Professional = takes ownership and gets things done. No hand-waving, accountable, etc. I would suggest punctuality is a strong indicator, but I was wondering if HN can come up with better ones.
2. The quiet soft-spoken voice of reason (and incentive).
3. The weight of wisdom.
4. A higher sense of purpose other than being liked.
5. A way of saying much with few words (the "genius of compression").
6. The ability to discern between "the idea" and "the packaging".
7. A great fear of ever saying in private what they would never say in public.
8. An aversion to announcing things in advance.
Rather than being "on time", a professional seeks to be "before time". Rather than trying to "get to the point", the professional "starts with the point". A professional is more concerned with examining and testing and adjusting motives, than learning methods.
Above all, a professional gives value to "voice". The idea that playing a violin well will eventually result in greater resonance, that every note contributes to the tone of the instrument. The professional chooses to produce true notes as much as possible, knowing that false notes played in practice will eventually come to light in the character of the instrument. A professional understands why orchestra conductors insist on punctuality, the first and second and third order effects thereof. How "bottomless wonders spring from simple rules... repeated without end." - Benoit Mandelbrot.
Ask a professional why they chose to take a particular course of action, and they will be able to tell you "why". Professionals are rational, and their rationality is proactively forthcoming. Professionals phrase things in the positive.
Most of these characteristics seem to come down to "words" and "voice" and "reasons".
Careful, you just described me, and my bosses characterized me as 'abrupt' for years, and they valued 'people skills' more than my ability to keep their software and servers running. (Yes, both.) We survived it, but I'm not sure they would have if they'd gotten their 'people skills' person instead of me.
That's not to say I haven't improved in that department over the years, but I still start conversations with the meat instead of 'How was your vacation?' (Yeah, I got scolded for that once.) It's not even that I didn't care about their vacation, it's that I had very important work matters to deal with (I was at work!) and they come first.
I've had similar problems before, where a focus on fixing things was derided because it wasn't "Friendly". I've actually noticed a correlation between how much people value superficial interactions, and how valuable that person is compared to others in their field.
That is, if a manager is more concerned with "Hi, how are you"'s then "The server is literally on fire, I need to get into the server room to put it out", they are much more likely to be incompetant then the average manager, and know it, which is why they're trying to buff their 'soft' skills.
This only applies to superficial reactions, not stuff like "When you attack people as your opening sentence, it makes them defensive" style stuff. If it actually matters, it's not what I'm talking about.
Doesn't gossip, unless it's harmless teasing. Does not do anything to spite another colleague, only interested in getting things done. Doesn't let his ego get in the way. If his proposal is passed for another team members, he still pitches in as much as ever. Likewise, he doesn't walk all over people who gave losing ideas, and listens to them as much as he would have. Moves discussions along to make decisions, understands that conversations are not productive unless something new is decided upon. He should move like a shark, but not in an evil way: keep swimming, or sink.
That seems to be more of a complete description of being professional than an indicator - I presume the OP is looking for things that indicate a person will do these things before they actually do them.
If a collaborator seems to strongly weight punctuality, especially to the point of making little remarks about stochastically late arrivals, that makes me not inclined to work with them because it signals a lack of perspective about what's really important (like good ideas and good results).
You get a job, you check the bus schedule...there's a bus that drops you off right outside of work at 8:50.
That's pretty reasonable imho.
However, fairly regularly the bus is going to be 5 minutes late...this may cause you to be exactly on time..maybe a minute late.
Also fairly regularly the bus will be 20 minutes late...causing you to be about 10 minutes late.
Rarely it will be even more late, but not very often...probably about as often as a commuter gets stuck due to an accident or something.
Is it really a big deal to be 10 minutes late sometimes for an unavoidable reason?
I could see if you had to relieve someone, but again..let's get real. Most HN readers probably don't HAVE to be at their work exactly on time.
Buses generally run about once every 1.25 hours...even upt to every 2 hours.
Is it really fair to ask someone to be at work 1.5+ hours early every day just so they are not occasionally 10 minutes late?
The problem is with PT, you have basically 0 control over things. If you are driving a car, you can listen to traffic reports, avoid congestion, drive faster, take shortcuts. With PT you are completely stuck.
This is not a contrived example, this is based on what I have seen with Public Transportation and people using it to get to work. Unless you live downtown or in a city with excellent PT, you can find yourself in this dilemma.
It's easy to write it off as avoidable, but it seems silly in my book to advocate going through a huge hassle just to avoid being a few minutes late.
