American Professionalism

A Syllabus

Dear Friends,

I recently found myself in the position of having to explain what ‘soft skills’ are and really wished that there were a school course that could cover it. Here’s a go at a syllabus for everything you’d really need in American professional life.

Best,

Sam

AMERICAN PROFESSIONALISM

Week 1:

Body language and expressions. In this week you will learn deportment in professional settings, starting with pep, a starry-eyed look of enthusiasm, and the all-important shit-eating smile. In the second half of the class, you will learn more subtle iterations of body language, like which moments to reserve the shit-eating smile for, how to chuckle at something a colleague has said even if you haven’t heard it, how to knowingly raise your eyebrows when a colleague complains to you about work conditions without agreeing with them so much that they turn on you and report your comment to senior management later on, and, then, how to nod sturdily and purposefully when asked to start on Monday as opposed to looking too chagrined about having to shorten the full three-day weekend of Halo or looking like that might be just the thing that saves you from actual starvation.

Week 2:

Empty platitudes. There is probably no more essential week in your studies than this one. Here we learn to master such phrases as “I’m agnostic on that,” “let’s table that for now,” “let’s loop in __,” “let’s delegate that to __,” “I’ll put that on my list,” “let’s notify corporate,” and fifteen or twenty other ways of postponing a decision and saddling someone else with the responsibility. Flash cards will be provided to better facilitate your memorization of these phrases.

Week 3:

Small talk. For this week of vital training in professional communications, you will memorize fifteen or twenty travel stories, again using our flashcard method, any one of which you may use to open a meeting as well as employing our facial recognition memory palace system to ensure that you haven’t told that exact same story to that exact same group before. You are to glance as well at five to ten books that you are likely to see in the background of a colleague’s Zoom and to have a pithy comment prepared the next time you see Atomic Habits or Outliers: The Story of Success. In the final moments of the class, you are to memorize a series of responses for the following life events: the birth of a child, a child’s milestone, a death in the family, a promotion. Standing face to face with a partner you are to practice drooping the corners of your mouth slightly, raising your eyebrows, and letting your eyes go moist to signify that you have a great deal more to express on the topic but are holding yourself in in a professional setting.

Week 4:

Careful obfuscation of your true self. Here we go deeper. Working in small groups, your classmates will pepper you with leading comments about love, loss, death, sorrow, great literature, your mental health issues, your various addictions, and you will practice resolving them into a workplace-appropriate studiously-neutral response. We will conclude the session with a master class lecture on how make any of the above topics sound like something you wrestled with in college — and still have the residue of hard-earned wisdom from — but have long since moved beyond.

Week 5:

Obfuscatory vocabulary. Don’t forget your flash cards! We have another vocabulary-heavy week on the subtle differences between a “touch base,” a “check in,” a “status update,” a “quick word,” a “confab,” a “let me borrow __ for five,” to determine what is corporate blather and what is a sign that you are imminently about to be fired if you can’t sabotage your rivals first.

Week 6:

Taking credit and assigning blame. This week combines flash card memorization with facial mirroring exercises in front of a fellow student. You are to practice such phrases as “I love the guy but…” and “I can’t promise but I’m optimistic…,” to always give yourself the chance to show you have overdelivered and to give yourself room to immediately reverse course in case the higher-up disagrees with you. You are to practice a modest look of good fortune when passing off somebody’s else work as your own and a funereal sigh to indicate that you really have exhausted every other option before going on to run down your colleague.

Week 7:

Sucking up punching down. Once you have learned to undermine equals you are ready to begin your ascent up the greasy pole. In this week we work in pairs, with fellow students holding cards up to their forehead depending on where they are in the hierarchy and you should be able to adjust your tone, deportment, posture, and volume of laughter at a second’s notice depending on what they hold up. Your partner should be immediately be able to guess what status they are from whether you laugh at one of their jokes easily and lightly like you’re standing over the ninth hole and work is just a constant pleasure or whether you laugh gruffly and shortly like their joke might be mildly amusing but it really is time for them to get back to their desk.

Week 8:

Handling equal level colleagues. Once you have got the hang of the greasy pole you may learn to handle equals in a strategic way so that they do not even realize how deftly they are being outmaneuvered. In the first part of this week’s section, you will learn Bitching and Moaning — how to complain about higher-ups so that no one thinks of you as a teacher’s pet but how to scan hallway corners, bathroom stalls, and the pillar of the company watering hole in case the higher-up is there; but, more crucially, how to only humor your colleague as opposed to actually agreeing with them should the higher-up happen to overhear or be accidentally added to the Bitching and Moaning WhatsApp group. You will learn also telltale signs for knowing who the office scapegoat is, and whether it’s you, and then the rest of the session will be dedicated to various tricks of sipping slowly or remembering to have lots of water with your drinks so that you can keep up with collegial heavy drinking without slipping into alcoholism alongside your junior colleagues.

Week 9:

Dress, deportment, and hygiene. This course material is often overlooked. Our class will travel together to vintage shops in Williamsburg and Brooklyn Heights and you will survey a number of office-appropriate Converses, skinny jeans, and lumberjack shirts to ensure that you look laidback, hip, like you just rolled out of bed but somehow in a perfectly presentable way, and also that you have no actual personality of your own. You will learn also how to stretch out the slender amount of work you have for a full day and so that the crisis that serendipitously hits at 5 can be heroically resolved by your staying to 7, as well as to how to shake your head with a harried look as you go to lunch like there’s a chance that you might be on your way to an errand or off-site meeting.

Week 10:

Office Party Tactics. This easily-neglected but vital piece of your education covers how to convince the office manager that your birthday has already happened earlier that year, as well as having a friend call you and giving you the opportunity to frown into your phone when it’s time for the whole office to gather for anybody else’s birthday party. The class will also teach you a karaoke song that demands crowd participation and that everyone else will sing in your stead, as well as how to eat an entire slice of office party cake.

Week 11:

How to undermine a boss. In this delicate week you will learn where the actual levers of power are likely to be and who to approach to facilitate a coup. Words like “inattentive” or “stretched thin” or “toxicity” are to be employed with pregnant pauses to enhance their suggestiveness.

Week 12:

The C-Suite. Unwind from the challenging partner exercises of the week before with the fruits of your victory: a higher level of small talk. Using flash cards, you will now memorize a different set of travel stories centering on comparisons of airport lounges and hilarious frequent flyer miles mix-ups.

Week 13:

Baseball vocabulary. We conclude our course with a flash card-heavy week in which you will actually learn what it means to “send in the closer,” or “take a rain check,” or to throw the competition “a real curveball.” If you are used to saying that something is “out of left field,” can you actually find left field on a baseball diamond?

Week 14: (Optional)

Learn a skill.