Unprofessionalism

This week's professional risk

Questioning the professional rules we’ve always followed, without ever choosing them.

Description

Every now and then, a conversation comes along that completely breaks my understanding of unprofessionalism. This episode starts with one of those moments. I realised that simply breaking professional norms isn’t enough. Some people challenge conventions to gain attention, power or status. Others do it because they’re trying to make work more human, more honest or more courageous. The difference matters.

But perhaps the most interesting part isn’t what m...

This week's professional risk - inspired by Charlie

Make the thing you've always kept furthest from work the centre of it.

Description

Charlie Robertson spent years keeping two lives carefully apart: the consultant at a well-respected firm, and Charlene Coco, the drag persona he performed in nightlife and mentioned to almost no one at work. Then he left the consulting career, went freelance as a facilitator, and — only about a year ago — did the thing that still makes him flinch when he posts about it on LinkedIn: he brought Char...

This week's professional risk - inspired by Mariam Halfhide

Telling someone honestly how their behaviour affected you, instead of hiding behind professionalism, blame or silence.

This episode invites you to reflect on:

Most of us were trained how...

Jamell Crouthers has held a full-time job the entire time he's been writing. Sixty books in eight years, a podcast, blog posts, all of it built in the hours around his day work. He writes fiction about social issues — race, workaholism, homelessness, addiction — the kind of conversations most workplaces won't touch directly.

When he worked at a medical office, he used to sit in the break room before his shift with his laptop and coworkers walking past started asking what he was writing. Some began buying his books. His supervisor became a regular listener of his podcast.

Donatella Caggiano was living in a Best Western while her flooded apartment got fixed when she watched a SWAT team raid a neighbouring house to catch a fugitive. She caught herself rooting for the person running and then realised she was the person running. Donatella accepted the hint her body and the universe were giving then drove to her office that morning and quit.

The job she walked away from was a corporate role she had stayed in through a merger and acquisition that kept her and her team in the dark, and left everyone working in...

Gustavo Razzetti once sat next to a woman at a corporate conference, judging the regional VP presenting on stage until she revealed that was her husband. Instead of backpedaling he apologised, then stood by every word. That instinct of owning the mess without pretending he didn’t mean it is the backbone of his work.

He has spent decades inside corporate and agency life watching great ideas die because of terrible culture. He now works with teams on what he calls conversational debt: the gap between what people nod through in meetings and what they actually act on...

Rori DuBoff once took an unused office at Accenture, tore it down, and built a virtual reality studio from scratch with no formal approval and that's how she got the firm into the metaverse. She didn't wait for the green light. She brought in a few people who were equally excited, and delivered.

She's spent decades in digital innovation and marketing, watching organisations say they wanted disruption and then treat the people delivering it as the problem.

That’s made her conclude that 80% of innovation is change management. Rori explains how most of us obsess ov...

Emanuele Mazzanti is a day one rule-breaker. When he moved to EY Italy, his boss asked to be called "Dottore." He noticed the distance being created and suggested, politely, that they drop the formalities and just use first names. Surprisingly, the answer was yes.

That’s a pattern he kept running into. Different countries and roles but the same kind of distance disguised as formality to keep things simple and boost performance. In consultancy, where everyone is climbing the same ladder, connection becomes a liability as only one person can move up at a time.

Th...

Cathey Armillas built her career the way most people are told not to. She doesn't separate what she loves from what she sells. Her sneaker collection became a filter for clients. Her obsession with waterfalls became a corporate training product. Her decades as a competitive softball pitcher became her coaching methodology. Her background in marketing psychology became her speaking framework.

She coaches TED speakers and executives to do the same. To stop becoming a flatter version of themselves the moment they walk into a professional space, and to trust that what makes them recognisable outside of work...

Benjamin Taylor was once brought in to help eleven chief executives navigate a merger that would cost the job of some. Before the meeting, a more senior colleague on his team pushed back on touching that topic. It would embarrass them, he said. It was better to keep things “professional”.

Benjamin thought the opposite. That staying professional in that room was going to make it impossible for anyone to have an honest conversation. What happened next? An awkward silence and the topic remained untouched for the rest of the that meeting.

