The problem with performance-managing professionals

When our first child was born last spring my wife and I indulged in that traditional speculation practised by many new parents: what did we want the dear girl to do when she grew up?

Like a lot of proud fathers, I instinctively veered towards the conventional. She would, of course, pursue a brilliant professional career, achieving both financial security

and social respectability. Put your trust in the professions and you can't go wrong.

My wife, less hidebound than me and, crucially, a few years younger, was more pragmatic. "I bet she'd make a good plumber," she said.

At only 15 months, my daughter has not yet had to face the literacy and numeracy tests that will soon be coming her way from the Department for Education and Skills. It is therefore too early to say in which direction she is headed - although, to judge by her talent for destroying order, plumbing may indeed turn out to be a favoured option.

But Mrs Stern's scepticism does provoke other, more immediate, questions. What does it mean to be a professional today? Where in the past the term covered the established disciplines of law, medicine or accountancy, today it is used to cover even the work done by security guards or contract cleaners.

Has the term "professional" been devalued through its ever wider application to ever more lines of work? And what implications does the changing nature of professionalism have both for employees and their organisations?

One afternoon last month, Demos*, a London-based think-tank, gathered together a selection of professional people and gave them a few minutes to describe the challenges they face doing their jobs. The effect was remarkable.

In both the public and private sectors, managers are agonising over similar things. In this age of targets, monitoring and performance management, professional people wonder how much autonomy they retain over how they go about their work. They had originally entered a profession because of a vocation, a calling. Now they found themselves pursuing a managerial agenda set remotely by bosses who often did not share the same personal commitment to the work in hand that they do.

Richard Sennett, a professor at the London School of Economics, argues that many professional people have lost "a sense of craft" in their day-to-day work. They are being judged according to their position in an occupational hierarchy, not by what it is about their work that makes them feel professional: their dedication to their craft.

"We have misunderstood the idea of quality, and how people go about doing quality work," he says. "A most important motivator for professionals is being able to do a good job for its own sake, rather than just to meet a target. If you take that ability away from professionals they get very unhappy."

"Professional" has become a very slippery term. During the past four weeks, the World Cup has offered us a masterclass in what football players call the "professional foul" - the shameful but necessary hauling down of an opponent who might be about to score a goal. "Well," former players say as they seek to justify this sort of action, "football is a professional game."

If colleagues break down in tears, or display uncontrolled emotions of any kind, there is often much frowning, tutting and use of the damning label "unprofessional".

But is this the sort of chilly professionalism we need to meet today's performance targets and competitive pressures? Perhaps it is. Better the cold, competent professional than the cheery, ineffectual amateur.

But sometimes, of course, professionalism is in the eye of the beholder. This is a theme film-maker Quentin Tarantino explores in his 1992 crime thriller, Reservoir Dogs. Professionalism is the film's leitmotif. A gang of armed robbers collapses into violent disarray as a planned heist goes wrong. Appalled by a colleague's displays of brutality, Mr White, played by Harvey Keitel, issues the most damning criticism imaginable.

"What you're supposed to do is act like a f****** professional," he says. "A psychopath is not a professional. You can't work with a psychopath, 'cause ya don't know what those sick assholes are gonna do next."

I have wandered a little from this column's usual territory. How unprofessional. But that is my point. The early 21st-century version of professionalism risks becoming narrow and impoverished. The under-40s coming up through the ranks seek variety and autonomy in their work, as well as financial rewards. They do not want their true professionalism to be performance-managed out of them.

My daughter may struggle, like the 19th-century schoolboy Tom Brown, in trying to earn a living while "doing some real good, feeling that I am not only at play in the world".

She might benefit from listening, if not to her father, to Tom Brown's schoolmaster, who offers this advice: "You talk of 'working to get your living' and 'doing some real good in the world' in the same breath. Now you may be getting a good living in a profession, and yet not doing any good at all in the world . . . keep the latter before you as a holy object, and you will be right, whether you make a living or not; but if you dwell on the other, you'll very likely drop into mere money-making."

* Production Values - Futures for Professionalism, published by Demos, www.demos.co.uk