I was brought into a new project at work not long ago. Initially, I wasn’t aware that my collaborators had no idea what I was there for, so I just went ahead with my typical routine of asking questions to prep for initial research — and that unfortunately led to a series of confusing email exchanges between our managers.
As it turned out, they were in the early phase of developing a new product, and somehow they are given the the impression that I am an expert who could magically pull a finished app out of thin air. (Hint: I am not.) They thought I was wasting their time by following standard procedures; why was I doing all that “research” when I should’ve completed my designs already?
The lesson I learned from this incident? In professional settings, people would try to fit me into a mold that they can understand, especially to help them answer the question of “what can this person do for me.” If I don’t want them to make any wrong assumptions, then I have to educate them along the way, no matter how tedious that might be.
(Although, I also suspect many people still can’t quite put a finger on what User Experience specialists are supposed to do. They recognize the “designer” or “researcher” part of the job title, but the “UX” acronym tends to elude them. And so, the responsibility to inform falls on me, which is just about every time when I start a new project and have to work with unfamiliar faces.)
But aside from the purpose of managing expectations, you shouldn’t intentionally set yourself up to only follow a narrow track — at least in the realm of knowledge professions, I’m of the opinion that you should actively seek to break out of that mold. It is comforting to fit yourself into a standardized profile because it helps you create a more defined career plan. But you might also come to realize that the mold is more malleable than you imagine, at least if you acknowledge that the universe likes to randomly throw a wrench into your life. In that sense, following a path too closely can be harmful as it is useful, because that might cause you to be inflexible to change and unable to adapt to unforeseen challenges.
After all, being adaptive to change is to be expected of a professional, along with several other qualities that I yet to have the wisdom to articulate. For the rest of this piece, I’d like to share some of my thoughts with you — on what it means to be a professional and briefly explore the concept of professionalism.
Here are my two cents on the idea of professional calling: no one is fated to be a maestro of any sort, including the greats throughout the history. While I’m certain that talent does play a role, more of it is hindsight bias and narratives that we’ve constructed in contemporary history; we all love to believe that every success story is guided by some mysterious force of destiny.
(For any given person, he or she may have the potential to “make it” in a particular career, if — and that’s a big if — the stars of opportunities, resources, and timings are perfectly aligned from the beginning until the end. But most of us aren’t always so lucky, and try as we may, we can’t get what we really want. The universe is just too indifferent and random than it is fair and predictable.)
Speaking of experts, there likely isn’t a single recipe for their making, but we can all agree that people who are considered true professionals do go above and beyond the average standards of their field.
For now, let’s set aside any preconceived notion and try to understand the elements of professionalism. I have dug up two stories for this purpose:
Take a second to visualize the term “night club hostess” and think about what comes into your mind. You probably imagined something along the line of... a lady with skimpy clothing, who is holding a glass of wine, while casually flirting with drunken customers. Well, that’s what I had in mind, until I saw the tale of Shirasaka Mai: the woman who made a lifelong career out of managing a high-end hostess club in Ginza — one of the most expensive and luxurious commercial districts in the world. The show mainly features Shirakasa’s backstory and how she leveraged her hard earned social skills to survive in a cutthroat hospitality market. As shown in one occasion: while conversing casually with a younger customer, she keenly spotted an opportunity to introduce him to another group of unacquainted guests, thereby helping both sides to form a new business connection. It was just done so masterfully that I had to take a pause during that segment to review the nuances that I had missed. Frankly, I have learned more about the art of diplomacy from Ms Shirasaka’s story, far more than any other networking resources I have consumed in the past.
If you were tasked to build some stairs for a house porch, how would you go about it? You may think that it can’t be that hard to slap together a few panels of wood after you measure and cut them to size. Unless you done woodwork before, you would soon find yourself stuck trying to figure out a minor issue. Because, more likely than not, you will have overlooked important details that you should’ve taken into account, such as the fact that some wood materials are more sensitive temperature changes, which cause them to warp in certain climates. (And if you still want to keep going ahead without consulting any carpentry resources, I wish you good luck.) John Salvatier tells his childhood story of building stairs much better than I do, so I will just focus on the key lesson I took away from this article: most jobs that seem simple and straightforward are more complicated than we can imagine, because there’s so much more knowledge that’s hidden from the plain sight; we aren’t aware of how much we really don’t know. It’s not an exaggeration when I say this is one of the most thought-provoking articles I came across in the past five years — and I read a lot.
