Rigorous vulnerability?
Kate here, going deeper into what it means to be professional today
Dear Lynne,
Wow, the heady mix of vulnerability and professionalism. So much to dig into! Like you say, teams often have an ambition to bring more vulnerability into the way they show up at work - partly because it’s a great way of building trust. Lots of organisations, especially in the social change space, now encourage people to “bring your whole self to work”. We can find this hard, partly because of the “armour of professionalism”, like you put it, but also because we don’t always have the skills and emotional maturity to discern what the right level of vulnerability is.
I also love that you quote from Maurice Mitchell’s absolutely seminal article on Building Resilient Organisations - this has such gold in it in so many ways and I’m sure we’ll come back to it as we keep exploring these topics.
I feel like I only have a short response in me today (partly because my professional self is very aware of the many pulls on my time this week lol), but I really want to go a bit deeper into the concepts of both professionalism and vulnerability.
To start with the idea of being a professional, especially in a social change or not-for-profit organisation. What does it even mean? My dad (who used to work in procurement for the NHS and local authorities) wore a suit to work every day, polished all his shoes on a Sunday night ready for the week ahead, and set off each day wearing his professional armour to do a quite clearly defined job. I, and many of my friends and colleagues, wear more or less the same things whatever day of the week it is, swear quite often in the course of my working day, and find it much harder to disentangle “life” from “work”. I remember Dame Mary Marsh talking about disagreeing with the concept of work/life balance because work is part of life, and I think I very much agree with her here.
But despite my supposedly casual appearance, I take my work and my professionalism very seriously. To me, being professional is about having expectations of myself that I will do what I say I will, that I will deliver good work that has impact in the world, and that I will be a good colleague to the people I’m working with. Partly I think that is about finding the joy and fun in work, but also recognising that it is often really hard, and needs grit and perseverance. I really love what Maurice Mitchell says about the fact we need to “normalize the idea that rigor, seriousness, and excellent work should coexist with fun and joy”.
The older I get the more important I find the idea of rigour. The work of social change is deep and will take a long time. I’m never going to get to the end of a working day and feel like I have “done” everything (this is one of the reasons I kind of miss working in pubs). So part of what keeps me motivated and going is the idea that what I have done, I have done well and thoroughly.
I feel that, as oxymoronic as it might sound, we maybe need to bring some rigour to the idea of vulnerability at work. I love Jocelyn K Glei’s concept of “tender discipline” which I think strikes the right balance of recognising that we are all human, fallible, animal beings, with the need to get things done. Or as the permaculture principle would have it, the need to obtain a yield. When, like you say the “workplace becomes a place of constant processing” we run the risk of losing our focus on the yield - or as Maurice Mitchell says just “fighting the small war”.
Getting the balance right between genuine authenticity and sharing and too much vulnerability at work is hard - and like you say we probably need different containers in the forms of meetings that can hold different levels of vulnerability. And we need to take responsibility for our own boundaries and needs for processing.
This does I think maybe get easier as you get older, and part of the role of older or more experienced people in an organisation might be modelling that balance. As Mark said in his latest Corporate Bodies post: “In a wellbeing meeting I might share that I was having personal issues that were impacting on my focus or energy at work, and I might ask for support to manage that. But with the same people in the pub after work I might share the details of those personal issues with them. In the wellbeing meeting we are colleagues. In the pub the same individuals might be friends. It’s not unreasonable to find these shifts confusing.”
So coming back to our discussion of zones, it might be that our zones of relationality shift depending on the container or meeting that we are in at any particular time. Developing the ability to discern where you and others are in relation to both your professional aims, your emotional needs and your own boundaries feels like the work of a lifetime. Lots to be getting on with!
lots of love
Kate