There’s been a bit of discussion in the past few months about words like “profession”, “professional” and, my favourite (given my job title),“professionalism”, with a number of solid attempts to nail these slippery terms down. Just to fatten this new dictionary we seem to be writing, I want to introduce a couple more to you.
Let’s start with “professionalise”. If someone is a professional, it generally means they have been through some form of “professionalisation” process, usually education-oriented, followed up with some form of professional trial, allowing them entry into membership of a professional organisation. And straight away I’m sure you can see the problem here – obviously the whole approach of becoming a professional depends on the existence of: (1) an accepted education process and then, (2) a professional organisation supported in its role of allowing admission as a professional.
Unfortunately professions can’t spontaneously come into existence. They too have their own professionalisation process to go through; and whilst it’s true that they can take a number of different forms, they all have to go through the basic trials by fire. One of those trials (and another word for our emerging professional dictionary) is “legitimisation”. Most of the academic literature suggests this is something that can really only be gifted by the public, after years of demonstrating socially valuable service.
When I began my investigation into this in the early days of my PhD research, I was working under the assumption that this was, academically, the biggest “barrier to the legitimisation of financial planning as a profession”. After all, everyone keeps telling us we have high community distrust and low confidence to overcome. I know it annoys financial planners to hear this (because, as my research showed, their clients do genuinely love them) but unfortunately the research also shows that the public perception is true – although with one modification. I don’t believe it’s actually distrust; I believe it’s more like a high level of scepticism.
Plenty of others are writing about how shallow media, unethical advertising and opportunistic politics feed this storm of distrust – and no doubt there is some truth there. But unfortunately politics and media cannot be the whole answer. Magnification can only be successful if there was an existing scepticism to build on in the first place.
The pages of our media are full of writing and measurements on the issue of trust – some even in an informed way – so I’ll leave that one for today and focus on a problem that I think is far worse than community distrust.
The heart stopper from my research, the results that sent me back to the lab to run the tests again (well, euphemistically, anyway), was the startling, clear proof that not only is the wider public sceptical about financial planner professionalism, but the vast majority of the financial planner community is too. It turns out that the professional community of financial planners is just as sceptical as the public when it comes to views about their colleagues’ self interest, conflict and professional competence.
Now that I’ve pinned it under the research microscope, I can of course see this everywhere in the real world. For instance, it’s there in the endless reams of aggressive blog commentary on trade press websites. Many of those blog tirades are live examples of that distrust, pitting colleague against colleague, adding little constructive depth to the desperately needed professional debate and ultimately only diminishing the community of financial planning. Something to ponder when you read that stuff – Treasury and ASIC get the same media emails you do.
Maybe we have all swallowed the public messages, or maybe we harbour our own doubts based on direct experience, but I suspect it’s more complex than each of those individual things. Whatever the cause, our unflagging scepticism about the profession beyond ourselves is holding us back as a professional community. There are still some large steps to take in the professionalisation journey, including directly tackling the issue of professional competence; but our own distrust is a demon we have to face if we hope to hold ourselves out as profession.
Not just because the consumer community deserves more optimism, but because the professional community of financial planning does. Otherwise, how can we be so indignant when the community arrives at the same conclusion that we do?
Deen Sanders is deputy chief executive officer and head of professionalism for the Financial Planning Association of Australia.