A personal story of mine is learning about the sales profession.
For a long time, my only understanding when it comes to sales people is that they thrive on sweet-talking customers into buying things that they don’t need. That’s a true statement in some occasions, but a good salesperson knows that lying to customers is short term thinking that will eventually come back to bite them — after all, the reputation precedes the individual. Especially in the world of business, words get around easily, and it takes only a few seconds to destroy people’s trust. That is to say, a professional in sales knows a good deal should benefit both the seller and the buyer.
(I figured this out by talking to at least a dozen of sales colleagues and sneaking around online sales communities: the best deal is when the buyer is satisfied with the purchase and the seller is happy with the sale.
The realization above was ironic because my mother is a veteran in sales — with more than two decades worth of experience in selling personal accessories. Somehow, I didn’t connect the dots until recently: she had just spent half a day working with the craftsman to make sure a merchandise was closely tailored to a client’s needs, even though “it wasn’t a big sale, but our business depends on the good will of customers, so I have to do right by them.”)
The main lesson here: we all can learn a surprising amount from all kinds of professions. There is valuable knowledge to be gained even in what looks like a simple operation of vending street foods — just imagine the level of dedication and ingenuity that a stall owner needs to have in order to turn a profit in a fiercely competitive food court.
While all professions require specialized knowledge in their line of work, having a mastery over soft skills tend to differentiate the uppermost echelon from the average. Ultimately, most of the complex problems in our world cannot be solved by any individual alone — they often require a wide range of talents and an abundance of resources — and there are fewer things more challenging than getting a diverse group of people to work towards a common goal. This is a scenario where the individuals’ emotional intelligence play a much more important role than their reasoning skills.
(I used to think phrases like “treat others with respect” and “pay attention to conversations” are redundant, but the longer I live as a working adult, the more I come to value these generic career tips. As it turns out, people that frustrate me the most are often the ones who can’t seem to wrap their head around these elementary lessons.)
You should know this if you have worked with others on anything substantial: a good collaborator is one that’s pleasant and easy to work with, even if he or she isn’t the best performer in the team.
Personally, I’d much rather to team up with an ordinary person who is organized and communicates clearly than to put up with a genius that constantly brings headache to everyone else; the negatives tend to outweigh the positives so much so that, if you want to achieve anything at all, it’s just better to avoid those individuals.
As I have brought up several times in the past, this is where T-shaped skills are once again relevant — as being highly skilled in one’s expertise is not the sole measure of competency in most workplaces.
Over the years, I have observed a number of technical consultants at work, and the ones I remember the most were those who excelled in both hard and soft skills. Due to the nature of their job, consultants are repeatedly thrown into new business domains and scenarios, yet are expected to start helping clients solve complex problems quickly. If it’s not obvious yet — this is _incredibly_ hard to do well, even more so when the client has a demanding personality; only the capable and communicative ones will come out on top. (And the ones who can’t do it well always appear in a stark contrast.)
This combination of skills has learning process of its own — for most people, the fast track involves plenty of mentoring and practical experience. And, as with most things in life, some will get there much earlier than others.
When I was younger, a particular image I have about professionals is a suit-wearing individual. This stems from my naiveté of associating a uniform with the idea of “professionalism” itself, which is obviously not an accurate image of working people (whether they hold a blue or white-collar job). Nowadays, if anything, taking a random sample of full-time workers in any major city would reveal that there are about as many people in casual or business casual clothing as there are people in uniform or formal attire.
Without having done any research on this, my guess is that there’s a direct tie between the social construct of professionalism and the ritual of wearing uniforms (or similar attires that match a narrow agreed upon criteria), and this has a certain effect on influencing perception and attitude.
Just take a second to conjure up an image of a lawyer standing by a desk — I’m willing to bet that you envisioned the person wearing some kind of suit or dress with a blazer, even though I have said nothing about if he or she is at work or that if the desk is in an office to begin with; your mind came up with all those explanations by itself without any instructions from me.
But that’s getting a bit far off from this article, so let’s save the topic of perception for another time.