Good Practice Guide

Professionalism at Work

Richard Brindley

• Publisher: RIBA Publishing
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000481860
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Professional Practice in Architecture

Professionalism is not automatic with qualification. It is decided by the manner in which you carry out your professional life – the conduct and qualities that you bring to your role. In architecture, it is founded on the principles of honesty, integrity and competence, and a concern for the environment and others. As a trusted expert, it is essential that you gain respect for your skills and knowledge while maintaining veracity and transparency in your relationships and dealings with clients, end users, design and construction professionals and the wider public.

With a focus on professional judgement, this book is a personal guide on how to be a self-aware and successful practitioner, aspiring to best practice. It will give you the confidence to create meaningful industry connections and handle contractual disputes, insurance and negligence claims while maintaining a high standard of conduct. By paying attention to business planning, financial processes, good management and effective communication, it will help you to protect your practice's reputation and increase profitability and cashflow. Ultimately, it will enable you to not only avoid professional pitfalls but to benefit from positive working relationships.

1 Professionalism: an overview

Professionalism is not the job you do, it is how you do the job

DOI: 10.4324/9781003231462-1

How do we define 'professionalism', or a 'profession' or being 'professional'? There are many different views and numerous treatises on the subject, but they generally agree on the following key characteristics:

• • Doing work that is paid.
• • Applying specialist knowledge or expertise.
• • Completing specific training and qualifications.
• • Working impartially.
• • Applying independent informed judgement.
• • Working ethically within a set of codified values.
• • Being honest and trustworthy.
• • Balancing the differing needs of clients, users, society and the environment.
• • Having a wider public interest and longer-term view for the greater good.

The essence here is that professionalism is not just the job you do, but it is how you do your job. It is having a set of values, behaviours and wider responsibilities in how you apply your specialist knowledge and skills. This applies to architects and the other recognised professions across the design and delivery teams in the built environment sector.

Professionalism is demonstrated by more than just qualifications, knowledge and skills. It also requires integrity, ethics and trust. Demonstrating and maintaining a high level of professionalism in your conduct and values will help you to create stronger relationships with your client and employer, as well as the team you work with, the people you do business with and the public who will use, or benefit from, the products of your work.

Each chapter of this guide focuses on a different set of professional issues, such as working with clients, handling money, working with others, managing projects and complying with the law. This chapter looks at the background and current issues of professionalism, as well as its dynamics, which are crucial for operating as a successful professional today.

To appreciate the importance and current drivers of professionalism for the future, it is worth understanding how professionalism has developed over time, particularly for architects in the UK.

History of the professions and professionalism

The concept of professionalism and the establishment of the modern professions developed from the trade guilds and from the learned societies for the church, law and medicine. These originated from the transaction of providing protected privileges and recognised status to particular people in return for the development and application of their specialist knowledge and skills to a prescribed standard. There soon developed systems of exclusive membership, training and regulation and compliance with an ethical code, and for maintaining a degree of integrity. The aim was to create an honest, skilled and knowledgeable broker that people could trust, who was concerned not only with their client's interest, but also the wider interest of society, the state and the environment.

From Greco-Roman to medieval times, there developed elaborate professional systems for most trades, as well as for religion, law and medicine. They formed the basis of local and state governance, vestiges of which still exist today in the form of livery companies in the City of London and elsewhere.¹ This served well enough for running primarily agricultural economies with an established feudal social hierarchy but, as international trade grew and the Industrial Revolution took hold, the changing financial, social and political dynamics created a need to evolve the system.

The UK was at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution, with the development of new knowledge and technologies. It was also undergoing a radical change in the way of thinking, through an intellectual and philosophical movement that soon became known as The Enlightenment. The vast changes in society led to the development of a new model of chartered professional bodies and professional codes, ethics and regulation from the early 19th century.

The invention of steam turbines, combustion engines, textile looms, steel furnaces and mass production systems soon led to the creation of new and much larger conurbations, with large workforces concentrated around key resources (such as water, coal, iron and clay), all connected by newly created canals, railways and roads. Society quickly became urbanised and mechanised, particularly in the UK, and London became the first city in the world to have a recorded population of over 1 million, while other British cities were also exploding in size and wealth. Influence and people moved away from agriculture and the domination of land ownership. Increasing power and money became concentrated in a new elite of industrialists, manufacturers and global traders.

The shocks to the economic and societal systems led to an urgent need for well-informed and independent experts who could help create and operate these rapid advances in scientific knowledge and social structures. There was also the need to control the exuberances of the free-for-all market economy and to define and maintain the standards of the new modus operandi for the industrialised trading world. Who was going to be the repository of this new knowledge? Who would set the standards? Who could look after the interests of the public and provide reliable, unbiased and trustworthy judgement? The answer was: the Professions.

