Everyone has their uniforms. It says who we are – allowing people to make instant judgements about us, as well as absorb the messages we are trying to express. I thought this while observing someone with Gordon Gekko-style slicked-back hair and a pin-striped suit in a coffee shop in the banking district of Frankfurt. I was early for a meeting and had time to kill. Meanwhile he was making contact with a colleague, a counterpart or a rival (or potentially all three), although was also finding his Blackberry an irresistible distraction.
My instant reaction was questioning. Why would anyone want to look so comically like a trading-floor hard nut (imagine Ray Winstone with too much Brylcreem)? After all, this was the image the BBC and other City-detractors love to portray, so why play up to it? I could just tell he was wearing red braces under his pin-stripes and he no doubt stood up while shouting down the phone – gesticulating wildly around the room to boot.
Yet in reality his haircut and dress-sense were simply short-cuts to the man. This was the image he consciously wanted to project, and he clearly saw it in his advantage to do so. It told the world that he was good at his job, that he understood his field, was integral to it in fact, that he was committed, that he was the real deal, and that – given the nature of his work – he was not to be messed with. Who knows, he may have assumed it attractive to the opposite sex (perhaps reasoning that the messages of success it gave were at least as attractive as the look itself).
Of course there are two other ways of looking at his dress sense. That he wasn’t part of this world and wanted to be. Or that he felt insecure within it and needed visual aids to mask this insecurity.
Both of these possibilities are likely to be harshly judged by outsiders, yet both have their merits. John Timperley , in Network Your Way to Success offers strong tips for developing great “rapport” with the industry insiders we want to impress (for jobs, promotions, deals, introductions). While some of them are obvious – like, smiling, agreeing, listening etc – some are less so, of which one is “dress to impress”. Here he implores us to adopt “group norms” with respect to how we look, which in the modern career world – for men at least – usually involves a dark suit, a sober shirt and tie and a hair-cut that says I’m ready for business rather than ready for the rock-concert at the weekend. So, who knows, our man may have been Head of Stationery but was keen to move on, his extreme look a heightened call for action in this respect. Indeed, many self-help gurus advise us to "fake it til we make it" - most notably Steve Chandler in 100 Ways to Motivate Yourself.
And such extreme adoption of group norms can go beyond the world of work. A vivid memory of my youth is the sight of two of my home town’s toughest kids turning up at a disco for mods (this was at the peak of the early-1980s mod revival) dressed in suits and long-green parkas. They’d cut their hair and even bought the scooters, such was the strength of their signal: “we want to join your gang”. And just to make sure the other mods knew they meant it, they terrorised the local “head-bangers” (mostly sixth-formers with a liking for Pink Floyd) for the next six months. Certainly, they knew that adopting group norms was the key to entry, and they executed their adoption with relish.
But what of the insecurity that may have also driven our banker to adopt his potentially-paradoxical uniform? Certainly, “imposter phenomenon” is a very real issue in the workplace. Originally discovered in women by two psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes it is now recognised that anyone that feels themselves to be an outsider (for whatever reason: class, age, education, region of origin, race or sexuality being the most obvious examples) can suffer from IP (they shy away from calling it a “syndrome”), despite having no less right to be there than anyone else. And while one reaction may be to hide – to become the wallpaper in the room – such a tactic is a quick route to failure on a trading floor. In such a tough environment, maybe a better solution is to adopt a mask – one that will not only hide our insecurities, but may well project the opposite. In this respect, what could be better than the most parodied version of “group norm” available?
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