I recently received an email from a colleague friend who owns and operates a very successful executive search firm. She’s quite familiar with The Power of Professionalism. At the very end of her note she added the following PS:
“I was comparing two people yesterday. I said to myself, ‘Person A is highly professional. It’s not that Person B is unprofessional, but Person A is notably highly professional.’ I really couldn’t put my finger on some detail or example that brought me to this conclusion. Odd.”
Isn’t that the truth? Often times it’s our intuition that whispers to us how professional someone is. And more-often-than-not the assessment this woman was making is an unconscious process for most of us.
There’s just something about how the person conducts themselves—which often translates to a lot of little, yet terribly important, things. Taken in aggregate, it reveals a tapestry that could only have been created by a professional.
In organizational settings (particularly) we’re prone to compare—it’s the nature of the beast. We compare because we must. Who do we hire—candidate A or B? Which service provider—A or B–gets the new maintenance contract?
Differentiating oneself is tough. Yet, I’ve learned that professionalism can be a big differentiator. For trusted professionals the key is to get others to notice—even if the person really can’t put their finger on the ‘why’.
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