Figure 1.1: Office of architects Bodley and Garner, London, 1883

Within a relatively short period, from the early part of the 19th century, a plethora of new professions, with their own representative bodies, were established for medics, lawyers, accountants, architects and all sorts of engineers. A seal of approval and civic oversight, along with an obligation to uphold the public interest, was awarded to the many newly formed professional bodies through the granting of a royal charter, a particular British construct.

Professionalisation of architects

The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) was one of these new professional bodies, formed in 1834, gaining its royal charter from William IV soon after, in 1837. The purpose of the RIBA was very eloquently described as:

the general advancement of Civil Architecture, and for promoting and facilitating the acquirement of the knowledge of the various Arts and Sciences connected therewith It being an Art esteemed and encouraged in all enlightened nations as tending greatly to promote the domestic convenience of Citizens and the Public improvement and embellishment of Towns and Cities

which can be simply summarised as the 'advancement of architecture'.²

Figure 1.2: RIBA headquarters, 66 Portland Place, London

The creation of professional codes, qualifications, standard terms for appointment by clients and fee scales followed quickly afterwards, all of which developed and formalised the concepts of professional integrity and behaviour. In several professions, there was also statutory regulation, legally protecting the rights of those who could exclusively practise in the field. For architects, a form of statutory regulation emerged in the 1930s, in the form of statutory protection of the title 'architect' - although not of the function or work of an architect. This was controlled by an independent regulatory body, the Architects' Registration Council of the UK (ARCUK), which became the Architects Registration Board (ARB) from 1997.³

Peculiarly, it is only the use of the title 'architect' that is statutorily protected. Anyone can carry out the functions of an architect in the UK, just not call themself an architect unless they are suitably qualified and registered. There is little statutory protection of any form of engineering, surveying or planning in the UK, but in Europe and elsewhere in the world there are various forms of protection for both the function and title of many built environment professions, including architects.⁴ Many of the other national systems for regulating professionals have been based on the British models, with the state taking on the self-regulating functions found in British royal charters.

An infrastructure of status, privilege and protectionism gradually grew around the professions. This was often mirrored by similar exclusive rights for trades, fiercely won and guarded by their trade unions. Many professions had generous fixed fee scales, so that they competed only on merit and quality of service, without having to haggle with clients over price - which was considered far too commercial and therefore unprofessional.

With the government-led reconstruction across Europe after the Second World War, many more professionals worked directly in the public sector, providing a public service, insulated from the commercial pressures of the private sector. In the mid-1950s, about half of the registered architects in the UK were in salaried employment and the public sector. However, this fell significantly, to below 8%, in the UK from the 1980s to the 2010s, due to the political and economic changes that reduced state provision and focused more on the private sector and open global markets.⁵

Rise of consumerism to balance professionalism

The value of organised professions was already being questioned as they were being established from the late 18th century. In 1776, the Scottish economist and moral philosopher Adam Smith famously described them as 'a conspiracy against the public' in his treatise An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.⁶ This sentiment was echoed by the playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw in his 1906 play The Doctor's Dilemma as 'conspiracies against the laity', when commenting on the methods used by professions to acquire prestige, power and wealth.⁷

Overtime, and despite the public interest obligations written into royal charters and statutory regulations, the professions were increasingly seen through the early to mid 20th century as self-serving, overly protected and privileged; focused mainly on looking after their own and their clients' interests, rather than the interests of wider society and the public good. Concern was often triggered by high-profile and much publicised failures in professional decisions and products. A recent example of this was the cladding failures in the Grenfell Tower fire. From the latter half of the 20th century, public trust in professionalism diminished and the professions failed to convince both government and society of their value in terms of protecting public standards and that they warrant their protected privileges and status.

This led to the rise of consumer protection legislation in the UK and across the globe, to protect individuals from these more protected professionals, with their more powerful clients and corporate organisations. Professionals were increasingly seen as abusing their greater knowledge, influence and status to bamboozle ordinary citizens, which led to growing public pressure on governments to change the balance of power. The result was the dismantling of many professional privileges, and the giving of additional rights and protection to consumers in their contracts with professionals and commercial organisations. From the 1980s, a raft of consumer protection legislation was established in the UK, such as the Consumer Protection Act 1987 and the Consumer Rights Act 2015. The effect of this legislation on the contractual relationship between consumer clients and their professionals can be seen in Chapter 2 (on clients) and Chapter 4 (on the law), in the sections on appointment agreements.

Professional bodies such as the RIBA were forced to reposition themselves and their members and to make changes to their professional restrictions. Mandatory minimum fee scales in the UK became recommended fee scales in 1981⁸ - these lasted until 2003, when a tightening of rules by the Office of Fair Trading meant that professional fee scales were no longer allowable. The RIBA codes were also relaxed in 1981, to allow architects to advertise, directly approach clients and openly compete for work through competitive fee bids.⁹

The onset of open competition ...