Obviously if it is critical that you are there at a certain time, that's a different story. If I'm a surgeon who needs to be on call 24/7...taking the bus is not going to cut it.
I'm also not saying we should give carte blanc to people to show up whenever they want...
However it's something that really depends on a lot of things.
There are a lot of things that can cause a person to be late, are most of them preventable and avoidable? Yes, but the effort may not be proportional to the benefit,
I honestly think these days showing up exactly on time is disproportionately valued.
It's definitely a factor, but it's one of many and if someone is a little late but good elsewhere I don't think it's a big deal.
Then I suspect that you would not fit into the "professional" category as defined by the OP. (That's not to suggest that the OP's definition of the word is the only appropriate one).
This reminds me of an idea I had for a product: place value on your and your colleagues time by creating a market for it. The market runs in the calendaring application - you are allocated a certain amount of everyone's time to take for meetings. If you want or need more than your allocation, you have to trade for it. That way you are forced to invite only the people you really need, it quickly becomes obvious whose time is most important, the overall amount of time spent in meetings is limited, and people become cognizant of the "value" of others' time. It could be built as an outlook plugin, even.
no link handy, but a similar thing was tried with email before. You had to offer points for someone to read your mail, and readers would natutally read the highest-paying emails first. The results sounded cool, similar to what you were predicting-- everyone got more conservative with others' email-redaing time. With the email version, you "traded points" by reading (or replying? I forget) your mail.
How a person prepares for erratic transportation schedules is an indicator for professionalism.
This as someone who as walked 2 miles in drizzling day-after-Thanksgiving rain to a job interview 25 miles south of Boston by train (they hired me, job did not last, couldn't pay me enough).
I don't think much of this thread is relevant. If somebody gives me a time to be somewhere, and it leads me to complex avenues of moral debate over the impact on my professional career and the opportunities in life for my children, for less than a kilosecond, then no.
Are they on time for work? Good. Are they late? Did they prevent or ameliorate that having an impact?
Will they execute what they say they will, when they say they will? We may have to wait on that.
I don't mind my employees being 10 minutes late one day and 10 minutes early the other. I understand that, with variances, you need to shoot for the mean.
I was late to an interview once. I could have blamed public transport, but in reality is was poor preparation and planning that caused the issue (forgot to take a map and tried to work on memory). I'm not talking 5 minutes late, I'm talking over 30 minutes late. It's the only time I've ever been late for an interview in my life.
They still gave me the job. I was uneasy about this at the time, but accepted. It was a bad choice, and I was a bad fit. The fact that they brushed off this bad mistake without mentioning it should have been an indicator to me that any amount of sloppy mistakes would be tolerated by their staff. And thus it was proved so.
One-off lateness can be the result of public transportation. Consistent lateness isn't.
Now, when is punctuality important? I don't care about 9 vs. 9:30 when getting into the office. I do care care about perpetually running 5 minutes late to a 15 minute team status meeting. There's an unspoken agreement at play; Meetings are short when people show up on time, ready to listen or speak.
No matter how professional someone appears there's always a chance they're a complete flake in reality.
The best you can do is determine quickly that someone is not a professional, and the basis for that is going to have to be a variety of factors.
There's no one thing that will serve as an accurate litmus test all around.
Punctuality is a good start, but I wouldn't put too much stock in it. Personally, I think it's way over-rated.
For something like an interview, punctuality is important as a sign of respect and for practical reasons...
If you interview someone, you should consider punctuality but also bear in mind that crap happens. I once had an interview and I got stuck in the subway, where there are no phone signals.
Who's to say if you are writing off a brilliant worker due to bad luck.
In terms of normal punctuality for work, I think it's vastly over-rated.
Places generally expect you to be slightly early for work, so I don't see anything wrong with the assumption that you will sometimes be a little late. As long as everyone gets to work around the same time, everyone does their work,everyone works their hours, and people are on time for the truly important stuff....I don't see the problem with even regular "lateness".
Anyway. I digress...
If anything I think how they are dressed is a better indication than punctuality, but that also has problems.
You have to look at a lot of things...I would worry less about whether they are a fit for some hypothetical objective mold of "professional" and worry more about how they fit with what you think is important, and how they fit with your culture.
All that matters to me is competence, work ethic, and how they fit in with the group....I'll take that over some nebulous concept of "professionalism" any day.
