Painfully Unique

One of the great pleasures of consulting is learning about the organizations, industries, and practices we serve. It continues to be fascinating – and fun – to learn about how all kinds of work gets done, and to discover the distinctive know-how, challenges, joys, and languages of many of what I will call, “vocational subcultures”.

Good consultants must learn about the vocational subcultures in which we work. Indeed, the most common point of skepticism I encounter before a consulting engagement or training session is that, as an outsider, I cannot possibly understand the unique world of:

• Accountants (or, those of large public accounting firms, small public accounting firms, municipal finance officers…)
• Engineers (or city engineers, pipeline engineers, maintenance engineers, product designers…)
  Miners (or metallurgists, geologists, mining technicians…)
• Long-term care (or nurses, social workers, physicians, housing directors, physical therapists…)
• Law enforcement (or street cops, investigators, correctional officers, probation and parole officers, jail programmers, supervisors, commanders…)
• Fire and Emergency Medical Services (or career firefighters, non-career firefighters, rescue squad team members, firefighter-paramedics, company officers, chief officers…)

The list goes on… but the theme remains: we all think that our workplace cultures are profoundly unique. In fact, some people seem to consider themselves unique in their uniqueness. By contrast, because I try to reserve “unique” for truly one-of-a-kind, I tend to describe cultural features as distinctive rather than unique.)

So what?

First, there’s some truth behind the belief: every vocational culture is distinctive and some distinctive features really do affect how practitioners and leaders make decisions, engage one another, develop professionally, or generally pursue excellence. “Excellence” itself is context-specific. Being a great jail programmer really is quite different from being a great oil driller. Further, when presenting general principles, it is helpful to teach those principles using examples from within the learners’ culture. Therefore, it pays to learn about the cultures in which we work, and making assumptions about one workplace culture based another is just plain dangerous. Learning a vocational culture from the outside takes time, effort, respectful curiosity, and abundant humility. It requires inside partners – true mentors and guides – with the same patience and investment. And, it is well work the effort for everyone involved.

However, there’s a real danger in focusing only on the differences that separate us, especially when we truly believe that our vocational culture is unique. If we are the only ones who can understand our world, then how do we constructively engage and learn from others? How do we make that world better? How do we even see where we need to improve? Moreover, to dismiss out of hand the input from those outside our culture is just a little too convenient as an excuse for avoiding uncomfortable critique. If we care about being our best, we need fresh ideas to improve. The more firmly we cling to the notion that nobody from outside our culture has anything meaningful to say about it, the more urgently we need that outside input.

In other words, if we care about getting better as leaders and as practitioners of whatever work we do, we need to engage with one another across workplace cultures, investing in learning about one another, while remaining open to input from those who have never walked in our shoes.

What now?

• Let us pause before offering input across cultures, to assure that our thoughts are relevant and well-informed.
• Let us pause before dismissing input from outsiders, simply because it comes from outside.
• Let us conduct ourselves in accordance with these Principles of Charitable Interpretation:
• We assume that the person we are engaging is competent and well-intentioned.
• We assume that an idea presented to us is fundamentally reasonable, even if we disagree.
• We maintain these assumptions until proven otherwise.
• Let us be open to, and curious about, other vocational cultures, and seek to connect with people who have differing experiences and perspectives.

And in so doing, we might just learn something from one another!