The Word That Sorts Without Saying

A Note from the Authors

This essay grew from a conversation that started on LinkedIn and kept going. My doctoral research at USC Rossier examined how standards of professional ergo the word “professional” operates in workplaces. Jerry’s framework on meaning repair examines how teams lose and restore shared meaning under pressure. The data and the framework fit together. What follows is what happened when we sat down and worked the fit. This article is opened by Dr. Suriel and then carried on by Dr. Washington who ties the research to a supporting framework.

What “professional” costs Black and Brown employees, in their own words — and the framework that names what is actually happening.

Kim walked into her annual review the way most people do: prepared, slightly nervous, ready to discuss her work. The work was not what came up.

What came up was her hair.

Her braids, her manager told her, were “too distracting.” She should consider a more “professional” hairstyle.

Nothing in Kim’s performance was at issue. Nothing in her work product was discussed. The conversation was about a word that was never defined and a standard that was never named. By the end of the meeting, Kim understood that her continued participation in the organization required her to change something about herself that had nothing to do with her job.

One word did all of it.

The word was “professional.” It arrived in the room with the weight of an institutional standard, and it landed without ever explaining what it meant. The manager did not have to define it. Kim did not have to ask. Everyone in the room behaved as though the term had a clear, shared meaning, which let the meeting proceed administratively while doing something the institution would never put in writing.

Nobody asked the question that would have changed the meeting: what do you mean by professional?

That is the first move worth knowing. The whole essay turns on it.

What follows walks through a four-phase pattern that explains how words like “professional” sort people without ever sorting themselves out. The data come from Jovanny’s doctoral study at USC Rossier, where he interviewed Black and Brown professionals about the language used in their evaluations. Their words, paired with a framework Jerry has been developing on meaning repair, show what happens when one undefined word is allowed to carry the weight of an entire enforcement system.

Section 1 — Phase 1: Drift

What Kim’s review meeting reveals is a system working exactly as designed. The institution did almost no work to make what happened to her feel like discrimination. It did not need to. The undefined words did all of it.

In my research, participants described entering performance conversations already knowing the outcome, not because anything had been said directly, but because the language surrounding them had already done its sorting. Kim’s experience matched what I heard across the data. The term “unprofessional” arrived without definition, without example, and without appeal. It landed and stuck, and because it was never pinned to a specific behavior, there was nothing concrete to push back against. The accusation floated above the evidence: weightless and therefore immovable, yet enormously impactful.

What made this particularly striking was the administrative cleanliness of it. No slurs. No overt hostility. A word, deployed in a formal context, by someone with institutional authority, and that was enough. The institution remained neutral on paper while the outcome was anything but.

Jovanny describes what the system does. Let me name how it does it.

A word like “professional” is what I call a magnet word. It pulls people in different directions while looking like it points one way. Four people in a room can hear “professional” and all four can be holding a different definition. One is thinking about dress codes. Another is thinking about speech norms. A third is thinking about emotional regulation in meetings. A fourth is thinking about who is allowed to feel comfortable when they walk in. The same word does four different jobs in four different heads, and nobody has to declare which version they meant.

What makes the magnet dangerous is the silence around it. If anyone in Kim’s review meeting had stopped and asked what do you mean by professional? the conversation would have changed shape. The manager would have had to point to a behavior. The behavior would have had to connect to the work. The work would have had to justify the standard. The whole chain of administrative cleanliness Jovanny describes runs on nobody asking.

This is Phase 1 of the four-phase pattern. The phase is drift. Drift is silent. By the time someone notices, the consequence has already attached to a person, the way it did to Kim. The repair move at this phase is to pin the term to a behavior. Make “professional” mean something specific. Write it down. Make it observable, testable, and applied to everyone in the room the same way.

Institutional repair (Phase 1)

Jovanny’s research points to three institutional changes that operationalize this move:

1. Require behavioral anchors when “professional” or “unprofessional” enters any formal evaluation or documentation. The word cannot stand alone. It has to point to a specific action.

2. Create a review checkpoint before the term can be entered into a performance record. A second reviewer confirms that the cited behavior is observable, specific, and connected to job performance.

3. Train evaluators to distinguish style-based concerns from conduct-based concerns before documentation begins. Style is preference. Conduct is action. The two are not the same standard.

Section 2 — Phase 2: Suppression

Mark and Brad’s experiences surface something the data returned to repeatedly: the standard does not stay in one place. It moves. And it moves in ways that are difficult to name in the moment, which is precisely what makes it effective as a mechanism of control.