I like asking people when the last time they've done irreparable harm to data was. (deleting a database table, formatting something they shouldn't have, etc...) Those who say never are liars. Those who have agony in their faces as they answer but can't tell me what they've done to prevent the situation from occurring in the future or those who don't care are pretty unprofessional. Those who regale us with heroic stories of accepting the blame for their mistakes, fixing it in the best way possible and putting safeguards in place to minimize the possibility of it occurring again are pros in my book.
I've accidentally truncated a database table in a dev environment, bringing all sorts of testing and development to a halt and making my manger's life miserable for a few days. (Due to some really bad menu design in an admin tool. Instead of a right-click for "Renaming" a column, there should have been an indication that a table truncate would be happening in there somewhere.)
I would never have agony in my face about it, perhaps because the event wasn't "irreparable." The database was just reloaded from production. My first answer to your question would be "never" because the event really wasn't consequential. In fact, I'd question just how "professionally" run an organization is if a data deletion event is of dire consequence. Anything important should be backed up and easily restorable.
Some decades back, someone did a study of companies that had some disaster happen. (Fire, flood, etc...) Of the ones that lost their data, only something like 3% of them survived the next year. Digital data is the most easily backed up corporate asset and probably the most important.
(To keep it from happening again, I'd use a different tool entirely, if given a choice. In that case, I wasn't!)
A very professional answer! You'd be surprised at the number of organizations and individuals that don't have some sort of backup solution in place, so the question will also filter out those. Even if you have backups or the data isn't 'irreparably' lost I'd imagine you agonized a bit from causing your coworkers a few days of pain, or if you need to restore from backups, perhaps a few hours of downtime? I guess I should change my question from using the word irreparably.
I think "Accepting blame for their mistakes and tries to learn from them" is the connsumate core of professionality. I've also further noticed that it really is a poor craftsman who always blames their tools.
By your definition of professional I don't understand why you want punctuality. Three months into the last job I had, I told the company: "I'm more productive when I'm more productive. I'm not going to abuse off course, but I'm not getting here at 8am sharp every day." They said I could come at any time I wanted, or telecommute if I wanted, as long as I got things done. One time I spent 4 days in the office only surfacing from my desk for food and smokes because someone screwed a deadline. I made 2 weeks wort of work on three days. I got a bonus, an all paid weekend retreat, and they payed me back the amount of redbull and coffee I had.
Why do you care if someone is in through the door of the office at 9am or at 12pm as long as their work doesn't suffer from it? In the case of meetings and the such I do understand the need to have everyone be punctual though, and that should be stated before hand. If you have a meeting, be there on time, if nothing time sensitive is on the calendar, then let people do what they find more productive, within reason off course.
I'm not punctual at the start of work. If work starts at 9:30am, I'll usually be in by 10:10 or so. I couldn't care less if people come in at 11 am, just as along as they get their work done.
However, if one is late to a meeting (internal or client side... or even the job interview), then I think that is a red flag, specifically if there is no good reason to do so or if they don't give a heads up.
The definition relies on the mutual understanding of all parties. If you all agree that showing up in your underwear. hung over and smelling like a urinal is acceptable, then as long as you deliver, you have met your obligation.
Punctuality, on agreed conventions, is a sign of respect and a measure of professionalism.
Some would say, improperly editing a post or a comment is a sign of carelessness and therefore would indicate a tendency toward sloppiness in one's work. It all depends on the agreed upon conventions.
All else being equal, and it rarely is, if someone was late-as understood by societal norms- and someone else was on time, who would give you the warmer fuzzy?
In the case of meetings and the such I do understand the need to have everyone be punctual though, and that should be stated before hand. If you have a meeting, be there on time, if nothing time sensitive is on the calendar, then let people do what they find more productive, within reason off course.
The original poster is asking if punctuality is in general a measure of professionalism. I say generally no, but it can be in cases when punctuality is important. I said its a non issue on perhaps a greater percentage of the cases.
If I hire two developers and one has a knack on getting to the office an hour late every day while the other has a knack of being half an hour early; however the first is always on time with his work, while the second one is pushing deadlines all the time. My fuzzy feeling goes to the one that comes late every day.
In contrast if I hire a support line agent, and he's always late and because of it I have customers not being attended to I mark him as unprofessional and a liability.
If you ever played in an orchestra with a great conductor, you would understand why things like punctuality are important.
In fact, it doesn't matter what the discipline is whether it be punctuality or something else, but the fact that discipline is valued. You might see these things in and of themselves as pointless (and you'd be right), but you'd be ignoring the 2nd and 3rd order effects.
