Tag Archives: linkedin

Business Image and Professionalism

Last night I watched the film of Alan Bennett’s The Lady in the Van, in which Dame Maggie Smith plays Mary Shepherd, a malodorous, dishevelled,  but equally imperious version of ‘Lady Grantham’ in Downton Abbey. The mentally fragile Miss Shepherd, a former pianist and nun, in flight from an imagined crime, took up residence in a van in Alan Bennett’s London driveway in the 1980s and stayed there until her death 15 years later.

maggie

Step by step, though with characteristic indecision, the playwright becomes involved in her life. At one point a social worker asks Alan Bennett:

‘Are you her carer?’

He recoils from the word.

‘I hate the word carer,’ he says.

And one can see why. You can care about someone, care for someone, take care of this or that, but who, or what, exactly, is a carer? Are not all human beings carers?

For similar reasons, I’m always puzzled when someone’s behaviour is described as ‘unprofessional’. It’s usually meant as criticism, but when I hear the word I’m always cautiously optimistic that something interesting has happened.

I hate ‘professionalism’. But what I mean is that I hate the idea that there’s something more than doing a good job, with all that implies in terms of skill, knowledge, experience, courtesy, pragmatism and economy. What does ‘professionalism’ add to the mix?

What people often mean by a professional style is a gloss of conformity with some entirely artificial notions of standard business behaviour.

I’m still angry with something a client once said to me twenty years ago. I was working on a systems implementation project for an international company that involved simultaneous implementations of SunSystems in both Prague and Budapest. I was shuttling between the two and on one occasion I worked until the early hours of the morning at the company’s Prague office before flying to Budapest to continue working there. The question arose, at around 7pm, towards the end of a very long day, as to whether we should begin a new task or down tools for the day.

‘I’m rather tired,’ I said. ‘We need to be very precise with what we’re about to do, so it probably makes sense to continue in the morning.’

Everyone agreed, but later it transpired that one of the young, arrogant, financial controllers had remarked that to say that you’re tired is ‘unprofessional’. He had worked for Arthur Andersen, and at Arthur Andersen no one would have dreamt of saying such a thing.

I’m still angry. I was being entirely honest and sensible and I expected a little sympathy.

I strongly believe that we should be entirely ourselves at work, not some ‘professional’ other self. We should neither look alike, nor behave alike. Diversity brings creativity to teamwork, and the less energy that we spend on attempting to be a person other than we are, the more energy there is available for the task in hand.

History, I think, is on my side. The worlds of work and leisure have coalesced. We work from home, we work on holiday, we don’t quite watch the clock as assiduously as we used to. We are flexible, and we are more ourselves, and, in my company at least, we rarely wear suits. Technology has made it possible for us to live and work in different ways.

Social media also reflect this change. LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, these are tools that blur the edges between workplace and home. We no longer project a ‘professional’ and a ‘domestic’ style in carefully separated ways. When marketing ourselves and our values, especially if we work for a consulting company, we present ourselves as real, diverse and whole people, not as androids formed from pliable material in a specific professional mould.

Facebook is where this is most evident, and to that end we have recently published a new Facebook banner for LLP Group which celebrates our diversity and individuality. Have a look at it here.

LLP Group

From left to right:

  • Veselina Portarska, Administration and Marketing Assistant at LLP Bulgaria is passionate about driving.
  • Adam Bager, LLP Group’s Chairman, plays the oboe.
  • Alinka Varhegyi, Chief Accountant at LLP Hungary, trains dogs.
  • Irina Ilieva,  Country Manager at LLP Bulgaria, does anti-gravity yoga.
  • Gabor Varadi, Consultant at LLP Hungary, loves surfing.
  • Valeri  Yordanov, Technical Consultant at LLP Bulgaria, races cars.
  • Dimitar Dimitrov, Consultant at LLP Luxembourg, enjoys skydiving.
  • Lada Svecena, Senior Consultant at LLP Czech Republic, runs marathons all over the world.
  • Dana Benakova, Senior Consultant at LLP Czech Republic, sings in a choir.

Let us all be interesting!

The Inane Idea of Leadership

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I’ve heard and read more than I can bear about ‘Leadership’.

leadership

Browse through the Group posts on LinkedIn and you’ll see hundreds on the subject (these are from the Project Management group):

These took me just five minutes to find.

I’ll never read a single one of them, not only because of the split infinitives, and the incorrect capitalisations, but because the entire concept, like its twin ‘success’, is utterly inane and entirely chimerical. Though I have to admit that ‘The Leadership Style of Anna Hazare’ does tickle my fancy a little (it turns out that he’s a 74-year-old former soldier fighting corruption in India, but I couldn’t read beyond the point where the writer introduced ‘four types’ of leadership).

I suspect that ‘leadership’ is originally an American concept, even if it’s caught on like a global epidemic amongst those who read and write for LinkedIn. I think of strong-jawed pioneers leading waggon trains into the unknown, slaughtering Indians as they go. I think of the ‘right stuff’ that took America’s astronauts to the Moon. I think of George W Bush leading the nation on a futile expedition to Iraq and of Donald Trump vowing to ‘make America great again’, by which he means ‘the greatest’. It’s essentially a military ideal closely linked to conquest, and it’s lauded in a country where too many Generals have made it to the White House.

I don’t believe in ‘leadership’. I don’t believe there’s an important quality you can distil from the mess of other qualities and characteristics that ordinary or exceptional people possess that is the very essence of ‘leadership’. Those who define it, train themselves in it, or chase after it are deluded. Those who crave it in others, wanting merely to follow, are yet more foolish.

Leaders find themselves ‘leading’, the best of them reluctantly, in virtue of their ideas, their courage, their determination, their principles, and their intelligence, sometimes entirely in virtue of their ability to delegate decision-making to others, or to achieve a consensus amongst their peers. The best are cajoled into the role (just as the UK’s Speaker of the House of Commons must be dragged to his chair following his election). The best don’t shoulder their way forwards and upwards. Sadly, it’s all too often delusion, ignorance, obstinacy, ruthlessness, self-interest, cruelty, skilful myth-making or obsession that inspires obedience in some and makes others into leaders. I think of Putin.

Let’s not forget that what we admire in today’s leaders we might revile or reject in them tomorrow. ‘Fred, the Shred’ who led the Royal Bank of Scotland to supremacy amongst the UK’s high street banks was later stripped of his knighthood when the bank nearly failed. Even Churchill, the right leader in 1940, was defeated at a General Election before victory was won in the East. Cecil Rhodes is not what he was.

Political leadership usually ends in failure. In business too, elevating the concept of ‘leadership’ to pre-eminence in the Pantheon of business ideals is plain stupid. Let’s hear much less about it and about its equally inane, intellectually vacuous twin, ‘success’.