#48 - The myth of professionalism
Why the beliefs we carry about professionalism are costing us our best leaders
In 2018, six women from the British Army made history, as the first all-female team to ski across Antarctica. It took them 62 days to cover 1704km from the Ross Ice Shelf to the South Pole and then onto Hercules Inlet, enduring temperatures as low as -40°C — all whilst pulling a sled weighing 80kg.
The Ice Maidens attribute their success to maintaining a strong camaraderie and dealing effectively with tension when it came up. But what really stood out when I learned about their mission, is just how much they cared for each other. Major Nics Wetherill MBE said she knew her team mates so well that she could tell if they were smiling or crying just from the back of their head.
And yet, how often do we describe that kind of care as 'professional'?
What does it mean to ‘be professional’?
We all have an implicit sense of what it means to be professional, but various official definitions give it as:
Knowledge and competence to do the job
Integrity and ethics
Reliability, appropriateness and accountability
What these all point to is setting out a normative set of behaviours, with professionalism really being about compliance with these norms. These norms are set by previous generations in the workforce — but they’re not fixed in place; they change over time as wider societal attitudes evolve. For instance, the Wikipedia article on professionalism talks about tattoos, which were once taboo to display, but nowadays are accepted in the vast majority of workplaces (there are some exceptions still).
If we examine professionalism closer, it reveals an implicit set of beliefs about showing emotions at work, which govern our behaviour:
“Keep your emotions out of it.” Feelings are seen as noise. The job requires logic, not emotionality.
“Maintain appropriate distance.” Care too much and you lose objectivity. Real leaders stay detached.
“Don’t let them see you struggle.” Vulnerability is a crack in the armour. Strength means appearing not to need anything.
These beliefs are reinforced by the boundaries and expectations of our roles1. Take for instance, resilience. When that’s explicitly drafted into a job description or a company value it’s seen as the ability to perform consistently under pressure and recover quickly from setbacks. Except the underlying belief may actually be you should be able to absorb whatever we throw at you without visible cost. The very human experience of struggling, needing support, or requiring time to recover may be seen as a lack of resilience, and therefore a performance gap.
So why are emotions at work vilified?
Showing emotions at work is a privilege
Being professional seems to require stoicism, distinguishing between what you can and cannot control. You cannot control what happens, but you can control your reaction (i.e. your emotions) to it.
Except — some people are permitted to show emotions, particularly anger, shaming others, or joviality. By virtue of their privilege they do not have to self regulate like the rest of us. Their emotions can be expressed, whilst everyone else’s must be suppressed. We can all think of that one person who this applies to.
In my own experience, I can recall times where I’ve been on the receiving end of a leader’s anger and frustration, and they certainly haven’t shown any self-regulation — or even self-awareness. Earlier in my career I once sat in a meeting where a senior leader was shouting at me for not doing something the way he wanted it done, banging his fist on the table. I was frozen in fear, worried he was going to lash out at me physically. This is of course unacceptable, but my inaction permitted that behaviour. Except, was it really inaction, or a very rational response to the threat in front of me? How I responded in that situation was predicated on our respective levels of power in that relationship. Fear of repercussions told me I had no other choice but to sit there and take it.
This is why I’ve always felt there is a double standard when it comes to emotions at work. If I got angry and banged my fists on the table just because my team did something I didn’t like, I would be fired (or at least, severely reprimanded).
Which brings me to another belief that underlies professionalism: leave yourself at the door. Your identity, culture, and ability to feel emotions must be checked in at reception. This conformity ensures there’s no discomfort created for others, because you’re all the same at work — and can therefore also be treated all the same.
Of course that’s rubbish, because it’s impossible to put into practice. And there’s a counter-narrative forming. ‘Be authentic at work’ has become a mainstream workplace slogan, and is increasingly finding its way into the leadership and psychology literature (see this from Berkeley and this from Psychology Today). Except it’s also problematic, because it’s not always safe to ‘be yourself’, particularly with the current politicisation of identity. If you are part of the dominant group, absolutely you can be yourself. If you are not, it’s safer to hide your true self and perform a different, more acceptable version.
So what is the true antidote to a professionalism that asks people to leave themselves at the door?
What professional institutions know about emotions
I’m currently re-reading Brené Brown’s Dare to Lead, and am reminded of the story she tells about the US Air Force (section 2: the call to courage):
The [US] Air Force’s most current manual on leadership, Air Force Doctrine Document 1-1: Leadership and Force Development, was written in 2011. In the document it explains that our Air Force’s current core values are an evolution of seven leadership traits identified in the Air Force’s very first manual on leadership, Air Force Manual 35-15, which was written in 1948. One of the seven traits is humanness… As I was reading the document I was struck by how much emotion I was feeling from the words on the page… words and phrases like: to belong, a sense of belonging, feeling, fear, compassion, confidence, kindness, friendliness and mercy… Yes the word love was in this military leadership manual… this document used a language that speaks to the human experience when it was instructing leaders on how to lead people.
Brené compared this with the most recent leadership document and found that those words did not appear. Instead there were phrases like tactical leadership, operational leadership, strategic leadership. She noticed the language had been sanitised, and in doing so, removed much of the importance of expressing those feelings and holding space for others.
I replicated Brené’s word search in the British Army’s Army Leadership Doctrine (which I found on the Centre for Army Leadership’s website), and found several mentions of feelings, belonging, fear, and compassion. Of particular note is that emotions and emotional intelligence appeared 31 times throughout the document — the most common expression, clearly underpinning the ethos of the leadership doctrine. The contrast between these two doctrines highlights significantly different approaches to leadership.
Given that fear is not only an emotion2, but a powerful (de)motivator that overrides our rational brains to determine our behaviour, I wanted to know more about how the army handles this in leadership. I searched for ‘safe’, which returned nine results including this one which surprised me, given the context: “For the growth of the leader and of the entire team, it is essential to create an environment in which it is safe-to-fail.” I personally did not think of the army as a place where failure is an option, as lives are on the line.
And yet it makes sense. In extreme conditions, where the cost of failure can be catastrophic, creating an environment where people feel safe is not a luxury — it's table stakes. The British Army understands this at a time when many companies are acting in the polar opposite — creating cultures of fear based on job replacement due to AI.
That culture of safety and emotional intelligence is what enabled Major Nics Wetherill to lead the Ice Maidens to success. The care she demonstrated towards her team wasn’t a nice to have — it was basic survival, it was professionalism in action.
So how can we bring care back into our leadership today? Here’s three questions for you to reflect on:
Whose emotions are you unconsciously dismissing as unprofessional, and what belief is driving that?
What do you do that tells your team they’re safe?
What would it look like to build care into how your team operates?
If these questions surfaced something you weren't expecting, that's usually where the interesting work begins. Book a call to learn more about working with me as your coach.
PS. This article has been accompanied by the support of Freya, a friend’s Pomeranian we are looking after this weekend. Cute fluffy doggo picture as a reward for getting to the end of this article!
Role is one of the scaffolds supporting the Social lever, in Belief OS®, my systems model of beliefs. Roles define what a person is expected to believe by virtue of their position. A CEO, a doctor, a parent — each role carries implicit beliefs about what is appropriate, possible, and true.
Emotions are another of the scaffolds in Belief OS®, supporting the lever of Affect, which determines whether something is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’.