Why would you think I don't think punctuality is important? I just say that it isn't an intrinsic measure of professionalism, while performance generally is. If the orchestra case you need to be on time, as to not waste someone else's time. In that case punctuality directly correlates as a rule, while in other cases it doesn't. Again I'm not saying I disagree, I'm saying you're agreeing with me but probably missed the second part of my argument. If by not being punctual you're wasting someone's time, then you're being unprofessional.
I don't argue that punctuality is unimportant, but I think it's lauded as a virtue far more often then it deserves. It's only a virtue if being late has a negative impact beyond "The department looks empty and the boss' boss judges".
Being late to a scheduled meeting is unprofessional. Turning up at 9 instead of 8 because there's really no impact if you do so? Not unprofessional. Expecting someone to turn up at 8 because "I said so"? TOTALLY unprofessional, and a jerky thing to do.
The point is not that punctuality is a virtue, but that a professional is capable of adhering to certain agreed disciplines, regardless of how important, or virtuous they may or may not be. A professional does not make the mistake of judging these activities for their intrinsic value, but sees them as an opportunity to develop discipline, which is useful and valuable for more important activities.
For examples see: the military, professional orchestras, rowing eights, ivy league traditions, and even children keeping piggy banks.
While I agree that a professional is capable of adhering to certain agreed disciplines, I also think that discipline is a sparing resource and spending it on showing up at a set time for no other reason then being "professional" is a waste of that resource.
My biggest indicator has always been, "do they do what they say they'll do?"
If they want to meet for coffee and offer to buy you that coffee in exchange for your time, do they do this without you prompting them? If you end up buying your own coffee, and they simply forgot, do they acknowledge it?
If they say they will email/phone you by a certain time, do they do this? If not, and they eventually do get to you, do they acknowledge/apologize for not keeping their word?
For me, to quickly find out, it always come down to these little things. Sure, people forget to call/email/buy coffee all the time, that's acceptable. But, do they take accountability for that slip? Do they take responsibility for it without you prompting them?
If the little things are handled professionally, I've never had an experience (yet) where the big things aren't...
eh, I think that following references rarely results in an accurate picture, especially following up on references that the applicant gives you.
Have you ever given a bad reference? I've given lots of references, and I've checked lots of references. I've never given a negative reference, and I've never gotten a negative reference when I checked someone else.
This is for two reasons. 1. when the applicant lists references, s/he is going to list people who think positively of him or her, and 2. if some random guy calls up and asks for a reference for someone who used to work for you, you have a relationship with your ex-employee. You have no relationship with this new company. You have nothing to gain (and possibly significant liabilities) from handing out a negative reference.
If you do some research and cold-call their previous employers/clients, you'll usually find out if the relationship was a negative experience for them. If you get a couple of these, and they've come to that conclusion independently, then you have your answer.
that solves the first problem (the applicant only choosing to give you the contact info of people who are likely to give them positive marks) but it doesn't help with the second issue.
I don't see any case where it's in the best interest of anyone to say negative things about a past employee. And I don't think you can count all "company policy is that we simply confirm they worked here" messages as negative, because sometimes that really is company policy.
When asked for a reference, have you ever said anything negative about a past employee or co-worker? Have you ever heard anything negative about someone you were considering hiring after cold calling a previous employer?
I haven't, but I know quite a few people who have checked references and gotten a negative response - in one case derisive laughter followed by an incredulous "Really? They put me as a reference?". Obviously it depends on whether it's a big shop where you'll get HR stonewalled, or a smaller place where you'll have the owner or a coworker.
One of my personal metrics for low resolution professionalism judgement is spin off of the classic "wtf's/min" standard for judging code quality.
My own unit is "Yes's/min". I find that when I'm explaining something to an individual who responds with too many "Yes's/min", that individual is usually (of course not always) not appreciating the nuances of the topic being discussed. Having an alarmingly high amount of certainty around a new or just introduced topic, I find, usually implies a lack of professionalism.
Your heuristic will fail you when you are dealing with people who are smarter than you are. It is awfully hard to gauge what topics are actually new to someone during a discussion unless you ask them or they outright tell you.
Just to quibble a bit.. really, if you're looking to hire a professional contractor, you don't want fresh or creative. You want someone who can deliver to a spec on time and on budget.
