Professional vs. Profitable

I recently was tasked with producing some documentation for a client. Most of my writing is conversational in tone, with the occasional tongue-in-cheek comment. The client liked the content, but asked that I change the language to make it more "professional". Which got me thinking about the word "professional". What exactly does it mean to be professional?

Entry number one from dictionary.com gives: "following an occupation as a means of livelihood or for gain". Entry number three, however, better captures the shade of meaning for "professional" as it's normally used in the workplace: "appropriate to a profession". The idea is that within a given profession there are certain things that one does to conform to the standards of that profession. But why? What are those standards, and what are they for?

Returning to definition number one, most of us practice a profession within the context of a business, and any business exists for one reason: to make money. Period. No matter what reasons a business gives by way of vague mission statements, a business exists to make a profit. Unfortunately, making a profit is hard work. More unfortunately, within the context of a large corporation - and particularly within the context of information-based corporations which employ a large number of knowledge workers - it becomes increasingly difficult to tie any one person's activities to the profitability of the company.

Enter "professionalism". Since we can't tell whether or not any one person's actions are profitable, we invent a set of customs collectively called "professionalism". Like any social ritual, professionalism involves wearing the correct costumes, saying the correct things, and following the correct protocols. These things are measurable - even if only qualitatively. Measuring professionalism thus becomes a proxy for measuring profitability.

The problem is that as an organization grows, so grows the disconnect between professionalism and profitability. So much so, in fact, that what most people call "professional" behavior tends to actually be mocked by the rank and file workers of an organization, who - on the whole - provide the lion's share of direct value to the company. It makes a certain amount of sense; the rituals of professionalism require effort, and so being "professional" necessarily leaves less time for being profitable.

What's especially terrible about this is that it's a positive feedback loop - the more authority one has within a hierarchy, the more disconnected one becomes from the activities associated with profitability, and so the more one must rely on judgments based on professionalism. Thus, senior management becomes even more disconnected as they become increasingly surrounded by like-minded experts in professionalism but not profitability.

It's not obvious what - if anything - can be done about this, except perhaps to grow an organizational culture that explicitly disdains the traditional notion of "professionalism" (or at least certain aspects of it). The next time you hear someone use the term "professional" or "professionalism", see if you can figure out why they chose to use that particular word.