 In American English, when you want to find out what kind of work a person does, you usually ask a question like, so, what do you do for a living? Or what kind of work do you do? Or just, so, what do you do? Well, it turns out that people who don't make themselves well understood about what they do, may end up getting paid less. That's the finding of a new study, and we have one of the authors of that study with us, Michael Pratt. So, Mr. Pratt, what do you do? Hi, I'm a professor at Boston College. And a professor of what specifically? A professor of organizational behavior. Organization behavior is kind of a mix between psychology and business. So we deal with things like leadership, public management, negotiation, those kind of issues. Well, and your new study is called What Clients Don't Get About My Profession, a Model of Perceived Role-Based Image Discrepancies. So in plain English, what does that mean? That means that a lot of time, maybe professionals are known for having unique knowledge and unique set of skills. But because of that, because they have skills that most people don't, people often misunderstand what they actually do for a living. Take example for lawyers. Most of us, or many people, think what they see on TV is what lawyers actually do. But in fact, it may be only a very small part of what they do and sometimes not even what they do on a regular basis. So now, in your study, you looked at 85 professionals, and these were four professions, architects, nurse practitioners, litigation attorneys, and certified public accountants. Now, I sort of have a sense what litigation attorneys, those would be lawyers who deal with lawsuits and certified public accountants. They keep your books and help balance your finances. And architects and nurse practitioners, what would be difficult about people in those professions explaining what they do? Nurse practitioners in particular, because they're a relatively new profession. They're called physician extenders because they often do many of the tasks that physicians used to do. Because of that, they're not really nurses and they're not really doctors or somewhere in between. So for many people, it's pretty confusing. They do things like doctors do, but they're not doctors. They call themselves nurses, but they do more things than nurses do. So there's a lot of confusion, especially around the nurse practitioner role. Architects, if you're of my generation, you may think of TV issues like the Brady Vunch, where Mike Brady would sit with a drawing board and draw nice pictures of buildings all day. So architects are all about designing buildings, but many people don't really know exactly what that involves. They want to know, why aren't they building the building? Why aren't you a contractor? Why can't you make something for me rather than just design it? So they have a lot of trouble explaining to people what exactly they do. And what about CPAs, accountants? CPAs are interesting because they said their biggest problem is that people tend to assume that whenever they are trying to find information, it's to hurt you. So they're there like police. They're trying to find out what you're doing wrong, rather than maybe trying to help out your financial situation by finding out where your cash flow is or what your financial situation is. So in a nutshell, what did your study find? A study finds that when people don't understand what you do, they tend to devalue it. They don't see it very highly. They tend to not pay you as much, at least in some cases, because they don't know what you do. They're not sure why they're paying you a lot of money to do it. They also find that they tend to sometimes bypass you. So architects, for example, rather than people going to an architect to design their house, they may just go to a builder and just skip the architect altogether. And so what advice do you have for people in these four professions or any profession about explaining what they do? I think there's three things that you should think about doing. The first is to educate. A lot of times people with very good intentions may not understand fully what you do. So you may start a conversation with, have you ever worked with an accountant or a nurse practitioner before? To get some idea of what background they have with that particular profession, you may want to have a little elevator speech about, again, very short about what you do. You don't want to go into a lot of detail, but enough to give them kind of the scope of what you do. And that's all a part of the educational process, because if you don't know what you do, it's difficult to go anywhere from there. So that's number one, educate. Number two, it would be to demonstrate. So we find nurse practitioners do this a lot. They'll perform procedures, although actually show the clients what they do. They may do it with somebody else. They may do it with the client in the room to show them, hey, look, I can actually do this stuff. I'm pretty good. And the third thing you could do is to relate. So you have educate, demonstrate, and relate. And relating is simply finding more about the person as a person. What are their hobbies? Where are they from? What did they do? If you think about it, what you're trying to do is build trust. And trust happens in three ways. One, by proving that you're competent. So that's the education and demonstration. Another one is that you're a caring person. So relating to people is good. And the third one is if you have integrity, what you do and what you see and what you do actually match. And so the techniques that I'm talking about, about educate, demonstrate, and relate, all are about building trust. And so I know the professionals in this study, the 85 professionals expressed frustrations when they were about the inability to explain or to be fully understood. Do you think the problem had to do more with the way they were explaining it? Or was it more the way what people were hearing or not hearing? Or just what they understood about those professions? I think the problem was that people really didn't, the professionals didn't go in with the mindset that people would not understand what they did. I think they assumed that, well, if somebody's going to an architect, they must know what architects do. If someone's going to a lawyer, they must know what lawyers do. But in fact, people often don't, either because they don't have enough information, or because what they see on TV is not exactly, because I work with police officers as well, what you see on TV may not be exactly what they do. So people may think they know what you do, when in fact they don't. So they start out with that conversation. They just assume, what would you like from me? So they want to start their transaction right away without any kind of small, without any kind of trying to figure out if they know what you're doing, if they have some idea of what your job is about. And I guess there's, you know, an element of here's an opportunity not only to explain or to, as you say, educate, demonstrate, and relate, but also market yourself. I mean, how, I guess, if you're trying to explain what you do and maybe what you do is kind of complicated, you obviously don't want to sound defensive. But at the same time, how do you avoid sounding too maybe self-promotional or that you're going to turn off the client by sounding like you're just trying to market yourself as offering what the client wants to hear? You're good question. I think you do that in part by relating what you do to how it's going to help the client. So I think a lot of time professionals talk about, here's the degree I got, here's where I'm from. It was very self-promoting, very much about, it's all about me. But if I can explain what I do in terms of, here's what you can benefit from by what I do, that's a nice way to start. Because then you're starting with what you can do to help the client as opposed to why the client should think you're hot stuff. Did the study look at all about how much less clients might have been inclined to pay someone whose profession they didn't fully understand? No. In part, what we did rather than a large-scale study, which we could have done that information, we did interviews. So we did 85 interviews. So with such a small number, we'd be hesitant to kind of make any conclusions based on that small amount. So we did a lot of, we talked with people for an hour or two about what they did. That's how we got our information. And how did you come to choose these four professions? Because he varied in some important ways. We had professions that were well-known, like lawyers and CPAs, and ones that were less well-known, like architects and nurse practitioners. But we also wanted to get professions that differed in terms of their reputation. Nurses in general are very well-respected. Lawyers, by contrast, are less well-respected. And so we wanted to see if it varied a lot by the kind of profession that we got. We were surprised that there are some small differences, but the problems faced by all four of those groups are relatively similar. And do you think there are other professions where people have similar problems in trying to make themselves understood in this new economy where there are new jobs that didn't exist five or ten years ago? Absolutely. And one thing I'm looking at, the description of the study, and it says here that with lawyers, clients will expect them to be dishonest. Do you mean that as a good thing? I mean, the clients go in wanting the lawyers to be dishonest or is it more that they're afraid they're going to be dishonest? I think they're more afraid they're going to be dishonest. And again, this is from TV shows, from movies that show these very stereotypical, you know, evil lawyers. And so people think all lawyers are out for themselves. Well, very good. Michael Pratt, thank you so much. Thank you.