Professionalism is Destroying Creativity
[Music]
have you ever been told
that you’re too much maybe you’ve been
told in a job
to tone down your personality
have you ever been passed over for an
interview
a job that you really wanted or even a
promotion
because of the way that you dress or
even worse
because of the way that you appear if so
this tedx is for you but conversely
if you’ve ever had to hire someone or
manage
a team member or work with anyone
this tedx is also for you
i remember when i was a kid and as a kid
i would wear
the most wild outfits i would wear a big
pink
tutu or a princess dress cowgirl boots a
cowgirl hat
i remember on the weekends it felt like
the world was
my playground my imagination would run
wild
i mean a box could become a spaceship or
i could become
the next president of the united states
there were no limits and i remember as a
kid so many people
said dream big shoot for the moon at
least you’ll end up among the stars
i remember all these cheesy posters
throughout school
hung all across of the all the walls of
our classrooms
and i remember at the time having a
love-hate relationship with those
posters
part of me felt like they were
incredibly cheesy
but part of me loved them because they
reaffirmed
this belief that i could be myself and
also have success
but over time i began to realize
that that nuance that idea that you
could be yourself
and be successful wasn’t necessarily
true
this was perfectly exemplified
in a conversation i had with an educator
at the age of 16 years old
when he said if i were you i would wear
glasses i would never wear makeup and
don’t wear
anything that lets people know how
attractive you
are so i took that advice to heart
and i began to wear blazers
i put together a polished resume and i
dulled my sparkles so that i would fit
in
with others now here’s the thing this
tedx isn’t just about me and my journey
no this is about a serious issue
within corporate within people’s nine to
fives and
within people’s lives here now today
i decided to look on google and see
exactly what advice is being given to
people who
are looking for jobs looking for
promotions
and open to new opportunities wanting to
grow in their career
now this is where things get a little
crazy because 65
of bosses actually said that clothes
could be the deciding factor
between two candidates with similar
qualifications hmm
70 of employers claim
that they don’t want applicants to be
fashionable
or trendy something sits a little funny
for me with that
and i’m going to share with you the
three areas where i see
a ton of room for growth as a nation as
a world
and especially as employers and
employees
now i decided to google once again on
college recruiter
how i could be most likely to be the
best candidate for a job
and there was a lot of very interesting
advice but most of it was offered
underneath this one umbrella
and that was how to dress right for an
interview
how to dress right to get a promotion
how to dress
right in the workplace and that’s that
funny for me
because i thought who decides
what’s right i didn’t know that there
was a wrong way to dress in order to be
successful
now i went to this article and college
recruiter on the first page of google
says avoid excessive
everything that includes but is not
limited to
and i quote flashy jewelry sparkly eye
shadow bad ties bold ties
colorful patterns and fun socks
in fact their overarching advice for
anyone who wants to
get a job be promotable and have success
in their career
is to wear a suit
i started to think about how many people
i know that are
wonderfully wildly remarkably talented
in different ways and i thought about
these people who have
winged eyeliner natural hair tattoos
piercings curly hair oh my goodness the
nerve
being a blonde i have blonde friends who
are wildly successful and
so talented and the truth is
creativity comes in many
packages i think one of the big problems
with our society today
is that we are laying the burden on job
applicants
and people who want to advance in their
career
we’re asking them to ask the question
how do i
dress right for a corporate success
story
but what we need to do is start laying
the burden
on employers the question that should
be asked is how do we find
amazing talent that may not fit the mold
of conventional professionalism
which brought me to my next point you
see
i love communicating i love
connecting with people i love creating
amazing
powerful strategies that grow a brand
significantly profitably and
using some of the really cool trends
that are available on social media today
what i don’t love is creating
powerpoints
or having to type up reports or
spreadsheet anything but yet i see
wonderful creatives and visionaries
being asked
to create powerpoint presentations with
not
too much energy put into them
i see amazing creatives
being lost in the process of having to
fill out a spreadsheet
and i really started to think about this
process
in corporate and in our jobs
one question that i had is what is most
important
is it that presentation of information
is made to be aesthetically pleasing or
is it that it gets the job
done in fact throughout my entire
marketing career one of the things
that’s been the most shocking
not only to our clients but to our team
and to the people that i teach
is that it is very rarely the most
aesthetically pleasing marketing
campaigns
that get the best results the greatest
return the most growth
ultimately the most profitable campaigns
have the necessary elements but aren’t
always presented
in an aesthetically pleasing way the
question we need to ask ourselves
is is the necessary information here
and that is far more important than
making sure
that our powerpoint presentations are
aesthetically pleasing
if someone wants aesthetically pleasing
they can spend some time on instagram
in fact most architects and engineers
actually write all of their notes in
complete
caps lock and that’s because they’re
focusing on
exactly what is needed in order to get
the job
done they’re not focused on pretty
pretty is the final product
it doesn’t need to be so in the
presentation of the data
megan merkel recently was interviewed by
oprah
and she shared a story that
was very controversial she shared a lot
of stories that were very controversial
but one that i want to highlight here
was a time when she was
advised to be 50 percent
less now here’s the thing when i sat
down and watched that interview
my immediate thought was i’m not shocked
i’ve heard similar sentiments from
co-workers
bosses prospective clients and even team
members
i’ve heard this over and over again to
be
less to not seem so excited to not be so
bubbly
to not make a fool of myself
people don’t take silly girls seriously
but so many other people resonated with
that message
because i’m not the first neither was
megan who has been told to tone
themselves down
and to be less of themselves in order to
be more
acceptable to the corporate foundation
you may have been told to use less
emojis
no emojis no exclamation points
there are entire tick tock accounts that
are dedicated to
explaining how boring emails have become
in the workplace
right we’ll circle back to that later
my question is this when you are
hiring and building a culture for your
workplace
are you looking for robots
assembly line automated humans to
perform
a task a certain way according to what
you believe
is exactly how a certain person would do
it
or are you actually interested in
diversity
instead of trying to make someone fit
the mold of the one personality that
corporate has deemed
acceptable or potentially successful
what if instead employers begin
spending time studying the different
personality types
disc kobe myers-briggs enneagram these
are
all amazing ways to learn about all of
the different kinds of humans that there
are
and how they act under stress because
it’s not the same
as what corporate expects us all to be
professionalism is killing creativity
thank you for coming to my tedx talk