In addition to meeting deadlines, you should aim to be on time to start your day, to meetings and to any other work-related events, whether in person or virtual. This might mean taking notes during meetings, asking relevant questions or even just using responsive body language.
Another way to show your investment in and commitment to your organization is by being proactive about improving the company. But that requires doing more than just identifying concerns or pain points. Make sure to pair your complaints with solutions. Instead of simply bringing a problem to your manager, come armed with a proposed resolution. The general work culture will often change from company to company.
Determining the right workplace attire is a good example. This can also impact your communication habits, as standard practices can vary. Other environments may require formally requesting a meeting via an administrative assistant. But what you intended to be a five-minute distraction can quickly turn into 20 minutes of wasted time. Some companies have specific policies around social media for this very reason.
If yours does, be sure you know what it says and adhere to it. Politics can have a positive outcome when coworkers build up and work alongside those in their workplace community.
But the political climate in an office can turn negative when colleagues are in competition with one another, rather than working together for the greater good.
Success looks different for everyone, but practicing proper professionalism in the workplace can get you far regardless of your ultimate goal. If you honor your work commitments and remain dedicated, productive and respectful of those around you, building a respectable reputation within your organization will happen naturally.
As you continue to progress in your career, you may find yourself eager to climb the ladder within your organization. There are a number of things you can do in addition to practicing top-notch professionalism. However, historical and institutional differences in professional work in a post- socialist context mean that professionalization does not occur in the same way in Russia, as professionals are typically state employees, and professional matters are regulated by the state Balzer, ; Svensson and Evetts, However, even without a vision of professional closure in the Anglo-American sense, studies show that individual specialists still strive for professional excellence Mansurov and Yurchenko, Our participants made clear that the relative novelty of their profession requires them to prove their credibility in the eyes of their clients and society.
Professional standards in Russia are state-regulated, but are still adjusting as the psychology profession develops Karandashev, Specialist certifications offered by professional associations are voluntary Karepova, Finally, a number of key features of Russian counselling are relevant to our discussion.
Firstly, counselling in Russia has been a female-dominated field since its emergence in the s, and in women constituted 73 per cent of graduate students in psychology Higher School of Economics, Secondly, this profession is one of the most popular choices for mature students who return to university to gain a second university degree Griffin and Karepova, , which results in an interesting age profile for the profession.
The average age of psychology graduates is higher than in many other professional settings. Lastly, counsellors in Russia tend to hold multiple jobs and work in multiple professional settings because earning high wages in this profession remains challenging. As explained above, current professional regulations do not stipulate the need for mandatory specialist certifications in order to undertake these types of work. Clients in family counselling tend to be predominantly women, while in business settings clients are predominantly men Karepova, This has to do with the essentialist gender role ideology dominant in post- socialist Russia Ashwin, and the prevailing male-breadwinner model that bolsters the segregated nature of the post-socialist Russian labour market, in which men are located in more lucrative sectors Kozina and Zhidkova, In our analysis, we show how these contextual characteristics of counselling work shape embodied compositions of professionalism.
Before we proceed to our data analysis, we next outline our methodology. Method Following a methodological approach typical of intersectional research exploring lived experience e.
Christensen and Jensen, ; Ludvig, ; Mirza, , we draw on 26 professional life-story interviews. An epistemological question which arises is how to access lived experience through language. We cannot claim to have had unmediated access to the lived experiences of the participants; however, translation of those experiences into language still provides a means to grasp them.
Interviews were carried out with practicing counsellors in Moscow and Vladivostok. There is no public directory of counsellors in Russia, so the population size is unknown. This determined the sampling method. Participants were recruited through e-mail contact via professional websites 13 responded to 94 initial requests and subsequent snowballing. Twenty-six interviews were conducted with 23 female and three male counsellors see Table 1.
The participants were aged between 28 and 64 years, with an average of 42 years. Their counselling work experience ranged from three to over 20 years.
They represented a range of therapeutic approaches and levels of seniority, from early career psychologists to directors of counselling centres.
