Look smart or be smart and look good?

There’s an horrible phrase I don’t like and it’s baked into the very fabric of our workplaces — looking smart.

I have a rather large gripe with the phrase to “look smart”.

It’s followed me from being a small niggle or annoyance in high school to me being a full-on grumpy monkey whenever I hear the phrase spoken with a negative tone or negative intent in the workplace, especially if directed at me!

Now, I may be a millennial, but I’m not too young to remember how we were taught to dress for work and interviews.

A lot of this comes from early work where everyone would wear hat, jacket, shirt, waistcoat, tie, trousers, shined shoes — if you were male — and hat, scarf, jacket, blouse, skirt, tights, heels — if you were female.

How you looked was a sign of your importance and influence and whether or not you were to be taken seriously.

Over time, dress codes began to soften. Women wore suits and men stopped wearing a full three-piece. We got no-tie Fridays, which turned into Hawaiian Shirt Fridays once a quarter, which turned into dress-down Fridays.

But while traditional (read: older) businesses and office environments were toying with whether or not they could go as far as to allow their male colleagues to undo the top button of their shirt once a month on a Friday at 3pm; other, newer types of businesses, were allowing their colleagues (often the founders themselves) to be comfortable in clothing they enjoyed wearing — bring on the era of the hoodie-wearing geeks!

This mindset has *slowly* been bleeding into other parts of our corporate worlds, but it has not gone unnoticed and can cause tension in the office.

Some businesses only allow dress-down or casual dress codes for their “innovation” or “digital” departments, which, quite obviously, causes tension with other areas of the business, with accounting and reconciliation screaming across the foyer, ‘Hey! What about me?’

Other business differentiate between those who are client- or customer-facing and those who work in back office functions — the dress code varies between a Branch Manager of a Big Four Bank and little Jimmy working in the basement or Suzie at the call centre.

And others provide even more of a compromise by asking that you always have a spare change of traditional business formal clothing to hand should you need to rush out to a client lunch or the CEO has a last-minute meeting with the Head of Architecture right next to your desk.

And I suppose, as far as organisational culture change has come, these could be considered good signs of loosening the corporate grip on traditional (read: historic) values and standards and accepting people for being people. But a lot of the time it’s a fine line and difficult to know when you’ve crossed it until it’s too late.

I’ve worked in a non-executive governmental office where the official dress code was “business casual” — whatever that means — and dress up when you’ve got meetings with external partners or the Board/C-Suite, but essentially everyone just dressed nicely in their own way and knew when to dress up or dress down depending on how their day looked.

And I’ve also worked in a medium-sized bank where the official dress code was “business smart”, despite being in a back office with zero interaction with customers, clients, or even our own C-Suite or Board, and rarely even our own Senior Leadership. Further, being in the “digital” department, you take your cues from your leadership — unbuttoned shirt, no tie for the gents, blouses, casual dresses and cardigans? Sure, if they’re doing it, right?

In my current organisation, the official Friday policy is still “no tie”. I laughed so loud when I read it, I interrupted a conference call a few desks away!

So, over time I’ve developed some tests to see how far I can go to “look like me” before someone gives me a sideways glance.

First, for the interview, I do not wear a three-piece suit. Shit, I don’t even wear a suit. Dangit, I don’t even wear shined black shoes! I wear a nice shirt, maybe with a cardigan, no tie, nice shoes, and my classic grey jeans or maybe some chinos. Basically, I dress at the top end of “comfortable smart” that I can muster, because there’s nothing I hate more than wearing a suit!

Then, on day one, I wear the same thing.

This is because I know that it must have passed the test the first time, so I’m on to a winner. And while I’m there, I can scout out what everyone else is wearing.

Then, throughout the week, I progressively get more casual, attempting to find the line of what’s too far, or too casual as the case may be — you can be forgiven almost anything in your first week or so.

No, I don’t wear a hoodie and ripped jeans on day three!

But, I might dress down to a cardigan and t-shirt with turned up jeans and Vans.

So, why is all of this important?

Well, if you’re really comfortable with your body, your appearance, you love wearing suits and don’t have fluctuating body weight and could afford pricey annual replacements anyway, then, well, it’s probably not that important to you.

But, if you’re like me, and you’ve struggled with ever-growing weight over the last decade, have anxiety, don’t like the look of yourself in the mirror, hate wearing suits, and struggle to find clothing that’s just tight enough to look smart but loose enough to hide all your wobbly bits, then I’m sure a lot of this rings loud with you.

(And that’s not to say that people tackling weight challenges are the only ones that have troubles with body image and self-confidence!)

So, what’s yer point?

There are two, really.

The first is about dress code policies.

The more policies you have and the more wording and detail and trip ’em up phrasing you have in those numerous and voluminous policies, the less you trust your employees. It’s that simple.

And if you don’t trust the people you’ve hired, then you’ve hired the wrong people, or maybe you need to take a cold, hard look in the mirror!

Some policies, don’t get me wrong, need clear wording and strong messaging, such as policies around LGBTQI inclusion and anti-harassment statements.

But others, like the dress code policy? Maybe not so much.

My favourite dress code policy to date is Mary Barra’s first act as CEO of General Motors. It simply reads, “Dress appropriately.”

I love it.

Now, I can hear people in the back rows screaming, ‘But what if I thought wearing orange jump suits and Slipknot face masks was “dressing appropriately” to work?’

Well, that’s what your management team are there for.

Your managers hire your employees. Then, together with your team, your department, and your general organisational culture, you implicitly and explicitly provide direction as to what is expected, while also allowing user discretion — they’re adults after all!

Essentially, entrust them to dress for the occasion, and stop trapping them into a beleaguered tradition of peacockery and plumaceous pomposity.

Second, “smart” does not equate only to traditional formal wear. Not anymore.

Smart should refer to your being kempt, your tidiness and cleanliness, the condition of your clothing, your acuity and intellect. It should not refer to the prescribed type of clothing you wear!

I have seen many (read: > 80% of them) straight, white, old men wearing suits because that’s “smart”, but it wouldn’t be beyond the realms of possibility to mistake them for an unfortunate transient sleeping rough outside of your local grocer’s. But, as long as they’re wearing the “right” clothing, it doesn’t seem to matter in many organisational cultures.

Hopefully though, the tides are changing, even if slowly. The bank I worked at recently introduced a company-wide (non-customer-facing) policy of casual dress, which is a real turn up for the books for a legacy bank!

So, next time someone tells you to look smart, tell them you’d rather be smart and look good!