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BeProfessional

Professionals should also be able to:

All of these are just instances of the one principle: PersonalDetachment? from the subject.

In our professional lives, whenever we remind ourselves to be professional, we mean that we should not let personal preferences interfere with our aim as employees of the company: to make money. Although in other communities the CommonCause may not be financial, acting in the same way can help AvoidConflict.

See also MeatBall:BeProfessional.

NarrativeLevel:

We are a large group of researchers who frequently discuss and collaborate. There might be other researchers who may want to collaborate with us, but with whom our group does not want to collaborate -- maybe we think they're jerks, or maybe they just work too differently from us to make it worthwhile. Maybe they've personally insulted some of our members. We do not invite these people to collaborate with us, or make them feel too welcome if they happen into one of our meetings.

But if one of them asks for a detail or piece of data relating to our published work, we give it to them. We don't spend a lot of time trying to help them out. But neither do we refuse to give them data that we would give our friends.

If we have a question about some of their work, we don't hesitate to ask them for help just because we don't want to engage them. We won't shoot ourselves in the professional foot because of personal dislike. Many important researchers really are jerks, but you cannot afford to ignore their work.

If some members of our group have a separate collaboration with the others, that doesn't affect our group one way or another. The others have not joined our group, so we're happy. If Bill Gates insulted you in a bar, would you ask your friends not to enter into any business relationships with Microsoft?


Professionally, you can minimize contact with certain people, but you cannot eliminate it. You strive to prevent personal issues from coming between you and your work. Unfortunately, being professional includes being professional when the other person isn't. There are times when a person is such an egregious jerk that you must make them go away by any means necessary, but often this is not the case.

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Discussion

this is an interesting subject, and one on which i seem to be changing my mind somewhat, over time. i used to strictly separate my personal from my private life. but no more. i still think that in general professional courtesy instead of tit-for-tat jerkiness is the right way to go, but my attitude is less utilitarian -- i do it because this is the sort of person i want to be, not because i would shoot myself into the professional foot otherwise. but beyond that, i don't separate my professional life from my private life much anymore -- i actually do boycott companies that behave in ways i consider unethical, for example, and i don't view that as unprofessional at all. if a researcher did research that i viewed as harmful, i'd not feel obliged to help zir out with my data. if somebody were to cheat me in my personal life, i'd no longer do business with that person either. in fact, i think that it is part of professionalism to police one's own colleages to some degree. which lines to draw is a difficult decision to make, however.

I have a bit of trouble with the overall tone and assumptions of this page. I worked as a professional for over 20 years, and the people I worked with were not people I didn't like, they were rather people with whom I tried to maintain a personally neutral stance. Sometimes I found that I didn't like them, sometimes we became friends. But the point of being professional is being neutral, not working with people one doesn't like. In my experience, I usually found I did like the people I worked with, even if I didn't want to party with them off-hours.

Also, working for me (and I suspect most I worked with) wasn't about making money, it was about providing service. I've worked in commercial enterprise, but predominantly in academia and government. Most professionals I've known (or at least the ones I most respect) needed to pay their bills like anyone else, but their prime motivation was service. The negative view of professionals expressed above sounds suspiciously like that of an academic -- since going back to school I've myself found the attitudes towards commerce and industry to be rather ignorant of the world outside of academia. For example, on a number of occasions I've heard repeated the idea that all significant research happens in universities, or that everyone outside of academia is motivated by money. Insularity has its price.

A few things seem to be getting confounded here. Communities often have as part of their community norms a set of rituals, manners, etc. about how they relate to those who are not members of the community. Strangers, nonmembers, clients, customers, neighbors, etc. These rules may arise from the community or from overlapping community.

Most professional communities do seem to have strong norms about how when acting in the role of professional of a given kind you are expected to sublimate any number of behaviors that might be approprate if you were one of your other roles. So if I'm acting in my role as software architect and somebody asks me a marketing question, as a professional I'm expected to either decline to answer to very explicityly take off my expert hat and put on my pretend to be marketing guy hat.

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