Twenty participants had studied counselling as their second university degree, and the majority held multiple jobs. All participants were of Russian nationality. The interviews, lasting between 60 and 90 minutes, were subsequently transcribed and translated into English by one of the authors, who is a native Russian speaker. Pseudonyms are used throughout to ensure anonymity. They were encouraged to give examples of what they considered good professional practice and the qualities and behaviours that they felt were central to counselling work.
To start with, the interviews were conducted from a feminist position — an intellectual position inseparable from our embodied experiences that informed our interpretations. The interview process itself was an intercorporeal, contextually-specific encounter between researcher and participant, in which positions were negotiated and shaped by, for example, gender and nationality Pillow, As such, being a female researcher of Russian background facilitated rapport, especially with female participants, due to the assumed extent of shared understanding.
We made note of what we thought these instances told us about establishing a credible or non-credible professional, remaining open to which social categories emerged as meaningful in the narratives.
We then brought our notes together, corroborating and synthesizing, comparing preliminary interpretations, and noting similarities and differences. We returned to the literature in an iterative process of reading our initial findings in light of our chosen key theoretical constructs: intersectional embodiment, intercorporeality and contextual settings. At this stage, we related our initial findings about counselling professionalism to the setting in which they appeared, what other actors were present in the descriptions, and how these micro-level interactions might be interpreted in relation to the broader conditions of the Russian post-socialist economy.
Compositions of embodied professional credibility in Russian counselling Our analysis is structured in three sections, showing how professionalism was constituted by the counsellors. Specifically, we discuss the embodied intersectionality of compositions, how these emerged in intercorporeal relations, and how professional embodiment comes to be privileged or disadvantaged in specific counselling settings.
Professionalism as embodied and intersectional When participants described what makes a good and credible counsellor, they often started from a gendered position. For instance, more importantly than qualifications, a good counsellor was seen to possess certain gender-related characteristics to which our participants referred in essentialist terms: I think that women who are counsellors are good because they are capable of listening and understanding, they are more open.
Women have more empathy toward other people … and are capable of understanding others better … clients are always in need of care and love, and women can provide that care better than men Svetlana, As these extracts indicate, counsellors commonly expressed a belief in innate differences between men and women, shaped by psychological theories of difference Karepova, and the dominance of an essentialist gender discourse in Russia Ashwin, These characteristics assume a way of connecting that is only made possible by a particular embodied subjectivity.
According to the participants, being a woman means knowing, experiencing and understanding the counselling situation from a particular embodied vantage point.
Such statements also simultaneously fix this position in essentialist terms; that is, a normative, gendered feminine embodied subjectivity comes to signify professionalism.
Yet, gender alone does not convey professional credibility. According to our participants, in addition to caring for and understanding the client, experience is a crucial aspect of a good counsellor.
However, experience does not equate simply to longevity of practice or accumulation of professional knowledge, but instead assumes the embodiment of appropriate life experience. Professional expertise is often attributed to the visible performance of knowledge Treem, , and this comment indicates that a younger or older body implies a particular kind of embodied knowing and life experience.
Younger specialists were viewed as undesirable due to their lack of biographical experiences, such as parenting. However, according to our participants, their age did not seem to diminish their credibility, since inexperience was linked to a biologically young body, and older specialists were perceived as innately embodying life experience, and therefore credibility. Yuliya highlighted these nuances in embodied experiences at the intersection of age and gender: When I worked [in her first job as a school counsellor] What can you possibly tell us here?
We know everything without your advice! However, such positions are not completely fixed. Yuliya said that deprecatory comments are typical of interactions with senior colleagues and school teachers but, in specific encounters, younger female embodiment may also be advantageous, as another participant explained: Young specialists, for example Groups of five- to six-year-olds can be guided by younger women, since they have enough energy Irina, What such comments show is that similar embodied compositions come to acquire advantage or disadvantage depending on who they encounter in a particular counselling situation, which brings us to discussion of the importance of intercorporeality.
The kind of embodiment judged to be professional is contingent on the relationship with other bodies, notably those of clients. As discussed previously, women are seen as possessing essentialist qualities that make them seem suited for the counselling profession.
When discussing the characteristics of the counselling relationship with clients, a particular type of female figure emerged as uniquely credible: I think they are such womanly characteristics: to listen, to accept, to understand; it is something more motherly. Men are usually taught to be strong. I have a female colleague who is the eldest here and amongst clients who find us through the website she is the most popular Moreover, in some sense she is not scary for a man — she is more of a mother figure Diana, 42, director of a counselling centre.
