Why I Got Better at My Job by Being Less Professional

I became noticeably better at my job when I stopped trying to be professional.

That sounds illogical, but hear me out.

By "professional," I mean talking like I was giving an MBA lecture at Wharton during a 30-minute meeting about adding a button to a web application. Corporate gobbledygook is basically its own language. Speaking it to another person is like nodding at someone on the street wearing a shirt for a band you like. It's a signal. "I see you. We're similar. We're peers." And that's fine for identifying your industry or tribe, but it's also just an abstraction layered on top of basic communication.

So far in my career, I've never worked on a team where I was just pushing code and closing tickets. Those roles exist, mostly at big tech companies, but in my industry engineering looks different.

Most of the time, I'm working with people who are extremely talented in non-software roles. Chemical engineers. Biologists. Chemists. Pharmacists. Sales, Marketers, and Operations folks. The setup is usually pretty simple.

They have a problem that software could fix. Go fix it.

It's like consulting, except you actually do something instead of making a PowerPoint about doing something. The tech industry has a newer term for this, Forward Deployed Engineer, which is basically what I've been doing internally for years.

In these situations, I'm almost never talking to someone who knows how to develop and ship software. And that's not a drawback. It's actually preferred. It's also what pushed me to start Shadow Solutions. I kept solving new problems for new parts of the business and eventually realized I wanted to apply that same kind of problem-solving outside my day job.

Things changed pretty quickly once I stopped filtering everything I said through a "professional" lens.

Meetings got shorter. Back-and-forths happened less. Requirements became easier to understand. The distance between having a good idea and that idea being genuinely useful shrank a lot. When you say what you actually mean, instead of the polished version of what you mean, friction disappears in places you didn't even realize were slowing things down.

You don't even have to take my word for it. My most recent managers have consistently described my strength as an ability to "cut through the noise." I like to think I became one of the go-to people for understanding a problem and proposing a solution largely because I talked to them like a person. I stopped treating people, even senior directors, as unknowable or enigmatic entities and started treating them as what they are: people who also want to get their job done.

At the risk of sounding arrogant, and to anyone who already thinks my ego is too large, just you wait, I'm now something of an "executive" in massive air quotes through Shadow Solutions and Verity. And honestly, I enjoy talking to the people who drop professionalism more than those who feel the need to keep it up. Sales calls are easier. Discovery conversations are clearer. Even when a random account executive from a startup SaaS company reaches out to me, the moment they drop the professional tone and just speak like a person, the conversation immediately improves.

None of this is about being casual or careless. It's about being precise. Professional language often hides uncertainty, overcomplicates simple ideas, and signals competence instead of creating it. If you have the substance, strip away the fluff and people will respect you for it.

And it turns out, that's often all people wanted in the first place.