The Professional: A Playbook to Unleash Your Potential and Futureproof Your Success

First published 2025 by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd

© Tony Frost 2025

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For Catherine, Elizabeth and Laura with love and thanks

Foreword

I found this book to be an excellent and very useful read. Indeed, as I read it, I had the recurring feeling that I wished it or an equivalent had existed years ago when I started out on my professional journey.

Tony Frost brings his energy, experience, optimism and practicality to every page. He poses questions that in my view get to the heart of the issues and that should be at the forefront of a professional's mind.

I particularly like his four challenges: complexity, increased client demands, remote work and the effects of artificial intelligence. Obviously there are further issues that each of us might raise but these four chosen by Tony provide more than enough insights to make the book worth reading.

He asks how one can become the best possible professional and add the most value in the age of artificial intelligence. Both of these questions remain on my mind after 47 years of life in business.

As to how young professionals should view the coming of artificial intelligence, after much thought I strongly agree with Tony that they should be ‘worried and excited but more excited than worried’.

Many have written in the areas Tony is exploring but none have done so — in my view — with the light, practical approach and at the same time the depth that I believe Tony has achieved. His lists throughout the book and further questions at the end of each chapter stay with you, compelling further thought even after finishing the book.

I applaud this book and hope you will find it as useful as I have.

David Gonski AC

13 November 2024

About the author

This is my second book. My first effort was as co-author of the riveting 773-page Guide to Taxation of Financial Arrangements.¹ When the publishers of this project discovered the existence, subject matter and length of my first tome they were understandably nervous. I promised them my new book would be shorter, and of wider appeal.

The title of my first book gives you a clue about my first career. When people asked me what I did for a living, I would smile and say, ‘I help big companies pay the correct amount of tax’. From there the conversation could go anywhere — or nowhere.

After a 34-year career as a tax adviser (lawyer and Chartered Accountant) I decided to do something different. As part of my efforts to retrain as an executive coach, mentor and leadership consultant I returned to my alma mater, the University of Sydney, to undertake a Master of Science in Coaching Psychology. This was great fun and I was inspired. I learned all manner of things that would have been extremely useful in my first career, especially during my time as managing director of leading Australian tax advisory firm Greenwoods & Herbert Smith Freehills. If only I could turn back time …

Armed with the knowledge gained in the course of my new degree and the years of experience amassed in the course of my first career (including the many mistakes I made) I decided that as part of my second career I would conduct masterclasses for professionals. You can check out the classes here: www.frostleadership.com.au. I began to prepare notes as class pre-reading. Then I thought it might be easier (it wasn’t) and possibly more profitable to write this book. Also, it helped with my relevance-deprivation syndrome, which kicked in when I stopped being a big-cheese professional after so many years. As you can see, I will try to be as honest and as transparent with you as possible.

At the end of each chapter I have included some comments in a section titled ‘In play’ so you can see whether, in my first professional career, I did, or did not, practise what I now preach. I also comment on what I am doing in my second career.

Visit my website to find Frost Insights on important issues for professionals that wouldn't fit into this book. They include Starting and changing jobs; Pay rises, promotions, performance reviews and management; Remote work — a legacy of COVID-19 and its impact on professionals; and Joy and fun at work.

Tony Frost

Sydney, January 2025

www.frostleadership.com.au

Note

1.  Frost, T, Reilly, J, and Kater, E (2009). Guide to Taxation of Financial Arrangements, Thomson Reuters.

Introduction

Modern professionals make the world go round. For hundreds of years professionals in a myriad professions have been providing all manner of services to clients who need the expertise and skills they themselves lack. Although this author is Australian, and what you will read has a distinct Australian flavour, this book is for the professionals of the world.

Why read this book?

As a professional building a successful career today, you are facing unprecedented challenges and opportunities as you service your clients and solve their problems. Changes in client demands, technology, competition and the regulatory environment have always loomed large, but the pace of change has accelerated markedly and shows no signs of slowing.

You face four interlinked challenges. In some cases, these are also potential opportunities. The first two have been building for some decades, while the second two are recent:

Complexity. Most professionals, in most sectors and in most countries, operate in an environment of ever-increasing complexity. This takes many forms including clients and their size, scale, business structures and transactions; governmental, regulatory and professional body rules and requirements; the demands of everchanging technology; and, in many industries, the long-term trend towards globalisation.

Increased client demands. Clients of professionals have become increasingly sophisticated, demanding and cost-conscious when seeking external services. At the same time, many organisations have in-sourced various types of professional services including but not only legal and accounting functions. In-house professionals not only are subject to increasing productivity demands from their employers but help their organisations to hire external professionals in the most cost-effective manner.

Remote work. Although working from home and other forms of remote work had been building slowly in the decades before 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic revolutionised where, when and how professionals go about their task of serving clients. Exactly how this is impacting the coaching, mentoring and professional development of younger professionals is still a work in progress.

Artificial intelligence. AI was first posited seriously in the 1950s, but it was the release of the ChatGPT platform by OpenAI in November 2022 that really focused the minds of most people, including any professional not living under a rock, about the potential of AI to dramatically reshape all manner of activities, including the world of work. As no less an authority than Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has observed, we are now living in the ‘age of artificial intelligence’¹, which will provide remarkable opportunities, as well as challenges, for all professionals and the human race at large.

