so called professional!
Hey Quentin
You are covering such an unpopular topic here and it is important that it be addressed if for nothing else for the ones that are just graduating from college. They must come to the workplace and know, what to expect. My opinion is there must be a level of professionalism at the work place , which means clear set out boundaries that defines how we relate but it must also not be like a cage, there can still be humour and some form of play between the colleagues but within the boundaries
Exactly, as long as the boundaries are clear and people understand the social limitations of their atmosphere, it is important for our mental health to operate as humans, and not robots
Hi there!…it is very important to maintain certain degree of professionalism in the workplace because work place’s or office rules must be followed to maintain what we call ” standards “…so that orderliness is in place and avoids chaos in the work place environment. In our profession as a physician, we have some form of open communication in how and when to refer patient/s to other physician or physicians for that matter…we have certain protocol to follow in our communications and referrals, thus maintaining and showing utmost professionalism in dealing with our fellow physicians. My personal opinion in the second scenario that you set in your article is, it is very important to maintain that formal composure as a senior officer in the workplace because it would be very disgusting scenario if you as a leader don’t have what we call “self control” and you drink too much alcohol and get very inebriated that you do foolish things to you peer because of drunkenness. I have been on a situation when I became a senior consultant in a certain hospital and we have a Christmas party and celebration with my peers and junior consultants in the hospital…and yes some of my fellow senior doctors got drunk and and was force to stay and sleep in the hospital physician lounge due to drunkenness. I think you made your point my friend but I really don’t know if the new generation will follow some form of professionalism these days, most of them are outspoken, out-going, adventurous, liberal minded and don’t want to be in a ” fench “. Good rapport and open communication is somewhat good but it should be balance and done in right manner. But remember the old adage…In ” vino veritas “!, sometimes you will know the truth of the story if there is wine involve in the communication but as what I’ve said awhile ago, don’t over indulge yourself too much that you lose self-control and composure in a situation. Thanks and more power!
Be safe!
laertesMD
Thanks for sharing that personal example and I believe it’s definitely something a lot of us have seen. In order to hold a leadership position, one should act like a leader in my opinion. It’s that simple