I’ve paused the series on Structuring for a week on ‘Work Hacks Wednesdays’ choosing a topic that came to mind yesterday, Professionalism.
I’ve often thought about this question – what is professionalism?
I wasn’t sure, in the early days, if professionalism meant being the dedicated work soldier and never ever bringing or expressing personal issues. These days, I feel differently.
As a friend said, work problems are much easier to deal with than personal problems. We get by deadlines, key meetings, presentations okay. Yes, not all of them work out but we still get by okay. The tougher problems to deal with are always personal one – someone fell sick, something on the personal admin front went wrong. So, do we take these problems to work or pretend all is well in our world?
My take on professionalism is that while we all have our own authentic styles of conducting ourselves at work, deal with problems etc, professionalism is continually prioritizing long term effectiveness above all else and this is done in a way that your immediate team know that, personal issues or not, they can always count on you to do the right thing for your current project or commitment.
As I type this, I realize that my definition of Professionalism seems to come close to that of integrity i.e. making and keeping commitments. Perhaps, that’s what professionalism is? To keep up our integrity in the heat of fire?
A Learning a Day 