Mark entered his institution having already learned to read the room. He adjusted his communication style, his dress, his affect. By most measurable standards he was performing exactly what the environment signaled it wanted, yet the feedback shifted. What had been acceptable became a liability. What had been neutral became evidence. The standard had migrated from culture into evaluation, and eventually into the language that shaped his promotion trajectory, without ever being formally revised or announced.

Brad’s account added a structural dimension. The movement of the standard was not random. It followed a pattern several participants recognized only in retrospect: the closer they got to senior leadership, the narrower the definition of professional became, and the more closely that definition tracked with the cultural defaults of whoever held positional power.

This is Phase 2. The phase is suppression. It is the phase where someone in the room can see the drift but cannot afford to call it out.

What Mark and Brad describe is the cost ledger of asking the question. Imagine Mark in a one-on-one with his supervisor. The supervisor mentions that he needs to work on “fitting in.” Mark could ask what do you mean by fitting in? The supervisor would have to point to a behavior. The behavior would have to connect to the work. But Mark already knows: his next performance review is six months away, his promotion case is being built right now, and the supervisor he is asking is the one writing both. The question is technically free. The consequence is not.

Three forces compound to keep the question unasked. The first is hierarchical inhibition: the cost of pressing the person above you in the org chart. The second is interpersonal fear: the worry that asking will damage the relationship you need. The third is futility: the suspicion that asking will not change anything, so why pay the cost.

When all three forces operate together, silence becomes the rational choice. The drift compounds. Year after year. Role after role. And the word keeps doing its sorting, exactly the way Jovanny describes, because the people who could pin it have learned that asking is more expensive than complying.

Kelly may have named what neither Mark nor Brad fully articulated in the moment. There was no compliant version. She described adjusting repeatedly, each time believing she had found the thing the institution was actually asking for, only to find that the ask had moved again. The moving standard appeared to be part of the system. It created a condition where the burden of proof never resolved, where no amount of adjustment could produce a stable outcome, because stability did not appear to be the goal.

Kelly’s testimony names something the framework Jerry has been developing struggled to capture until he read her interview. The standard moves because moving is what the standard is for. A pinned definition would be testable. A movable definition becomes unfalsifiable. The accusation of unprofessional behavior, set against a definition that can be quietly revised after each adjustment, has no closed case. There is no version of Kelly that resolves the question, because resolution was never the function.

This is suppression at the cognitive layer. The worker becomes their own enforcement mechanism. The mask becomes the job. And the cost is the one Kelly named: the daily energy of editing herself for a standard that will not hold still long enough to be met.

The systemic repair at this phase removes the manager’s option to keep moving the goalpost. That requires legal and policy infrastructure beyond the manager’s discretion.

Systemic-scale repair (Phase 2)

Jovanny’s research points to three institutional changes:

4. Audit promotion and evaluation language across a three-to-five-year window for disproportionate use of style-based or conduct-based terms against employees of color.

5. Build a standardized definition of “professional” into institutional policy with explicit behavioral includes and excludes that match the Pin box at the end of this essay.

6. Create an anonymous reporting mechanism for employees to flag instances where professional standards appear to shift between review cycles.

Section 3 — Phases 3 and 4: Repair, Outcome, and the Biographical Pattern

Nate did not set out to be a repair mechanism. He was doing what he understood good leadership to require: noticing who was being left out of the development conversation and pulling them in. But what his mentorship represented in the context of the data was something the institution was not doing on its own. He was activating repair at the individual level because no systemic repair existed to activate.

Several participants who named mentorship as a form of resistance described relationships that functioned the way Nate’s did: quiet, deliberate acts of counterweight outside the formal sponsorship structure. Someone who had learned to read the system pulling the next person through. The knowledge transferred was not just professional; it was protective. In many cases, the difference between a career that compounded and one that quietly contracted.

Margaret’s arc makes the stakes of that distinction visible across time. What her account reveals is not a single instance of a moving standard but the accumulated weight of moving standards across a career. Each adjustment she made, each recalibration, each shift in how she spoke or carried herself that landed successfully and then had to be recalibrated again, did not disappear. It engraved a message. And what it engraved was not just exhaustion, though that was present. It was a biographical pattern: a career shaped less by her own choices than by the energy required to remain acceptable to institutions that never formally agreed on what acceptable meant.