The notion of mother invokes a register of embodied capabilities, the meanings of which are underpinned by a broader social and cultural imaginary of what motherhood means and how it is practised. In contrast to a credible mother figure, the intersections of gender, age and sexuality in specific client relationships may also come to undermine counselling professionalism, as Natalya 29 explained: [Clients] are mostly women … of middle age and middle class … Women usually come with family problems.
So I have to juggle this situation and work only with women. When heteronormatively positioned in an intercorporeal relation to a married man, age, gender and sexuality converge to produce non-credible professional embodiment. These examples again indicate how therapeutic credibility is seen as founded in a shared intercorporeal knowing Hindmarsh and Pilnick, between counsellor and client, and how it leads to particular bodies being composed as trustworthy and professional.
This results in homosocial reproduction, whereby a claimed shared corporeality facilitates bonding between embodied subjects, thereby barring others from entering that social space and thus upholding hierarchical social structures Bird, This brings us to discussion of the significance of context and localized work settings.
Compositions of professionalism as situated As the above analysis shows, different embodied compositions gain salience, a process which, as argued in our theoretical discussion, should be examined in the context in which it happens. The view of an embodied self as situated foregrounds such exploration of how various social settings and locations afford or constrain the professional credibility of particular embodied subjectivities.
Consistent with traditional gendered social norms in Russia Ashwin, ; see also Vacchani and Pullen, , feminine embodied capabilities are valuable in the intimate, private counselling space, where clients are seen as vulnerable and where the relationship between counsellor and client is seen as particularly personal and intense. On the other hand, male bodies, particularly younger ones, tend to have an advantage in a business environment: In business training there are more men Vera, A trainer should be young, energetic … these corporate workshops are active and therefore they need the same kind of leaders Lidya, Hence, this particular localized professional setting clearly shapes the constitution of credibility, privileging one particular version of masculinity and excluding other forms as invalid see Simpson, Interestingly, energy and activity do not have sexual connotations in relation to heterosexual masculinity, differently to the case of the young female body that constitutes a sexual threat in individual counselling.
Thus, we see very different embodied credible professionals emerge in different workplace locations and situations within the same profession. The privileging or disadvantaging of certain embodied compositions is also shaped by the broader professional context of Russian counselling.
While Valentina would prefer to hire older men, such candidates are generally unavailable. This indicates the structural conditions of the labour market, whereby the feminized character of the profession means that there is a greater supply of women candidates and men are a scarce resource.
This indicates that the dynamics and effects of intersecting categories are not predetermined; rather, they are always situated see Hancock, ; Van den Berg, As shown above, both the immediate workplace settings in which counselling relationships are situated and broader social and cultural contexts come to shape variations in the privilege and disadvantage of embodied compositions of professionalism. Discussion This paper set out to explore how embodiment is mobilized or retired in constituting professionalism in the Russian counselling profession, and to understand how an embodied intersectionality framework may contribute to the theorization of professional embodiment.
We argue that our proposed framework provides the following valuable contributions to debates surrounding professional embodiment. Firstly, current literature that points to the importance of the embodied nature of professional experiences is largely gender-focused e.
Gatrell, ; Haynes, , ; Sullivan, , while studies emphasizing the importance of multiple dimensions in understanding experiences of professional privilege and disadvantage do not always consider the body as a key site for analysis e. Karlsen, ; Price-Glynn and Rakovski, ; Tomlinson et al. An embodied intersectionality framework grounded in a phenomenological epistemology enables us to bridge this gap in theorization, as it offers a means to account for intra-categorical variations in professional experiences, and ensures that the active role of the body is brought to the fore when analyzing professionalism.
At the same time, it allows us to show how particular categories may become salient in different settings. Our participants drew on essentialist and embodied gender categories in describing counselling professionalism. For example, age was associated with an assumed extent of life experience, and gender was associated with the ability to care well.
Yet, it was clear that different embodied intersections of age, gender and sexuality produced more or less credible positions depending on work setting and client.
