Titles to Serve
I was early to the event and the lady arranging name tags shifted her attention from the tags to me. ‘Hi, I’m Susan. Who are you with?’ “I came alone,” I responded, thinking that being the only other person in the room was clue enough. ’No, I mean, who do you work for?’ I really don’t like that question. She was looking for a known logo. I work for myself, which means I work with clients directly, outside of the overhead and umbrella of a logo. When I tell people this, I’m usually treated with some odd mix of pity (‘bless your heart, you couldn’t work for someone else so you had to go ‘independent'’) and jealousy (‘I hate my boss. How’d you get out? Please take me with you’). ’Self-employment’ is not really a category people know what to do with, so I flipped the question back to Susan. ‘I’m SVP of Strategy at Agency Prime' she noted with great panache. ‘Sounds neat, I offered.’
I circled back for more coffee since I wasn’t clearly yet articulate. ‘What brought you to this event?’ I asked a young woman eyeing a bagel.' ‘My boss told us we had to do something like this once a quarter and this one was close to the office’. “He sounds thoughtful. What is he the boss of?” I wondered, trying to push the conversation off the starting blocks. 'I do social. I’m an account rep.,” Megan noted, doubling-up on the cream cheese. “Enjoy” I noted, resigning any hope of actual conversation.
Last try, I thought, or I’ll have to fake a call from some imagined corporate office and excuse myself to the coffee shop.
“What do you know about the speaker?” I quizzed (definitely my best opener of the morning. The coffee must be kicking in). “Not much,” she admitted. “Hi, I’m Amy. I work in education innovation because I couldn’t stomach perpetuating a broken model and inequalities inherent within it. What do you do?”
In their introductions that morning, each person chose a different tact to describe what she did.
Susan stood behind her title, describing her relative importance at the company and the role she played internally.
Megan, well, Megan came for the bagels. She hid behind her boss, offering me no insight to what her firm did or how I might help (or how she might help me).
Amy, by contrast, succinctly articulated the problems she solved, why she is passionate about the space, why I should trust her expertise in the matter and illustrating how much thought she had put helping others understand what she did. Perhaps her introduction was a bit strong and perhaps there’s an opportunity to articulate more fully what ‘innovation,’ ‘education,’ and ‘inequality’ all meant in her context, but hey, this was an introduction.
With three examples to admire, I recognized that ‘independent’ isn’t helpful, even if the phrase answers the direct question she asked.
I realized that my answer to their question was less about my employment status and more about finding a place to start our conversation. If Amy is the hero of her journey, my role (and thus how I introduce myself) should mirror hers and seek to narrow the focus of our search for ‘you too?’
Who I am is the same and what I do stands consistent, even if the language around the titles shift. My title should seek to serve others, orienting them to how I can help their journey.