Unprofessionalism

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 freela...

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: Why do we suppress a difficult emotion although we know that it makes it even stronger? Why feedback falls flat when we can't name what a behaviour actually did to us. Why...

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...

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...

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 bec...

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...

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...

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....

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 anyo...

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...

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 admi...

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 emergen...

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 t...

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...

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...

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 s...

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 corpor...

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 tha...

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 convers...

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 podc...

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...

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 r...

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 Xcha...

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. T...

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 co...