Some careers compound silence. Each unaddressed grounding failure adds to the next. The standard moves, the employee adjusts, and the adjustment is absorbed as compliance rather than recognized as labor. Other careers compound voice. Somewhere, usually through a relationship like the one Nate offered, the pattern becomes nameable. And once it is named, it cannot be unnamed.

What Jovanny names in Margaret’s arc is the part of the framework Jerry has been working hardest on.

Nate’s mentorship is Phase 3 of the four-phase pattern. Repair activation. Someone in the room finally speaks the question that should have been asked years ago: what do you mean by professional? The fact that Nate is asking it informally, in a side conversation with a younger colleague, instead of formally, inside the institution that produced the drift, is the indictment.

When repair activation works, you reach Phase 4. The outcome. The threshold for the next repair drops because the first one did not destroy anyone. The room gets a little safer. The next person finds it easier to ask. That is the virtuous loop, and Margaret is its biography.

Here is the part of the framework that has been forming through conversations like the one with Jovanny that produced this essay. The four phases were originally built for a team in a room over a span of weeks or months. Margaret’s arc shows the same pattern playing out across an entire career. Decades of suppression accumulate into people who walk into new teams already silent because they are reading every room they have ever been in. And decades of small repairs accumulate the other direction. Each Nate someone meets makes them more capable of being Nate for someone else. The arc bends both ways. Some careers compound silence. Some compound voice. The conditions that decide which way it goes are the ones this essay has been describing.

Individual-scale repair (Phase 3)

The individual repair move at this phase is the one Nate is already making. Jovanny’s research points to three ways institutions can stop leaving that work to volunteers:

7. Equip managers and mentors with language to name magnet words in real time, when they surface in feedback or evaluation conversations.

8. Build peer cohort structures within organizations where employees can collectively identify and document pattern-based standard shifts.

9. Create space in formal development conversations for employees to name what they are experiencing without it being entered into their performance record.

The Pin

If the room is going to use the word, here is what the room means when it says it.

Professional (in this room)

Includes

Observable behaviors connected to the work itself: following through on agreed deliverables by the agreed date; communicating accurately and clearly with colleagues and clients; producing work that meets the documented quality standard for the role; accepting accountability for outcomes within the scope of the role; adhering to the published code of conduct applied to everyone the same way.

Excludes

Hairstyle, grooming, and body presentation. Clothing within published dress-code parameters. Accent, cadence, and vocabulary preference. Religious, cultural, or identity expression. Emotional response in moments of disagreement when not directed at colleagues. Conformity to the cultural defaults of senior leadership.

Test

If a behavior would not be called unprofessional when performed by the highest-performing person on the team, it cannot be called unprofessional when performed by anyone else.

Repair Protocol

Eight prompts for the next time “professional” enters a meeting. These are the questions the framework asks when the magnet shows up. Print them. Keep them in a slide deck. Use them out loud.

1. When you say “professional,” what specifically are you measuring? Name the behavior, not the person.

2. Is the standard you are applying related to the work, or to the worker’s appearance, accent, or cultural expression?

3. Can you describe what compliance with this standard would look like in concrete, observable behavior?

4. Would a different team member meeting this standard look the same to you? If they would not, the standard is moving.

5. Where is this standard written down? If it is not, can we write it down now?

6. Who in this organization has been penalized under this standard? Who has been rewarded?

7. Does this standard require people to suppress cultural expression, accent, or identity to comply?

8. If the answer to question seven is yes, what is the standard actually measuring?

Reflection Questions

Five questions for the reader. Sit with them before the next review cycle.

1. When was the last time someone in your organization was called “unprofessional”? What were they actually doing?

2. What words in your workplace function the way “professional” does in these scenes? List three.

3. What is the cost in your organization of asking “what do you mean by ___?”

4. Who in your organization is mentoring younger colleagues to keep their identity intact? Who is mentoring them to suppress it?

5. If you tracked your own career, where has suppression accumulated? Where has resistance accumulated?

The Authors

Jovanny A. Suriel, Ed.D. is an applied researcher whose doctoral work at USC Rossier examined how standards of professionalism can carry embedded bias. He publishes The Unstated and consults with leaders on the gap between what their organizations say and what they do.

Jerry W. Washington, Ed.D. is an independent researcher and Marine Corps veteran (Master Sergeant, retired) who publishes What Time Binds at what-time-binds.com and teaches Project Management at UC Irvine Division of Continuing Education. His current research examines how teams maintain shared meaning under coordination pressure.