When Professional Standards Become Personal Standards

One of the things that has stayed with me since reading Laura Empson's work is that she never really portrays professionals as passive recipients of organisational culture. In many discussions about the legal profession there is an implicit assumption that people are somehow victims of demanding organisations; that firms impose expectations and individuals simply comply with them. That isn't how Empson describes professional life at all. If anything, her picture is considerably more sophisticated because she recognises that professionals have agency. They are intelligent people making deliberate decisions in environments where autonomy is highly valued. The question is not whether they have choices. The question is how those choices are gradually influenced by the culture in which they are made.

I think that distinction matters because it changes where we look for explanations. If we assume that organisations simply impose pressure upon individuals, then the obvious solution is to reduce the pressure. Yet that doesn't fit particularly well with many of the conversations I've been having. Lawyers often tell me they could have gone home earlier, that nobody explicitly asked them to check emails over the weekend or that they chose to spend another hour refining a piece of advice. Those comments are often followed by an apology, almost as though they feel obliged to defend the culture they work within. My impression has rarely been that people are trying to defend their firms. Rather, they are trying to explain something that feels perfectly rational from the inside but looks rather different from the outside.

That has led me to think rather differently about the relationship between professional culture and individual behaviour. Perhaps the most powerful influence of any organisation is not that it changes what people do. Perhaps it changes what people come to regard as reasonable. Once that happens, behaviour no longer feels imposed because it has become aligned with personal judgement. The lawyer who stays another hour isn't necessarily responding to external pressure. They may genuinely believe that staying another hour is the right thing to do.

That idea seems particularly relevant to professions where judgement itself is one of the core attributes people are valued for. Lawyers are trained to weigh evidence carefully, anticipate consequences and make decisions that can withstand scrutiny. They are not accustomed to acting thoughtlessly. If they decide to continue working, there is usually a reason. The difficulty is that those reasons are themselves shaped by the professional environment. Over time, the standards that belong to the organisation gradually become the standards we apply to ourselves.

I have found myself thinking about this in relation to elite sport because there are interesting similarities. Athletes who reach the highest level almost always possess demanding internal standards. They notice details that others overlook and are rarely satisfied with simply being good enough. Initially those standards are enormously helpful because they encourage deliberate practice and continuous improvement. Problems usually arise not because the standards are high but because the athlete gradually loses the ability to distinguish between performance and identity. A poor performance begins to feel like evidence that they themselves have somehow become inadequate.

I'm not suggesting that lawyers experience exactly the same process, but I do think there is an interesting parallel. Throughout many of the LegalPsych interviews I have been struck by how often people describe feeling responsible, not simply for the quality of their work, but for outcomes that sit well beyond their control. They carry clients' anxieties, they replay conversations long after they have ended and they continue thinking about problems that cannot realistically be solved until the following day. From the outside this can look like an inability to switch off. From the inside it often feels like professionalism.

That difference in perspective seems important because it changes how we interpret behaviour. If somebody cannot switch off because they lack resilience, then the intervention looks one way. If they cannot switch off because their understanding of what it means to be a good lawyer has gradually become intertwined with constant vigilance, then the challenge is something altogether different.

This is where I think Empson's idea of the 'insecure overachiever' deserves a little more reflection. It has become one of the phrases most frequently associated with her work, yet I sometimes wonder whether people focus too much on the word insecure and not enough on the word overachiever. The professionals she describes are not underperforming because they doubt themselves. They are often achieving remarkable things precisely because they continue questioning themselves. Their uncertainty encourages preparation, attention to detail and intellectual humility. Those are qualities most clients would actively seek in a lawyer.

The issue, therefore, is not insecurity itself. The issue is what happens when the mechanisms that drive excellence are left entirely unchecked for twenty or thirty years.

This is one of the areas where I think performance psychology can add something to the discussion. In sport we often talk about self-regulation, by which we simply mean the capacity to monitor ourselves accurately and adjust our behaviour when circumstances change. It is one of the foundations of expertise because high performers are constantly evaluating what they are doing, deciding whether it is working and making subtle adjustments. Importantly, however, self-regulation depends upon feedback. If the information we receive becomes distorted or incomplete, our ability to regulate ourselves also begins to deteriorate.

That made me wonder whether something similar can happen within professional life. If the principal feedback someone receives is that they are valued because they are available, responsive and relentlessly committed, then those qualities naturally become reinforced. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. The difficulty arises if other forms of feedback become progressively quieter. Signals from family, friends, physical health or even our own emotional state can easily become secondary because they are less immediately relevant to the demands of the working day.

I don't think this happens because lawyers consciously decide that work matters more than everything else. Rather, I suspect they gradually become more fluent in one source of information than another. They become exceptionally skilled at noticing what clients need, what colleagues expect and what the next case demands. At the same time, they may become rather less skilled at noticing what they themselves need. That isn't because they lack insight or emotional intelligence. It may simply reflect years spent directing attention outward towards the demands of the profession.

This is one of the reasons I have become increasingly uncomfortable with the language of work-life balance. It suggests that the challenge lies in allocating time more evenly between two competing domains. The interviews we've been conducting suggest something rather different. Many lawyers are not struggling because they have forgotten the importance of recovery. They are struggling because the professional habits that make them exceptionally effective at work have gradually become the habits through which they organise the rest of their lives. Constant vigilance, anticipation of problems and a strong sense of personal responsibility are invaluable in practice. They are much less helpful when carried uninterrupted into evenings, weekends and holidays.

At this point, I found myself asking a question that Empson's work doesn't really set out to answer, although it naturally emerges from it. If professional cultures can gradually shape the standards by which individuals judge themselves, what happens to those standards over time? More specifically, what happens to the body, to attention and to self-awareness when someone spends years living according to expectations they no longer experience as external at all?

It was while looking for research that addressed those questions that I came across Alexandra Michel's remarkable longitudinal study of investment bankers. Reading it felt less like encountering a different argument and more like discovering the next chapter of the same story.

Reference

Empson, L. (2017). Leading Professionals: Power, Politics, and Prima Donnas. Oxford University Press.