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Does professional citizenship resonate with you?

Lizzie O'Brien

So, you think you’re a professional? And most of us do. Think we’re professionals. We get to work on time, roll up our sleeves, coach colleagues, advise the business, fight fires; balancing the needs of workers and organisations at the same time. And we go home. To our friends and loved ones, to the gym, to the pub, to the cinema.

But if we’re professionals, do our responsibilities start and end with our day job? Do we have a duty to use our unique skills to help others? How can we go beyond our roles while balancing our work, family and other busy life commitments? These ideas sit at the heart of professional citizenship, which is described by the University of Minnesota as 'an identity: seeing oneself first as a citizen with special expertise working alongside other citizens with their own special expertise in order to solve community problems that require everyone’s effort.’

So, what do you think? How can we be better professional citizens? And should we be? Does the concept resonate with you? Please share your thoughts - the good, the bad and the ugly!

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  • That's an interesting concept and reminds me of a very strange date i went on a few years back. After some initial pleasant conversation, the chap tried to tell me that as a HR Professional, I had a duty to spend all of my time outside of work trying to make the world a better place. I disagreed - my private time is for me to do things that i enjoy and whilst i always try to help people a nd do good because of my nature, it was certainly not my 'duty; to do that, just because i happened to be working in HR

    He then got very animated and cotninued to rant that i was being irresponsible and HR people like me, needed to realised that we were responsible for 'ridding the world of evil'. Unsurprisingly i disagreed, and at that point i ended the evening. Strangely he asked to see me again and was surprised when i declined.

    So my thoughts are very strongly that we absolutely have no duty to be better professional citizens outside of work. I do however believe that everyone - young or old, professional or not, has a responsibility to treat the world and the living beings on it with care and respect.
  • in reply to Teresa
    Agree with Teresa that there should not be an implicit and automatic obligation/duty on HR professionals to take an active role in deploying their expertise in the community at large.

    In a period when I was regularly doing 60-70 hours weeks with occasional 50 hour non-stop crisis sessions, I would have been a little miffed if someone had suggested that I really ought to do more for the community at large - particularly when the work I was doing time involved recruiting 3.500 people for new jobs, liaising with technical schools to help them align their course content with the company's recruitment needs, training newly recruited first line managers with the supervisory skills they didn't yet have but clearly had the potential to acquire.....

    Many on the forum give their time to the community on a voluntary basis, and for me that is the right way to ensure commitment and enthusiasm on the part of those giving their time. I fully recognise that in other national cultures, different social values apply - however the UK is not Norway, India or Uzbekisatan and has it's own distinctive values (neither right or wrong in an absolute sense), and it would be totally wrong to blindly copy other cultures.

    On the other hand I believe that as human beings we have a duty to treat others with respect and consideration, which for some people can include extending the availability of their professional skills to the community at large - but by choice. When I retire next year I shall continue to teach MBA courses in international HR, but that is just as much about keeping my brain in gear as about giving to the community
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  • in reply to Teresa
    Agree with Teresa that there should not be an implicit and automatic obligation/duty on HR professionals to take an active role in deploying their expertise in the community at large.

    In a period when I was regularly doing 60-70 hours weeks with occasional 50 hour non-stop crisis sessions, I would have been a little miffed if someone had suggested that I really ought to do more for the community at large - particularly when the work I was doing time involved recruiting 3.500 people for new jobs, liaising with technical schools to help them align their course content with the company's recruitment needs, training newly recruited first line managers with the supervisory skills they didn't yet have but clearly had the potential to acquire.....

    Many on the forum give their time to the community on a voluntary basis, and for me that is the right way to ensure commitment and enthusiasm on the part of those giving their time. I fully recognise that in other national cultures, different social values apply - however the UK is not Norway, India or Uzbekisatan and has it's own distinctive values (neither right or wrong in an absolute sense), and it would be totally wrong to blindly copy other cultures.

    On the other hand I believe that as human beings we have a duty to treat others with respect and consideration, which for some people can include extending the availability of their professional skills to the community at large - but by choice. When I retire next year I shall continue to teach MBA courses in international HR, but that is just as much about keeping my brain in gear as about giving to the community
Children
  • in reply to Ray
    Totally agree with the observation in Ray's final para above and have to say that I'm not too comfortable with this concept just focusing on 'professionals' (whatever that means exactly, in an HR context.....). To me, it's inherent in the concept of a decent society or human community that everyone, be they professionals or artisans or whatever puts whatever skill and spare time and available resources they have into helping it to function effectively, for the common good.

    A now long dead relative used to recount life in a local village in the 1930s Depression where her father was the village butcher and could not bring himself to watch neighbours' children etc starve, so gave away meat to very many local families, at considerable financial cost. He wasn't a 'professional' but so what??