If you are already a professional, or are thinking about becoming one, you presumably intend to have a long and successful career. To achieve this, you will want to respond to these four challenges. This book is the essential companion on your career journey. As well as being your go-to guide, it will help you think about and answer two vitally important questions²:

How can I become my best possible professional?

How can I add the most value in the age of artificial intelligence?

I won't attempt to define ‘value’, as it will be a personal thing and depend on your field. I encourage you to reflect regularly on the ‘value’ you are creating, and for whom. You will add value to individuals and organisations, starting with your clients. But you can also add value to your employer, your colleagues, professional and industry bodies and associations, universities and other educational institutions, governments and regulators, society at large and, of course, to yourself.

I have three modest goals for this book: First, you will fundamentally change how you think about your skills and how you will prioritise their development over the rest of your career or careers. Second, employed professionals and their employers around the world will do the same. And third, together we will start a global revolution in the management of employed professionals. You will have the knowledge, vocabulary and confidence to ask your employers to help you to develop most effectively. This will be in the employers' best interests as well as yours.

That's it.

What is this book about?

Part I (‘State of Play’) sets the professional service scene. It addresses some big-picture issues facing professionals now and in the years ahead. This includes what it means to be a professional in the age of AI, how technology is changing what professionals do, what clients want now and will want in the future, as well as what employers want and should be doing to achieve their goals.

To help you address the four challenges and the two questions set out in the previous section, Part II (‘Playbook’) introduces the ‘Playbook to Unleash Your Potential and Futureproof Your Success’, with its Five Factors:

Self-care. Even the hardest-working and most conscientious professionals are allowed to look after themselves!

Motivation. You are most likely to succeed if you are highly motivated. What motivates you?

Learning. Although you have one or more university degrees and professional qualifications, learning should never stop.

Capabilities. You will want to spend your precious time developing the capabilities that will best assist you in the age of AI.

Accelerants. These are seven proven ways to get ahead in professional life.

I want you to abandon the notion of ‘hard skills’ and ‘soft skills’. I will introduce you to Prime Capabilities (what you do/have) and Enablers (how you apply them) and explain why this is about much more than changing names. More importantly, I will convince you why it is necessary to make this leap.

I have included questions for reflection, and templates and tools to help make my suggestions as clear and as easy to understand and implement as possible. Don't accept any of the suggestions as gospel. Poke, prod and challenge them. Discuss them with your colleagues. Add and subtract things and make them your own.

You'll notice I have called this framework a playbook. Why? Because ultimately I believe you should have fun at work.

This book will be of interest to different readers in different ways. Younger professionals and students may find Part I of greater interest than more senior professionals who have already been around the block a few times. All professionals should find the Five Factors in the Playbook in Part II of great assistance in shaping their personal and professional development. I encourage every reader to review all of the Five Factors, then prioritise their implementation in a way that is ‘most personally meaningful to you’.

Who should read this book?

I suggest that all professionals at any age or stage of their careers will find value in The Professional, but it is directed primarily at ‘employed professionals’ — that is, professionals working for a firm or an organisation owned by other people. This includes but is not limited to lawyers, accountants, actuaries, bankers, financial advisers and planners, management consultants, coaches, mentors, architects, engineers, scientists, information technology workers and people working in human resources, advertising, market research and public relations.

The book may also be of interest to many other people including those employed in various parts of the medical, healthcare and veterinary professions. One very enjoyable strand of my second career is being a facilitator in the impressive Company Directors Course run by the Australian Institute of Company Directors. As directors are professionals they too should find this book compelling reading. I hold a number of non-executive directorships in my second career, and I will certainly encourage my fellow directors on various boards to read The Professional.

Relatively early in my career I spent about five years working as an in-house tax professional at Westpac Banking Corporation. I learned a lot about banking and financial transactions as well as how to service multiple clients within a single organisation. When I returned to public practice at what was then Price Waterhouse, most of my clients were themselves in-house tax professionals employed by large companies. Consequently, I have written this book not just for those in professional service firms but for in-house lawyers, accountants and other professionals employed inside corporations, government bodies, not-for-profits and other workplaces. This means that ‘clients’ in this book include people in an organisation who have services provided to them by in-house professionals within that organisation.

At the same time, professionals such as those working in the public service quite reasonably may not view the people they are serving as ‘clients’. However, these professionals will still find this book helpful.

The COVID-19 pandemic led to a fundamental reassessment of what constitutes a ‘workplace’, and this book will also be of interest to professionals working in a new, post-pandemic environment, perhaps from home or from cafés, and perhaps on a freelance basis for multiple clients.

This book may also be helpful to school, university or college students. It offers some insights into the world of work that awaits you. I suggest you reflect on skills that come most naturally to you. This should help in choosing a calling you will enjoy and in which you will succeed. Academics may also embrace the concepts in this book and where appropriate squeeze them into already crowded curricula.