He has spent his care...

When Julie Brown was being poached from one company to another, they asked what she was currently earning. She told them a number she wanted to be true — what she deserved, not what she was making. They didn't blink.

That’s how she spent 17 years as one of the highest-paid professionals in a male-dominated field before realising that the secret lay in building relationships. She's turned that into a book called This Sh!t Works, and a speaking career with keynote speeches 99.9% of audiences want to hear again. Turns out, the sh!t does work.

We t...

Jussi Hermunen was brought in as a consultant on a multimillion-euro project when he discovered that his go-to tool was on the client's prohibited software list. He used it anyway. Not out of recklessness, but because a diagram reads the same on a factory floor as it does in a boardroom.

A clarity that a 70-page document full of acronyms that nobody in those steering group meetings would admit they hadn't read could never provide.

He has spent decades inside large organisations finding the people whose working lives are shaped by decisions they had no...

Tramaine has a rule for herself and everyone she manages: what you allow will continue. She learned by watching what happened when she didn't set a boundary, and what happened when she did.

With +15 years of managing teams across industries and seven countries around the globe, she spent a lot of that time being called difficult for doing things like putting her own phone number on an emergency contact list so her junior team members could have Christmas or pushing back against a request that would disrupt her team’s weekend.

Tramaine is a leader wh...

Thirty years ago, in a room full of blue suits with padded shoulders, pearls, and red ties — all competing for one of the most prestigious academic scholarships in the world — Michael Bungay Stanier walked in with long blonde hair, earrings, and a pink tie-dye tie.

He was in his mid-twenties, in Australia, competing against people he knew might be sharper than him. His logic was simple: if I try to beat them on their terms, I lose. So he placed a different bet. One where he'd either come last by a long way, or come first.

He...

While working in Vietnam, the uni president, once told me I was getting away with a lot — working from home, teaching with comic books, skipping the standard slide show — because I was young, female, pretty, and white. As harsh as it might sound, I know my Vietnamese colleagues would indeed never have had the same latitude.

The freedom to show up unpolished isn't equally available. Sometimes is contextual. Sometimes we are born closer to that permission than others.

Maybe that's why it's been harder than I expected to find female guests for the podcast. Being unpr...

Roi Ben-Yehuda was one dissertation away from finishing his PhD when he realised he didn't want what was waiting on the other side. He walked away. Then years later, settled into a good job he liked, with a new mortgage and two small babies at home, he felt that pull again and walked away from that too, right in the middle of a pandemic. 

Both times, the "thou shalt” voice telling him to stay on course was very loud. Both times, he ignored it. But the last one he gave himself nine months to make it work or...

Leanne Hughes wrote the name of a podcast she didn’t have on a blue Post-it note, dropped it in a hat, and when her name was called — walked on stage and described the show as if it existed. It didn’t. A few months later, the First Time Facilitator was born. That’s also how she landed a Wiley publishing deal, and sold out a 50-person consulting conference in eight days.

The pattern is always the same: claim it first, build it second. Resourcefulness shows up after commitment, not before it. Waiting until you’re ready is the ris...

When Martin Frederik Garbers’ company was acquired, he was handed the unenviable job of letting twenty-five people go. His own days were numbered too, but he chose to spend them sitting through the hard conversations, one by one, as a human being first – a CFO second.

As he walked the Camino after redundancy, his body told him with every fibre of his being, that he wasn't going back to corporate life. Now he lights a candle in the early hours of the morning, takes executives for long walks in nature, and asks his coaching clients to slow down...

As her classmates chanted the purpose of business (spoiler: to make money), Philippa White couldn’t help but feel like she'd wandered into the wrong room, as the business school black sheep.

She'd grown up watching her uncle bridge worlds in apartheid South Africa – endlessly curious, fascinated by people and possibility, and the doctor of Nelson Mandela. He taught Philippa something that no business school curriculum was ever going to: the return on being more human. Today, she takes this conviction into boardrooms across the world.

We got into what happens when people genuinely care abou...

Alex McCann isn’t a qualified career coach, occupational therapist, or psychologist. But he’ll be the first to tell you that.

