The New Book “Talent Master” Chapter IV Introduction: Digital Professionalism

Digital workforce and workplace are more diverse and dynamic than ever today, they are multi-generational, multi-cultural, and multi-devicing. The talent management goal of an organization is to find out how you can locate the right candidate with the right capability for a right position within an organization to unleash potential and achieve high performance. However, from a wide variety of talent management surveys, unprofessionalism is still pervasive, it is the big barrier to building a culture of innovation, damages the business reputation and tarnishes the trust of modern businesses and society.  Hence, how to assess employees’ professionalism, help them shape the right mindset, build high-performing business culture and improve the organizational effectiveness and maturity?
High-quality professionals look decently, think profoundly, and act thoughtfully: Being professional means you present a certain quality that shows a high level of excellence & value, peculiar and essential character. We are what we think, the quality of a person is often decided by the quality of his/her thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors. High quality digital leaders or professionals are great in altitude, aptitude, and attitude -a winning mixture composed of intelligence and competence, confidence and humility, self-esteem and high EQ. They are also made of personal qualities such as positive thinking, critical thinking, independent judgment, a sense of responsibility and respect (both respect others and being respected). High-quality leaders and employees make positive influences on corporate culture and bring wisdom to the workplace.
High-professionalism means authenticity: Nobody is perfect, we all have strength and weakness, focus or preference. Being authentic means being true to that in different aspect: thinking, saying and doing with consistency. Being consistent during the good and tough moments is particularly difficult for leaders as they advance in their career, it means that you have clear visions and coherent thoughts to lead forward even the time flow. The high-quality professionals sometimes also make mistakes, but they have learning attitude o focus on solving problems, not finger point, and they are able to learn from every experience, understand the context, have work ethics and dealing with situation intelligently and consistently.
High-professionalism also means maturity which is not always associated with age but having a sound understanding of basics and make fair judgments. It is the clarity of thoughts along with self-control which helps in choosing the most appropriate reaction of inaction. It’s the ability to weigh in the impact of what we are planning to do and responding to every situation according to its severity level. Intellectual maturity also means to have the ability to live comfortably with contradictory thoughts, and expressing things courageously by taking care of the feelings of the other people empathetically. Communicate thoroughly, but not winning a small battle of ego. When a person knows the principles of life and has well crated to great level of mindfulness, competencies, or skills, the person becomes fully developed and thus has achieved maturity with is the combination of capability and potentiality.
From people management perspective, in order to strengthen the weakest link -people and advocate high professionalism, organizations should integrate performance management, talent management, culture management and knowledge management into a holistic approach to get people digital ready, build a culture of innovation, drive corporate mindset, attitude, capability and long-term achievement. Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu