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Nobody sitting with perfect posture in a room of button-down shirts, looking at a slide that says leverage strategic capabilities, is doing their best work. Theyre just not. You know what theyre doing instead? Theyre nodding pleasantly, wondering the last time they went to the bathroom, and trying to figure out when to jump into the conversation with an agreeable, jargon-filled platitude. This is good for no one. I have been a management consultant for over a decade, serving many Fortune 500 clients, and I have spewed my share of jargon. I understand the instinct. We want to telegraph our competence and we want to fit in, and therefore, we put on business theater. Unfortunately, when we perform, people can often tell. Take Princeton researcher Daniel M. Oppenheimers landmark study, cleverly titled, Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly. He found a consistent negative relationship between language complexity and judged intelligence. In other words, unnecessary jargon makes us sound dumb. This kind of performative professionalism is harming how were perceived, but it also harms our ability to truly connect with others. No doubt, connection is critical for business performance. Gallups research shows that employees with a best friend at work are significantly more likely to engage customers and internal partners, get more done in less time, support a safe workplace, innovate and share ideas, and have fun while at work. Its also critical for our own happiness given more than half of Americans are considered lonely. Whether it be jargon, dress, platitudes, or generally making our work look like how weve always done it, its all a form of muting ourselves; rounding our corners. Sure, we may feel like we fit in if we equate fitting in with blending in, but often thats not truly what were afterwere after connection. And its very hard to connect if you dont first let others see who you are. For clarity, the problem has never been with professionalism in its truest sensedoing high-quality work, on time, with kindness and decency (which, for the record, has absolutely nothing to do with the fabric of your pants). The problem has always been in the performancethe tamping down of our humanity, creativity, and the confidence to say the company strategy needs an actual point of view, rather than rolling out Our strategy is to exceed our KPIs and outperform for our shareholders. Ill admit its hard to break free from these norms. I have done an in my head eyeroll many times in jargon-filled meetings (Im like 90% sure they were in my head) and then added more jargon myself. It felt easier to play along. But the more Ive given up the gamethe more Ive simply, kindly, clearly said what was in my head; the more Ive worn T-shirts to work; the more Ive shared openly about my life with colleagues and been genuinely interested in theirsthe happier Ive become. Have some people judged me for it? Thought I was too casual? Maybe. Oh well. I will gladly take their judgment in exchange for my comfort. If you, too, are feeling the urge to unbutton that top button (or maybe youre reading this in sweatpants and are ready to get others on board), here are five ways to experiment with being less professional at work: Run the alien test. Like a fish unaware of the water its swimming in, it can sometimes be hard to spot the performative professionalism around us. It can help to ask, If an alien from an advanced civilization were to observe this norm or behavior, would it make sense to them? Or would it seem silly? For example, aliens would see the merit in wearing comfortable clothes to keep us warm at work, but would not see the point in ties. Dangly nooses to appear smart? Very odd. Getting rid of the pomp and circumstance allows us to connect with others under our facades; it tells others that they can also be themselves; and it saves a lot of time, money, and discomfort! Has anyone ever liked paying for dry cleaning? Talk like a human. Instead of saying leverage say use. Instead of action item say to do. Even employee engagement is little more than human happiness in a suit. For one day, put a note next to your computer that says dejargonify and see if you can go the whole day without using terms that would end up on business jargon bingo such as circle back. And simultaneously, experiment with sharing your perspective with more clarity and confidence (e.g., What I see is . . .) When we stop worrying about sounding smart and impressing each other, we can focus on actually being smarton sharing profound ideas, simply stated, rather than mediocre ideas, elaborately cloaked. Humanize your space. Whether you work in an office, at home, or in another setting, experiment with changing the visual cues around you to make you feel more yourself. You might have fidget toys, an old-fashioned fountain pen, or maybe a cozy blanket on your chair. Photos and trinkets that remind you that you are more than an employee can help ground you throughout the day. These items will not only make you feel more grounded, but theyre conversation starters for others to get to know you as well. Dress for joy. For the same reason you wouldnt show up to a wedding in a tracksuit, its smart to be aware of your organizations norms around dress. And yet, it might be worth pushing a boundary or two. Try dressing first for joy, comfort, and function. What colors make you happy? What items make you feel best about your body? What clothes help you do your best work? Even if you work in a hyper-professional environment, you can always experiment with a fun sock. Because feeling good in our clothes takes us a bit closer to feeling good in our skin. And while theres a business case to be madehappy employees are up to 20% more productiveto me, the more compelling case is that when were happy . . . were happy. And thats plenty a goal unto itself. Model humanity. So often we feel the need to show up professionally because thats what we see others do. If we want to shift the culture, then the best place to start is by shifting what we model for others. If it feels safe, experiment with showing up to a meeting with wet hair. Maybe you exercised, showered, and jumped on the call because you didnt want to sacrifice your health for the sake of professionalism. Or perhaps you eat during a meeting if youre hungry. Share a little about whats happening in your life outside work. In doing so, youll cultivate a workplace where people dont feel the need to hide their humanity, their needs, and alongside those things, the best of themselves. Show yourself and others that we can be humans at work. Because we are.
