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Making of a Professional
Y
Professional You might have heard this term aplenty in your career but have you truly earned it?
ou have hardly spent a year in your present job, which you got just after completing your engineering degree. Why do you want to change your job so soon? I asked a candidate who had walked in for an interview. I would like to work for a professional company, he replied. When I asked further as to why he thought his present employer was not one, he was quick to say I am the only professional in my department, no other person, not even my boss has a professional degree. To him, professionalism does not mean anything beyond having a professional qualification. Though my immediate reaction was one of pity for the kind of professionals our colleges are turning out, I quickly realised that my own definition of professional was far from perfect and needed refinement. If I were to educate the candidate at that point of time what it meant to be a professional, I could have only said more about what being a professional was not: it is not merely having a professional degree; its not about just gaining expertise in ones subject; its just not about the ability to flaunt jargons in ones talk. Then what was it about? I was not happy with what I knew and I felt ignorant. Education, as someone said, is a progressive realisation of ignorance and this kind of disturbance help me focus my learning.
When I was scanning the bookshelves at Landmark, I immediately pulled out the book with a red jacket that carried on its spine the silvery letters THE PROFESSIONAL. While the title caught my attention, the author enamoured me to start reading it immediately. Although I have not read the earlier books of Subroto Bagchi, The High Performance Entrepreneur and Go Kiss the World, I have always been captivated by his columns that used to appear in the Times of India. His writings have the simplicity of words, clarity of thoughts and more importantly, a profound authenticity of expression, which make them touching and inspiring.
As is my wont, I started reading the book page by page rather than skimming through. Bagchi opens with the chapter Burial of the dead. He very succinctly brings out the idea of who a true professional is in the first four pages of the book itself. He narrates the story of a real-life character Mahadeva, whose life revolves around unclaimed dead bodies. This is not someone who is conventionally associated with the term Professional. As he grew up uncared for in the vicinity of a hospital, one day it so happened that the police asked him to bury an unclaimed corpse for a meagre fee and from then on, he became the go-to guy for burying the citys unclaimed corpses. Every time the police picked up a corpse that had no claimants, Mahadeva was summoned. Whenever he got a call to reach the morgue, day or night, hail or high water, he arrived there. Most of the time, it was a gruesome experience dealing with a body; there was no telling what had been the cause of death or state of decomposition. He did not choose his clients; he accepted them in whatever size, shape or state they came in; he treated them with respect and care, with due dignity. He was not an employee of the hospital, nor did the cops supervise what he did with the corpses. He did not have a boss who wrote his appraisal or gave feedback. He did his work with such dedication, focus, care and concern that he was soon in demand. Mahadeva had buried more than 42,000 corpses in his lifetime and his dedication has earned him phenomenal public recognition.
Unlettered Professional
6. Communication 7. Planning, organising and punctuality 8. Quality of work 9. A positive attitude, approachability, responsiveness 10. Being an inspiring reference to others; thought leadership While referring to the last attribute of being an inspiring reference to others, he says that tomorrows professional must have a beaconlike presence in a world, and being ordinary will no longer be considered professional. He has also presented the ten markers of unprofessional conduct in the subsequent chapter. Building a Professional Culture: Bagchi has presented The Professional in a sequentially arranged manner under seven broad parts, namely, Integrity, Selfawareness, Professional qualities, Managing volume, Managing complexity, New world imperatives and The professionals professional. The development of a professional is a lifelong learning curve and there is no beginning or end in this pursuit. Reading the book alone cannot make one a professional. But it is about being one. And as Bagchi concludes, being a professional is a matter of personal choice and the values one opts to live by. But, if you want to build a professional culture in your organisation, you have to engage in a collective conversation on the various aspects of being professional so as to imbibe the understanding. Thats how the organisation can learn to be professional. Further reading: The Professional by Subroto Bagchi
Bharath Gopalan
The writer is a learning and development professional with around two decades of experience in designing and delivering training interventions for individual transformations and organisational development. He is deemed as a national resource person by the GoI for conducting train the trainer courses: Direct Trainers Skills. He is currently steering the L&D practice in a cement major in South India.