An absolute honour to speak again to Myriam Hadnes on her new ‘unprofessionalsm’ podcast. My thesis: Most ‘professionalism’ is just a way of making power look tidy. Join the conversation on LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/antlerboy_leadership-corporateculture-psychologicalsafety-activity-7460271858760888320-36dh
An absolute honour to speak again to Myriam Hadnes on her new ‘unprofessionalsm’ podcast. My thesis: Most ‘professionalism’ is just a way of making power look tidy.
We treat it as if it means competence, judgement and maturity. Quite often it means something else entirely: ‘keep your feelings hidden, wear the costume, don’t say the dangerous thing, and for heaven’s sake don’t disturb the horses’.
That is why so much organisational life feels oddly sterile at the precise moment reality is most febrile.
Take any serious change process. Mergers. Reorganisations. Service redesign. Local Government Reorganisation. Political transition. Budget stress. Job threat. Everyone in the room knows the stakes.Everyone has private fears. Everyone is careful not to name them – I always recall Erving Goffman’s phrase ‘in the nudist colony, it is the glances which are veiled’.
We call this restraint ‘professionalism’ and pretend surprised when the work rings hollow, and we come across as evasive and faintly dishonest.
I don’t mean that masks are useless. Often, they’re protective. Sometimes they are the only container people have. Not every room is safe enough for raw honesty, not every facilitator or consultant is equipped to open things up without doing harm – and every facilitator who takes the risk, takes the risk. Indeed, sometimes, masks enable honesty…
But let’s stop pretending the mask is the person.
Professionalism is often a membership test before it becomes a standard. It tells you who belongs, who knows the code, who can carry the costume, who can suppress unacceptable emotions,who can speak fluent institution. It’s as much about status as it is about service.
That matters in the public sector, because our best work usually depends on discussing what the formal script excludes: the fear, the grief, territoriality, the status games, the private incentives. The fact that some people in the room are ‘collaborating’ through gritted teeth, that a calm and ‘effective’ process can still be a deeply unreal one.
The trick is not to glorify ‘being unprofessional’. That just becomes another pose. The trick is to have a wider repertoire; to know when to wear the mask, and when to loosen it. To know when a joke, a question, a well-timed breach of professionalism, or a plain statement of reality does more good than another hour of polished performance. Because if you can’t break a norm, you are not choosing your behaviour. The room is choosing it for you.
And public service reform is already too full of people acting out roles they didn’t write.
The question is this: what behaviour gets rewarded as ‘professional’ but makes honest work harder? And how do we engage with that with a broader, well-justified, view of what will be for the best?
Check out the podcast here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/episode-018-norm-breakers-privilege-benjamin-taylor-myriam-hadnes-wdt8e/?trackingId=iXP8a7RxSie4Y08AdumlyQ%3D%3D
chosen path 