Category:
E-Commerce
There are many, many maps of New York City. There are the decor maps, sold on Amazon, and the tourist maps, which mostly focus, erroneously, only on Manhattan. Theres the iconic subway map, as well as the MTAs new version. Theres the Eater and Grubhub maps, which tell us where to eat. And then theres the map that really matters: the official legal map for the city, which quite literally rules the streets of the city, complete with boundaries and widths. Its also the map that doesnt currently exist, at least in one singular and easy-to-use form. Thats changing, though. On Tuesday night, New Yorkers appeared poised to approve Proposal 5, a measure that will push the city to create a unified official map representing its five boroughs for the first time. The effort should help officials finally catch up with unification efforts, which began more than a century ago in 1898, when areas throughout modern-day Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island, Manhattan, and the Bronx were combined to form one city government. While the city has streamlined most operations, New Yorks maps were never synthesized into one document, scattering authority over these official charts across the city and resulting in thousands of paper topographical documents. Today, the diffuse nature of these official maps slows down housing construction, adding another hurdle to solving the citys extreme housing crisis, advocates argue. The passage of the proposition means that these paper maps will finally be distilled into a single visualization and eventually digitized. The goal is to speed up any city process that typically requires verification with an official city map or updating a city map to mark a change to street geography.The creation of a unified city map should also help officials more accurately represent the citys waterfront, particularly as climate change alters the coastline. Plus, it should help eradicate the problem of paper streets– streets that are still recorded on official paper maps, but no longer exist in real life. Fast Company chatted with Casey Berkovitz, who is on staff at the Charter Revision Commission, which was charged with considering New Yorks official city charter and putting forth ballot initiatives, including the now-passed map proposal. Earlier this year, the group found that changes to the current map were, in their words, overdue. This interview was edited for clarity and length. Rebecca Heilweil: Can you explain what people voted for? Casey Berkovitz: Today in New York City, we have a very archaic system in which the official city map is spread out across five separate borough offices. On paper we think it’s about 8,000 paper maps across the five boroughs. This is really an artifact of a time before, not just digitization, but also borough consolidation. The five boroughs became one city in 1898, but the borough presidents maintained jurisdiction over things like street maintenance through the middle of the 20th century. The city just never updated to consolidate its official city map into one unified map. Certainly as digitization and the internet have become more widespread in recent decades, the city never moved to modernize, either. This measure would do both. Rebecca Heilweil: Growing up here, I was familiar with all sorts of New York City maps. There’s the lot numbers maps, there areConEdison maps, and there’s school zone maps. Will all of those kinds of functions that the city provides, and which are mapped spatially, end up on this map? Will it show everything related to municipal activity? Casey Berkovitz: When we talk about the official city map, we refer to a pretty specific function, which is the map of things like street borders, street widths, property lines, in some cases, waterfront borders, which hasve to do with construction and infrastructure. There are other maps like you mentioned. There are school district maps and city council districts and community districts all on down the line that are obviously important and frequently interact with the official city map, but that are their own distinct maps and that wouldn’t be affected by this proposal. Rebecca Heilweil: Can you talk a little bit about the digital aspect of it? What is that going to look like when people hear digital map? They might think Google Maps. Casey Berkovitz: We actually already have the vast majority of what a digital city map would look like online, but doesn’t have any binding authority because it is not the official city map laid out in the city charter [Editors note: This unofficial map is available here]. In terms of what it would mean for New Yorkers today, if you want to build housing infrastructure, or any number of things, many of those functions require either confirming on the city map or updating the city map. These are things like property lines or the width of a street or the grade of a street that have impacts on what you can build. Those functions can take months or years because they require going to each individual borough map office, finding the right paper map, confirming what