14.1 Introduction

Professional communication must always cater to the audience. This is true, especially in face-to-face interactions where, unlike with written communication, you can assess audience reaction in real-time and adjust your message accordingly. This places the responsibility of behaving professionally in the workplace solely on you. When we speak of professional behaviour, we mean the following aspects that generally fall under the banner of soft skills:

• Civility
• Social Intelligence
• Emotional Intelligence
• Social Graces
• Business Etiquette

Each aspect will be considered in more detail, but first it is important to examine the personality traits of successful professionals. We must be careful with how we define success when we speak of personality, however. Those who lack the soft skills associated with the above aspects are difficult to work with and are usually demoted or fired. In rare instances, cruel, selfish, arrogant, narcissistic, or sociopathic people rise to positions of power through a combination of enablers tolerating or even rewarding their anti-social behaviour and their own lying, cheating, and bullying. This is an unfortunate reality that’s difficult to watch, but it’s important to avoid being enablers. It’s also important that business professionals do not allow those bad examples to become acceptable. They aren’t, and the proof is the suffering it spreads among people in their sphere of influence. For every horrible person who moves up the corporate ladder, there’ll be a trail of broken, bitter, and vengeful people in their wake. The loathing most people feel towards such people proves the importance of conducting ourselves otherwise.