He walked away from a six-month internship, would sneak off to watch films when he should've been serving popcorn, and then decided he was done pretending he had it all figured out. Now at just 25 years old, he’s figuring it all out in public. After hundreds of conversations about why people feel lost in their careers, he’s building an AI career coach for the ones tired of faking it.

Alex doesn’t claim to...

Anna Lundberg had spent her whole life being the good girl. Top of the class as valedictorian, Oxford graduate, and the shiny P&G title to show for it. She’d ticked every box, perfected the image, and then she did something very off-brand: she quit.

What she didn’t expect was how long the good girl mindset would follow her. Even now, a decade into solopreneurship and 370 episodes into her podcast Reimagining Success, Anna still feels the pull of the old scripts. Say yes, never chase, be likeable, and fill up your diary to feel important.

Mark McCartney showed up to facilitate a C-level team in Berlin on the hottest day of the year, drenched in sweat, and opened by pointing out his own stain marks. They laughed. The room shifted. That's Mark — someone who left a 15-year finance career, spent a year in Peru, and has since asked 300+ people the same question: what is a good life?

We got into why real vulnerability isn't the rehearsed trauma story but the small, mundane thing you say in the moment that reminds everyone they're sitting with a human. We talked about boundaries as a so...

Sometimes, just sometimes, the rules are there to be broken. Because when you dare to break them, miracles and moments of beautiful humanity could be waiting just on the other side.

Rotem Kazir was trained never to let her coaching clients know anything about her. Keep distance. Stay neutral. That's professional. Until a founder she'd coached for two years said something that broke the rule for good.

She's spent 20 years working with startup founders — first in HR, then on the VC side, now as a coach — and what she keeps seeing is that the performance brea...

Jon Berghoff walked into a room of C-level executives from billion-dollar companies and noticed they'd all filled the back rows first. He spent two hours debating whether to say something. Then he got on stage and asked them to move to the front. The looks he got said: nobody has ever told us where to sit. Three Fortune 50 companies in that room ended up hiring him.

Jon is the founder of Xchange and one of the most in-demand facilitators in the world. He also spent five years running global conferences in a suit on top and barefoot...

Early in her career, Tieren Scott was told she needed to sound more "bubbly" when presenting. Her manager pointed to a colleague in the room as the example. Tieren's natural voice — grounded, measured, clear — wasn't the problem. It just wasn't the default. That moment taught her something black women in America already know: professionalism was never a neutral standard.

Tieren has a doctorate in organisational leadership and a decade of experience as an instructional designer and coach. We talked about what it actually costs to mask every day — adjusting your tone, reading the room before you've even opened...

A software engineer fired a test missile and watched it cartwheel into the ocean. He looked at the code and thought: that looks like what would happen if I hadn't loaded all the microcode. Did I load the microcode? Oh God. Did he tell anyone? No. So they fired three more. Same result. He was too afraid to speak up. That, says Mike Parker, is what professionalism encodes: fear dressed up as competence.

Mike spent 35 years in consultancy before founding his liminal coaching practice, and he's been thinking about where that fear comes from — Taylorism, factory floors, a...

Jillian Reilly was young, running a multimillion-dollar AIDS programme in Zimbabwe, and supposed to give a diplomatic speech to a room of religious leaders. She sat through the procession, looked at her script, and decided she couldn't do it. What she did instead nearly sent the US government officials behind her into damage control mode.

Jill went on to write a bestselling book called The 10 Permissions, and this conversation is really about where that idea was born. We talked about the invisible rules we follow without questioning them, why "am I allowed?" is the most exhausting question...

Welcome to Unprofessionalism! My shiny new podcast, a provocation in the making, and the place to challenge everything we’ve been taught about being professional.

Together, we’ll be peeling back the limitations of professionalism, on a mission to restore our humanness and bring joy, defiantly, back to work. You’ll hear stories from scientists, artists, entrepreneurs, and true masters of their craft as we question the very construct of professionalism, its silent expectations, how we can break free, and seek to be unprofessionals in all that we do!

But first, join me from the very b...

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