it looks like, and changing what it looks like. That’s a long process. There are frequently long queues at those borough offices to do those sorts of things. That adds, again, months or years to the process of building important infrastructure and housing. Not all of those functions would become instantaneous with the digital map, but they would be significantly faster than the process today of finding the individual paper fragment of a map and updating or confirming the information thats on it. Rebecca Heilweil: How long is switching to a unified map system going to take? Casey Berkovitz: Taking that many paper maps […] unifying it, confirming the information, will take time as well from five borough offices to one central office. Granting it the official status as a city map will require essentially a zoning action to grant it that official status. Thats another benchmark in the timeline moving forward over the next couple of years. Rebecca Heilweil: What are some of the design considerations or, I don’t want to say aesthetics, but things that in terms of what this map should actually look like that you’re thinking about? There are so many different types of maps and so many different ways of representing things. Casey Berkovitz: The important thing here is that street and property lines are clear, that street widths are clear, and that changes over time are visible. In the preview map today, we have overlays of where there have been changes to the city map over time so that New Yorkers who are interested can see where streets have been remapped or de-mapped over time. Rebecca Heilweil: Can you talk a little bit about what you anticipate the biggest challenge being, moving forward? Casey Berkovitz: It is a lot of paper maps to unify and to make sense of. They are amazing historic documents and certainly, well want to take good care of them and preserve them, even if they’re no longer the official binding government document. Balancing care for the physical maps with effciency of unifying them and digitizing them is going to be relatively important. It’s going to take a dedicated effort from city staff. Rebecca Heilweil: What should I have asked you that I didn’t about New Yorks upcoming digital map? Casey Berkovitz: This is pretty in the weeds, but it may be interesting to people who are interested in maps is that New York City actually has a number of what are called paper streets that are streets that exist on the city map today, but are not real streets in real life. A number of the construction or zoning actions that would be sped up by the unified and digitized map related to, if you either want to get rid of a paper street in order to do construction there or if you want to otherwise change the street kid. The other thing that is maybe a little more broadly applicable is how the map modernization intersects with the climate crisis. New York City has 520 miles of waterfront, along the bay and then along the rivers. Particularly as the climate has changed, waterfront borders have changed […] This proposal might make a big difference either in development or resiliency efforts, where the paper maps when they were created genuinely do not reflect where the actual waterfront border is today.
Category:
E-Commerce
Voters are filling in their ballots today to choose who will lead America’s largest city for the next four years. New York being a center of global finance and business means that its local elections will always attract some degree of attention outside of the five boroughs, but the city’s mayoral race this year has garnered far more national interest than usual. That’s in large part thanks to Zohran Mamdani, the assemblymember from Queens who was virtually unknown outside of New York before he launched his campaign a year ago. Mamdani went viral early in the race with entertaining person-on-the-street videos in the wake of Donald Trump’s second presidential election victory. With support from an energized base of younger voters, he rode that wave to a primary election victory against former Governor Andrew Cuomo in June. Since then, the national headlines about Mamdani and the broader race for mayor haven’t stopped, which is to say that no shortage of eyeballs will be focused on New York’s election results as they begin to pour in on November 4. Most polls have shown Democrat Mamdani with a comfortable lead over his two main opponents: Cuomo, who is running as an independent, and Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa, the Republican on the ballot. If Mamdani coasts to victory as expected, he would be the first Muslim mayor of New York and, at 34, the youngest person to lead the city in more than 100 years. How can I track the New York City mayoral election results? News outlets with real-time decision desks offer the fastest way to see how the election is unfolding. We’ve rounded up some resources below: NPR (via Associated Press) New York Times CNN Decision Desk HQ Election polls close at 9 p.m. ET. This story is developing…
Category:
E-Commerce
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