Professional Practices

Pithy Personalized Principles

By: Denny Davis

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Aspiring professionals need to acquire professional abilities early in their development. For example, high school or college level teams should know and practice professional ways of thinking and behaviors that distinguish themselves in competitions, performances, and interviews. This book is a set of exercises to help students craft professional principles relevant to them and to practice professional behaviors.

Since the development of professional behaviors does not occur automatically, students and student teams should invest in professional development atop their academic endeavors. Unfortunately, dry lectures or readings on professional behaviors become boring times with little practice, and they yield little long-term benefit. Instead, this book guides students through discussions of topics relevant to their current project work and leads them to create pithy principles that tell them how to do their current work professionally. Their pithy principles will make discussions fun and give them memorable principles to put into practice.

This book addresses many topics organized under the following topical headings: team identity, member relationships, team communications, team management, and work management. Each 1-page topic has an example principle, introductory text, and discussion questions or statements. Space is reserved for discussion notes and the team’s personalized pithy principle.

Each exercise is designed for a 5-10 minute discussion, preferably at the start of a work session. This allows teams to select a topic relevant to their needs, conduct discussions to determine how to address the need, and proceed to their project work to put into practice what they defined as the professional way. Then at the end of the project work time, they might reflect on the success of their principle and make any necessary revisions. This gives teams a test site for improving their professional practice.

This book is written by a man with over three decades of team project experience in the university environment in addition to a decade at the high school level. He has guided teams of many disciplines through organizational, behavioral, and interpersonal challenges. This book can be a valuable tool for aiding teams in successful project experiences.