A joke among architects is to call plumbers|electricians|framers "creative". You don't want purple cow plumbing, and that goes for a lot of professions. ;)
With all respect to people who do them, I think that those kinds of proffessions should be ultimately done by machines and technology. People are good at creativity and generating new ideas; machines are good at repetition and precision.
This is a valuable question, but the replies are going awry of what draws me to the question. What if all you have to go on is a 'reply-to' email and their first and last name?
Not a complete list, but fishing for suggestions:
Context--they sent you a business related email, and appear roughly 'professional' to you, but you want to make sure.
Their message/website/page/example project. You be the judge.
Do they reply to their contact form?
Is their contact information available and current?
LinkedIn, github, any other free, populous site membership--what is their public face?
Being part of the social web is not an indicator of professionalism. However, you may learn about someone's professionalism based on what they have online if they participate. Keep in mind many good professionals have life outside of their work and don't have the time or interest in open source projects or giving free advice on sites like stack overflow.
>Being part of the social web is not an indicator of professionalism.
Not at all?
I'm not saying you need to be tweeting what you had for lunch or anything but having some presence on the social web is probably a good indicator in a broad swathe of fields. For example if I'm after a graphic designer and they're on LinkedIn|Facebook|Twitter or somesuch then it's an indicator that they're clued in with modern advertising, likely to have their finger more on the pulse, likely to be happy corresponding via the 'net, etc..
Depends on what you mean by "punctuality" if you mean arriving at work at the same time every day then I would say you are dead wrong. If on the other hand you mean being respectful of others time and not being late for explicitly scheduled events or calling ahead if you will be, then that may be true.
I assume this is going to be done in an interview.
One thing you could try is to see how the person handles constructive criticism. Try to get them engaged in a discussion about what they did wrong and how they could do better in the future. Pick something you have actual knowledge of so you can better tell if they are BSing you.
This can be difficult to do in an interview because you often don't know anything about the person. However, even if you have them pick an example of a screw-up from their past, you should be able to get a general sense of whether or not they try to be accountable for their actions. A bad sign would be if they pick an example where they didn't actually screw up or explain their failure as completely out of their control.
For me, a designer is professional if he tells me "if you add one more thing in the menu, it won't work" or "remove that 'more' link after each paragraph" instead of "you should really use another tone of blue" or "I don't like the font you are using".
I have no idea about programming, but I guess a professional in that field would be arguing about the software architecture, instead of what to use - php or ruby.
So generally, professionals are people who help you achieve whatever goal you have, instead of arguing what tools to use.
Check out their track record. Observe them, listen to them. Do they give you a vibe of understated competence and confidence? Or do they relentlessly hype themselves and speak in vague buzzwords? Ask questions, dig deep. "Drill down" into their area of alleged expertise. Do they answer your questions easily and with insight? Or do they engage in an avoidance strategy? Keep poking like this, the answer will become obvious.
"Those who know don't talk and those who talk don't know"
Be careful of those who talks a lot trying to prove you that they are professionals. Professionals are generally in demand, they should be busy doing work, they don't try to higher their status because they are already rewarded. Those who sucks try to trap you with words.
Not an indicator for professionals but should be helpful to filter some.
first, I think "professional" is too broad a brush to evaluate at once, even using your definition of professional.
For instance, I'm very good about taking ownership and being accountable. I'm, uh, somewhat less good at actually getting things done on time. I mean, I won't make stupid excuses or try to shift blame, but I am quite often late on actually getting the damn thing done because of my own personal failings, so if you just measured a willingness to accept responsibly when accepting responsibility is unpleasant, you'd think higher of me than you ought.
"what is the most costly (to your employer) mistake of your career?" is a good interview question to probe the willingness to take responsibility. I know I've made some expensive mistakes, some of my worst were simply because I typed the wrong thing out of fatigue or inattention. (as I have grown older, I think one of the most important things I've learned is how to tell when I am likely to make a mistake, and when to log out.)
I'd argue that a person who claims not to have made expensive mistakes is likely the type to dodge responsibility. (this is eminently true in the ops world. I imagine it's true elsewhere, but I've got a lot less room to speak.)
You could also give them a hypothetical where, say, they could have prevented a mistake but it wasn't something they actively caused. Then ask them if it was their responsibility. "If you hired a guy who did something stupid that cost us a lot of money, is it your fault or his fault?" I'd never hire anyone for management who thought it was the hiree's fault.
showing up on time, in my experience has nothing to do with a willingness to take responsibility when something goes wrong.
