Professionalism is Destroying Creativity | Rachel Pedersen | TEDxLenoxVillage
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdCV6V5m3dM Video ID: wdCV6V5m3dM ============================================================ [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