How to learn professionalism? Can anyone teach, please?

1. *Planning*: Whether it is an operation conducted by a doctor or a project executed by an engineer, professional behaviour demands a certain amount of planning so that overruns are avoided and the work proceeds smoothly. How many of us make plans in our everyday lives? How many companies take planning seriously? Does our government take the Planning Commission seriously? If we answer these questions, we may discover
that many of us are not professional at all, even while claiming to be so.

2. *Decision making*: The way we make our decisions also shows how professional we are. Usually, we go by our whims and intuition and fail to analyse the situation. When we look around ourselves, we find the consequences of such decisions. Companies which had diversified without taking into account ground realities have come to grief: a
pharmaceutical company which entered the cosmetics industry, an engineering company
which diversified into shipping, and so on. Multinational companies too made this
mistake and entered the country thinking that they could sell overpriced products to our huge middle class, but only to come to grief. There were few buyers for their products showing that their decisions had been made out of wishful thinking rather than scientific principles.

3. *Communication*: How we communicate also shows how professional we
are. Do we take care to explain something to our customers, subordinates or
superiors? A doctor who explains a point to a worried patient is much better than one who simply writes out a prescription. The end result of both doctors is the same, but one reduces worry while the other causes unnecessary tension. To a sick person, that makes a lot of difference.

4. *Doing our job*: Finally, our attitude gets reflected in the job that we do. Does it reflect our care and ability? Or are we content in doing a half-baked job hoping that someone else will correct our mistakes? A journalist can give a story full of mistakes and these will no doubt be corrected at the proofing stage. But professionalism demands that
all mistakes are removed by the person himself, without depending on anyone
else. It also means keeping an eye for details, however minute they may be.

5. *Doing what is right:* A company which does not treat its workers well can hardly be called professional, no matter how many professionally qualified people it employs. Similarly, companies which do not pay taxes or fail to take note of their social responsibility are unprofessional.