We see here the shape-shifting qualities of social categories that dynamically intersect to produce differently valued positions. As we have demonstrated, conveying professionalism involves aesthetic work and bodily presentations, as suggested by other studies e. Gatrell, ; Haynes, ; Waring and Waring, , but our analysis goes further to indicate that meanings of professionalism forged in relationships between bodies are not limited to perceptible differences inscribed on their surfaces.
Thirdly, we have also argued for the systematic incorporation of contextual analysis into the embodied intersectionality framework, that is, considering how variations of credible embodiment emerge in particular settings in both the broader social context and the localized professional situation. Previous studies have argued that work spaces and environments are crucial to the construction of professional identities Haynes, ; Riach and Cutcher, ; Rumens and Kerfoot, ; Simpson, ; Tyler and Cohen, By viewing the self as situated, an embodied and embedded intersectionality framework offers a means to unveil how the privileging or marginalizing of professional identities occur in different professional settings in a particular social context.
For instance, our findings show how embodied compositions of age and masculinity produce valued positions in a business environment, while in more intimate settings of family counselling, compositions of femininity and age convey professional credibility.
However, some employees may require some additional assistance honing these skills. Consequences of unprofessional behavior Lack of professionalism in the workplace can lead to: Disgruntled or frustrated employees Low engagement and morale Toxic atmosphere High turnover Avoidable obstacles for recruiting, retention and succession planning Negative brand reputation among customers, vendors and industry partners — which may result in lost business opportunities and reduced revenue Areas of struggle for employees — and what you can do to help 1.
Interpersonal skills Common unprofessional behaviors Demonstrating resistance to working alongside others Inability to discern the feelings of others and adapt behavior according to these cues lacking empathy Being inflexible: Change is a constant in the workplace , regardless of industry or the type of work, and agility is a must. Adopting an inappropriate communication style for a particular audience: For example, an employee may treat one of their colleagues like they would a personal friend, throwing casual slang into conversation and broaching topics that may not be suitable for the workplace.
Image, conduct and attitude Common unprofessional behaviors Failing to show up in appropriate, business-worthy attire: Whether your office requires a suit and tie or allows jeans, your employees should still appear presentable and neat. A special note about social media Traditionally, employees have treated their social media accounts as private spaces outside the purview of the workplace.
What you can do Striving to instill a desirable image, conduct and attitude in your employees starts with having established policies. Policies, when applied consistently, also demonstrate your fairness to the entire organization. Have written and consistently applied policies governing: Appearance Time and attendance Social media Office etiquette Media contact Remote work Ideally, these policies are documented in your employee handbook.
Technology use Common unprofessional behaviors Not knowing how to write a proper email, evidenced by: Engaging in too many back-and-forth exchanges Being overly verbose Making basic spelling and grammar mistakes Not discerning which modes of communication are best: Just as not every issue requires an in-person meeting, using impersonal media such as email, text or instant messenger IM can flub the delivery of a complex, more nuanced message.
Excessive Internet or smartphone usage: This issue has gotten more complicated because of the world we live in and our reliance on doing many personal tasks online. But there is a fine line between an employee taking a short break to attend pressing personal matters for example, scheduling a doctor appointment versus idling away hours shopping, playing games or perusing social media.
What you can do Provide training on proper email etiquette, and coach employees on the savvy application of technology to communicate with others in an optimal way.
Demonstrating a lack of trust Becoming too chummy with direct reports: Be careful about blurring the lines between personal friendship and the professional manager-employee relationship. What you can do Your leaders — particularly less experienced leaders — should undergo regular training. With these assessments in hand, you can improve your work developing managers. Establishing professionalism in the workplace When working to clarify your expectations regarding staff professionalism, carefully set and maintain the tone and atmosphere you want your office to embody upfront.
To craft clear standards and benchmarks, ask yourself: What culture and image do I want to have? What behavior is required of employees to achieve this? How am I communicating these aspirations to both new employees and employees who have been with the company for awhile?
Are leaders modeling my desired behaviors every day? After all, termination is often the costliest option. Summing it all up Professionalism in the workplace is undoubtedly critical for maintaining harmony and a positive image among stakeholders while also developing and promoting internally.
0コメント