Finally, I recommend this book, especially chapter 4, to employers of employed professionals, such as the partners or other owners of professional service firms. Its insights into how best to engage with the clever and ambitious professionals you have hired are crucial as, if you play your cards right and help them to grow and develop, they will become your organisation's future leaders.

Further reading

The range of topics addressed in this book is large and often much more could have been said or has already been said elsewhere. Under ‘Suggested reading and viewing’, I provide a list of selected complementary publications and materials in the public domain. I encourage you to use this book as just one step in your ongoing professional development. Read widely from my recommendations and go beyond them to explore the thousands of resources now available in print and online.

In the section on reading lists, I have suggested a way to set up your own discussion group with like-minded professionals so you can help each other with your ongoing personal development.

Notes

1.  Gates, B (2023). The Age of AI has begun, GatesNotes, 21 March.

2.  Here is a third good question to ask yourself regularly: Does my work bring me enough joy and fun? I tackle this question in an Insight (Joy and Fun at Work) on my website, https://frostleadership.com.au.

Part I

State of Play

Part I explores the modern professional services landscape. It provides the context and sets the scene for the Playbook introduced in Part II.

Chapter 1 looks at what it means to be a ‘professional’. It is a concept that has been well covered by learned authors and commentators over the past two hundred years. Nonetheless, given the perhaps presumptuous title of this book, I would be remiss not to offer my own views of what it means to be a professional. I like lists (and there are plenty of them in this book), and I have set out some criteria for what it takes to be a true professional. In chapter 1 I set out what I think are the characteristics of a good professional, before listing the attributes of a great professional. I follow this with a list of cardinal sins professionals sometimes commit. In the ‘In play’ section for this chapter I discuss the importance of working in a supportive and ethically sound environment in which the organisation's values are, ideally, aligned with your own.

If chapter 1 tills well-worked soil, chapter 2 focuses front and centre on the modern world in which you live and work. Here we will begin our discussion of AI and the remarkable impact it is already having on professionals, as well as doing some crystal-ball gazing in order to consider what the future may hold. Unsurprisingly, international experts' views diverge on what AI has in store for humanity. Even the creators of this new technology admit to alarm at its apocalyptic, world-ending potential. As this book goes to print, governments and regulators around the world are working feverishly on decisions around whether and how to tame AI. Reassuringly, more than one expert confidently predicts that AI won't take your job. The risk is someone using AI will make you redundant if you fail to pick up the new technology yourself.

In chapter 2, inspired by the work of Charles Darwin, we look at the existential need for professionals to be increasingly adaptable, especially when it comes to AI and other emerging technologies. I am writing in the early years of the age of AI, which has seen the release of generative tools such as ChatGPT, which are, in essence, highly trained but ‘non-thinking’ parrots. In years to come, humanity may or may not create the much, much more powerful artificial general intelligence (AGI) — technology that can think, make decisions and take actions in a way similar to or probably better (way better) than humans do. If such a scenario eventuates, professionals as we know them today may or may not exist, and this book may or may not be of any use. For the record, this book was ‘hand-made’, and no part was subcontracted to ChatGPT or any other AI bot.

Chapter 3 takes us into that mysterious and wonderful world that is client land. Professionals wouldn't have jobs if they didn't have clients whose problems need to be solved. Yes, some clients can be difficult at times, and some can be difficult all the time. Nonetheless, true professionals know how to build the best quality relationships possible with each client and take the time to find out what they really want and need from their advisers. In my first career I was constantly amazed by how many professionals of all types and flavours didn't undertake the basic task of truly understanding their clients' wants and needs. This chapter will help you to avoid that mistake by putting in place a Client Service Charter. If you don't already have such a thing, you might tailor to your circumstances the template I have provided. Try not to subtract too many things. This chapter also contains advice on what to do when clients behave very badly. Sadly, the old adage ‘the client is always right’ is no longer current. On a happier note, chapter 3 has tips for professionals working in professional service firms on how to get the best work on the best clients.

Finally, in chapter 4 we take a brief look at what employers of professionals want from their employees. This discussion is fairly short because different employers will want different things and place different emphases on the capabilities of the people they employ. The main purpose of this chapter, which I had great fun researching and writing, is to offer suggestions, lots of them, as to what employers should be doing for the employed professionals in their care, and for each other as the owners or senior members of the organisation.

I cite some sobering data from Gallup on the level of ‘employee engagement’ internationally. One of many themes in this chapter is the importance of leaders and managers self-consciously adopting a coaching style when working with teams as a sure way to lift employee engagement. If any employer reading chapter 4 is not convinced by my citations of what Gallup, Google and Apple CEO Tim Cook have to say about the importance of a coaching mindset to effective leadership, then I suspect they are unpersuadable. One of the many linked topics in this chapter, and a recurring theme throughout the book, is the importance of the skill, the science and the art of giving quality, ongoing feedback to team members.

Once you have worked your way through these four chapters, I will have softened you up to think more deeply about how you will answer the two questions I posed in the Introduction:

How can I become my best possible professional?

How can I add the most value in the age of artificial intelligence?

Part II, ‘Playbook’, will equip you to respond to