“Dissolve Your Identity” Part 1: Job Titles and Presenting Yourself

“To be is to do.” - Sartre

“To do is to be.” - Marx

“Do be do be do.” - Sinatra

Perhaps one of the most agonizing questions that kills conversations and means absolutely nothing is “What do you do?” On the one hand, on a personal level, it pushes our identities back towards our work as though our professions define us. On the other hand, it has become worse since people have become more interested in job titles rather than describing their responsibilities. This is when it becomes an exercise in posturing and hyperbole when 21st century Millennial humor shows its face, and people either come up with absurd job titles that you can see a few examples of here, including ninjas. Yes, we’re not kidding.

The core of this is a kind of deep disconnect between what we do in our professional work, how we identify ourselves, and a kind of need for validation.

There is a version of an old Zen story of a renown military general who approaches a monk at the entrance of a temple asking for his friend, an equally renowned Zen master. The monk asks who this visitor is, and the general proudly boasts he is a great decorated hero and slayer of men, here seeking a great Zen master. The monk stares blankly at him. The general then says that he’s achieved many victories in battle and is equally famous for his handsome looks. The monk continues staring blankly, wondering who this guy is, before the general finally realizes what’s going on and says, “Oh, hi, I’m Bob. Is Dick here?” (NB: we’re using English names for humor and it’s an adaptation–don’t quote us on precision). The monk smiles and welcomes Bob, telling him Dick is in the back probably reading a magazine.

What we can learn from this modern re-telling at its essence–missing Japanese names notwithstanding–is that people like people, and job titles create images that we try to live up to and try to get others to validate. The problem is, people are responding to the image, not you, the person. So if your job title is “Customer Service Ninja” and your duties are a Human Resources department’s clever way of inspiring morale, drop “ninja” from the title and change the colorful description, and you’re simply assisting customers with their concerns. Likewise, calling someone a team member or an employee has no technical difference (for the most part), because without a guiding philosophy to go with the title changes, they’re just that: fancy names that mean absolutely nothing.

If you want to impress people but have them remember absolutely nothing meaningful about you, give them a fancy job title when you’re at a networking event, joke around about it, don’t tell them what your actual job duties are (or what you’re looking to do with your current skill set), and go with the extremely flawed “fake it until you make it” mentality. If this isn’t what you want, then ask yourself how well this strategy works for the people you’re trying to emulate and look at how they live, then ask yourself if this is what you want to do and how you want to live.

For people interested in nonprofit work and social enterprise, there are a few different norms compared to the private sector, which can allow for certain kinds of humor when catering to the younger workforce, especially in tech. You might notice that a lot of people simply like saying “I work in nonprofit” or “I work in social enterprise” and are more than happy to tell you what they do, such as “I write grants to raise money for microfinancing projects in Central America and East Africa” or “I manage an inner city youth program teaching life and professional skills for at-risk youth to help keep them away from drugs and gangs”.

Notice how instead of a job title, telling someone what you do like we might choose to do so in social enterprise and nonprofit speaks volumes as opposed to calling yourself a Customer Service Ninja–which ultimately just becomes the same tired joke that tries to hide the fact you’re not doing anything different but adding some nouns and adjectives to characterize your work and avoid describing the monotony of your job duties.

By focusing on what you do, you show something that someone else could do as well. By focusing on a job title, you show someone an image that they can either celebrate or shrug their shoulders at.

There is a trap, however, in both approaches, and that is one of identity: are you your job title or your job duties? Job titles were once meant to designate your role and responsibilities, and now that people can be a Vice-President of Communication, Vice-President of External Relations, and Vice-President of Development, you can have multiple Vice-Presidents and whatever nouns you add, but you’ll ultimately either see your office as having multiple vice-presidents, or you’ll have one actual vice president and a lot of other people who are just happy to have a fancy title to make their responsibilities seem greater than they are and flash something nice on their business cards.

If you take away the job title, however, you’ll then need to ask who you are and what you contribute to your employer and colleagues. More often than not, younger professionals will struggle with actually describing what they do as most evident when filling out their CV and work history. An HR Manager won’t look at job titles alone, he or she will look at the things a prospective employee has achieved–actual, tangible actions. If you forget to list your job title but describe what you’ve done, you convey who you are very clearly, and they can let that slide. If you just put out a fancy job title but don’t describe the things you’ve done, you come off as a time waster who worked until you were released from your contract, much like office assistants who spend all their time on social media avoiding doing any work and clocking in simply to get their hours in while hoping for the work day to end faster. Their job titles become their only way of validating their identity of being employed rather than having any connection to what they do and avoiding the identity of being unemployed.

So now ask yourself this: what do you want to do that will make you take pride in your work? When you can answer this question, you can then proceed to the next question, which is who are you?