My friend KimM and I were bitching talking about our jobs lately when the subject of “professionalism” came up, mainly in regards to appearance and behavior on-the-job. The topic was expanded on by the revelation that the talented actress Mo’Nique has been overlooked for roles because of a perception that she went outside the conventions of Hollywood.
Different cultures have different rules of behavior and everyone knows this, even children. The university or corporate culture mandate of professionalism depends a lot on your job, the institution you work for, and even the part of the country you’re in.
Nonetheless there are universals for Westernized American society: for men, ties are more professional than polo shirts; for women, heels of some kind, even low pumps, are more professional than flats (woe betide your feet).
The tricky part, though, are the other conventions, the unspoken but oft-referred to rules of engagement. In academia, you never publicly criticize your mentor, for instance. You don’t write letters to the editor about how awful your graduate program is, either. There was a young lady in my MLIS program who did just that in an online blog — no doubt, there are those reading this now who know exactly who I am talking about, and this was nearly 4 years ago — and became instantly unemployable. Not in any way she could see, but if you listened to the backchatter of different communities online, it was obvious. I’m sure she found a job eventually, but there is no doubt her career took a critical hit before she even got her degree in hand.
But here’s the thing: She wasn’t actually wrong.
There were faults with the program and many of us were trying to get them addressed…on the back end. Talks with professors and adjuncts and administration were common; the ALA student chapter was a strong mover and shaker back then and was very involved in those discussions. Nothing that student wrote about publicly was in any way a lie. She was right on the money about our program’s faults and had a right to say so in a public venue. Doing so was against the convention of academia, even if it was not strictly against the rules, and whether she ever became aware of it or not she paid the price. Maybe she knew what she was doing though, and just didn’t care.
Likewise, Mo’Nique is also suffering backlash for doing something she had a right to do. She wanted some control over her appearances during a promotional tour, and when she won the Oscar she used the opportunity to make a political statement. One side of this declares that by breaking these conventions, she crippled her career, not only losing out on great acting opportunities but curtailing what could have become a very powerful, influential position for her in Hollywood. The other side, though, is just as valid, in that she was probably very aware that those moments might be the only time in her life she would get a chance to do anything like that. Oscars are not guaranteed, especially not to black women, so it’s reasonable to assume she decided to “take the hit” in exchange for using that one, golden opportunity to try and create positive change in her world.
What may on the surface look “wrong” or like someone is being “a trouble maker” through the lens of the culture whose rules are being broken might simply be someone living by a different standard of rules altogether.
KimM and I, and so many of my friends, are working in environments we don’t feel at home in — for money or convenience, doesn’t matter, we have to make conscious efforts to “fit in.” I’m not saying that’s wrong (and I happen to like my current job a lot, even when I bitch talk about it), but the point is that if we wanted to climb that culture’s ladder badly enough, we would conform far more than we do. For the sake of succeeding within that culture, my librarian colleague would possibly have never written that blog post; Mo’Nique would have humbly accepted her award and tripped off into a slew of acting jobs. That’s the bottom line.
Instead, we sometimes make “outlier” decisions that colleagues and friends far more enmeshed in their chosen (or, perhaps, default) culture do not understand, or do not approve. The people I know, they aren’t sheeple, so I expect a lot of them accept the conformity consciously in exchange for the chance at a tenured position or a move up to middle-management or an opportunity to get their work funded. In that sense it does come back around to “do what feels right”, because if you cannot function in that particular culture at all it will utterly break you (for instance, in my case that would be law enforcement or emergency services).
But I think that’s my point here: it needs to be a conscious decision, and made for reasons that resonate with your truest self, the calling you have or the work you feel you need to do. Ironically, that often puts us on the outside of the cultures we actually need to participate in to achieve the success we are working towards (for whatever value you ascribe to ‘success’). We’re often pressured to conform under the assumption that we are looking for success as defined by that culture.
We’re not.
If we cannot stand there in confidence of what we are standing for (in my case, a full time career as a commercial fiction writer…eventually…), then we’ll keep getting thrown back down to the ground by the sheer force of cultural disapproval. The desire to belong is very strong, the need for approval almost addictive. We can poo-poo all of that but only to our detriment; recognizing and accounting for how strong those forces can be makes the difference between succeeding in our own, unconventional goals or succumbling to a life that would ultimately ruin us.
[To make clear, I’m not directing this post to people who happily conform to the culture they belong to because they find that fulfilling; the focus of this post is on people like me, who don’t easily conform to anything to begin with (goodness knows I’ve tried) and have personal goals that stand outside of “convention” in regards to professional careers]
