As human beings, we have been putting labels on objects, ideas, concepts, and even people since the earliest days of language and shared communications. It helps us make sense of the world and for thousands of years, it has served us well, especially for tangible things. Putting things into categories narrows down the universal experience into something more manageable, so we can easily understand how to differentiate between say, a car and an aeroplane without having to go into details.
It becomes more complicated when we start to talk about intangibles and become involved in the world of adjectives. So we can (mostly) comprehend the world of colours and distinguish between blue and red. We can largely distinguish sounds like a bang and toot. But as soon as we move to the next level we begin to lose some of that shared understanding. Blood red or navy blue become more subjective and relative terms make it even more difficult as we interpret more descriptive terms like loudness or tone.
As language evolves we start reusing words rather than finding new ones and our understanding becomes even more dependent on context. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in the business world, and arguably IT is the worst culprit of all. We have to work even harder to understand what’s being discussed when even the context doesn’t give us much help. Agile and Lean are great examples of how terms not only depend on context but on organisational culture and even the person using them.
As global communication expands exponentially and billions of individuals are trying to carve out a niche for themselves, the labels we use to describe ourselves and the labels organisations bestow on us become less and less useful. The distinctions between someone’s job title, their role, their job description and what they actually do have never been so blurred. And it’s not helping anyone - and recruiters wonder why CVs get longer and longer and the number of people applying for certain jobs gets bigger and bigger whilst the time needed to find the right person expands at a similar rate.
For the last three years, I’ve been on a contract in Prague and the role I applied for was PMO Assistant. Internally, I believe the role was advertised as a Service Excellence Manager. In my day to day activities, I acted as the deputy team lead, communications expert, change manager, agile coach, process improvement specialist, HR admin, initiative leader, reporting expert, facilitator, trainer, train the trainer, event coordinator, proofreader, MS-Teams expert, Miro designer, and whatever else needed doing! I didn’t ever do any substantial PMO work (but I had a lot of fun!)
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| I'll be the Wingman for you and your team* |
I mentioned in that list that I acted as an agile coach. But I don’t want to be an ‘agile coach’. I don’t want or need to be placed in that pigeonhole. The doesn’t accurately describe me, what I do, or how I can genuinely add value to an organisation that might make use of my services and skills. It pitches me as one person in an ever-increasing pool of people called agile coaches who range from highly experienced coaches with a vast understanding of organisations, teams, software development, business management and people to those who have joined a week-long Scrum course and got a certificate.
The label doesn’t help a recruiter or a hiring manager who won’t necessarily understand the details of why they need an ‘agile coach’ other than to tick some boxes, and the job description that is posted is probably made up from a composite of what they think an agile coach should be doing rather than aligning to the specific context of the need. Once the corporate ‘agile coach’ job description has been word-smithed and stamped with HRs approval, the expectation of what that person needs to do is often set in stone and their room for manoeuvre becomes limited and the value they can add decreases.
We spend far too much time worrying about this kind of label and trying to explain to others what we are and what we aren’t. Over a 40 year career, I’ve developed a lot of general and specialised skills - a veritable jack-of-all-trades and a master of quite a lot of them. Try putting that as your current role on a CV and see how far it’ll get you! But as retirement looms, it’s one less thing that I have to worry about!
Right now, I’m content to be a Wingman. I’ll help you think about how you and your team can perform better in order to meet their needs, your needs and your stakeholder needs, using all the knowledge, skills and experience I’ve garnered over the years (which all have their own useless and meaningless labels!)
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