As for "gets things done" eh, I'm not the right man to ask about that. When you figure out a better answer than "hire them as a contractor and see" let me know.
I don't know if I agree with the word professional. It does signal things like: wearing a suit, talking the talk, playing politics well, turning up on time, etc...
The only things that are important to me are that the person is honest, a hard-worker, intelligent, a clear communicator and has common sense.
If it's a superficial analysis (ie interview), then punctuality, dress and preparation on their part (investigation prior to the meeting) is valid. If they haven't inquired about the dress code, then they should assume it's formal. If you have a minute to do a slightly deeper analysis then Google is your friend: how do they present themselves on social networks, do they have a blog, have they commented in forums (do they troll) have they posted code (usually a goldmine). If the profession is technological and they have no web presence whatsoever, that's usually a red flag in itself.
anyone who does things with the wisdom of an 80-year-old sailor, the efficiency of a 45-year old BMW factory worker, and the enthusiasm of a 3-year-old with finger paint
Put him in uncomfortable situation and tell him to do something you expect he really loathes, something what just sometimes "needs to be done, no matter what". If he balks or talks too much, he's not a professional.
Example? Give photographer a video camera and say you have an vision of some cheesy shot (look at clientsfromhell.net for ideas) and see what get's delivered.
I'm not sure who is more of a professional, the web developer who gives the client their requested BLINK tags and Comic Sans, or the one who tries to dissuade the client and avoids work from similar clients.
Easy answer - one who tries to dissuade the client. A professional will not always do what is asked, but that doesn't mean they don't do what is right.
There are two senses of the word "professional" here. Some people are professional like doctors or engineers. They will not always do exactly what is asked of them, because there are real-world consequences. Sometimes they will educate the client instead. Some people are "professional" like prostitutes. They will pretty much do anything enthusiastically, so long as they are paid.
More value is created by the first sense of the word, IMO.
It depends. What I have learned is that every professional can and will give advice and derail bad developments. This is not a problem at all. The problem is that sometimes you absolutely need to do something and then you need somebody who understands you and just does. On most cases the world is grey, there is no wrong, no right. What I described in my previous posting is just a test, can he walk the walk.
BTW. I have to ask, is "BLINK tags and Comic Sans" wrong on every occasion, on every target group, on every situation, on every web page, absolutely no matter what? Because if you agree that there can be one in a billion situation where "BLINK tags and Comic Sans" are acceptable or even good thing to do, then ... you are not professional :-)
No, the world only _looks_ grey. In a given situation there really is a right thing to do, and wrong thing. The details matter immensely, however, causing white and black to be right next to each other, and intermixed thoroughly. This leaves it very hard to tell what is the right thing to do, leading to moral dithering and apparently grey morality.
(I'm not really being serious. But I'm also not really being entirely unserious.)
Huh. I wonder what about this provoked the downvotes (net 2 at this point). I'm actually curious, not just trying to whine about karma, and would like to hear about people's moral intuition that clash with mine.
It really is my experience that small details about a situation can turn my opinion of an action from totally justified to totally unjustified, or vice-versa. I wouldn't have expected it to be controversial that details can matter greatly, making judging many situations quite difficult either looking from the supposedly objective outside, or from the definitely subjective people on one side or another.
1. Discretion.
2. The quiet soft-spoken voice of reason (and incentive).
3. The weight of wisdom.
4. A higher sense of purpose other than being liked.
5. A way of saying much with few words (the "genius of compression").
6. The ability to discern between "the idea" and "the packaging".
7. A great fear of ever saying in private what they would never say in public.
8. An aversion to announcing things in advance.
Rather than being "on time", a professional seeks to be "before time". Rather than trying to "get to the point", the professional "starts with the point". A professional is more concerned with examining and testing and adjusting motives, than learning methods.
Above all, a professional gives value to "voice". The idea that playing a violin well will eventually result in greater resonance, that every note contributes to the tone of the instrument. The professional chooses to produce true notes as much as possible, knowing that false notes played in practice will eventually come to light in the character of the instrument. A professional understands why orchestra conductors insist on punctuality, the first and second and third order effects thereof. How "bottomless wonders spring from simple rules... repeated without end." - Benoit Mandelbrot.
Ask a professional why they chose to take a particular course of action, and they will be able to tell you "why". Professionals are rational, and their rationality is proactively forthcoming. Professionals phrase things in the positive.
Most of these characteristics seem to come down to "words" and "voice" and "reasons".