Your job title was never the full list
Take away your job title and describe what you can do. That is usually where it gets hard.
For over a decade my job was leading teams through emergencies. Typhoons in the Philippines. Earthquakes in Nepal and Indonesia. Conflict and displacement across the Middle East, West and Central Africa, Bangladesh and Myanmar. I got good at spotting what people could do when their title said something else. Doing the same for myself took much longer.
If you are between organisations right now, or staying where you are and trying to be seen for more than the role you hold, this one is for you.
The pattern I kept running into
It arrived in the same shape every time. Demand outpaced design. No time to recruit, no structure that could flex fast enough. So you looked at the people already there and found out what they could really do.
Anyone who has worked in a stretched team will recognise the shapes this takes. A logistics officer with a finance background. A programme manager who used to work in construction. Someone in an administrative role holding the only serious IT skills in the office. Someone who speaks a language that becomes the most important thing in the room the moment a negotiation opens.
None of that appears on the organisational chart. All of it decides whether the work moves or stalls.
The work I am proudest of came out of the same habit of looking. In the Rohingya camps I ran consultations with children, and we turned what they told us into a book printed on waterproof paper (yes, that's it in the picture above), because the camps flood every year. That happened because we asked children what they knew about their own lives instead of deciding in advance that we already knew.
Seeing what someone can do is a leadership job and it stays one. It also asks you to say out loud what has been added to whose plate. Noticing capability is not permission to hand someone a second job and call it development.
The leader who sees you is temporary
They move on, or the structure changes around them. A restructure lands, funding ends, or you decide you want something else.
Then you are sitting across from someone who has never watched you work, and the only thing between what you can do and what they know about you is whether you can say it.
That holds even if you never leave. A new manager arrives, or a panel you have never met before, and nobody in that room was there for the year you held the thing together.
The part people tell me is hardest
It is not the capability. That is there, years of it, most of it built in conditions the person has long since stopped finding remarkable.
What is missing is practice. For years someone else did the describing. Your organisation had a word for you and the word did the work. Take it away and "what do you do?" comes back out as a job title, and the job title was never the full list.
Everything you did that sat outside the job description still happened. It just needs words another person can hear.
Reflection invitation
What have you done well that has never appeared in any job description you have held?
Think of one time your team got through something difficult. Not what your role was. What did you actually do?
If the person across from you had never seen you work, what would you want them to know first?
What's Coming
Upcoming events
Mark your calendar — here's what's on the horizon for leaders in our community.
Finding Your Language is where I do this work with people. The four-week programme starts on 3 September. Eight places, 700 CHF each, and the cohort after it has no date yet. Full detail sits on the programme page: https://touchingdistance.com/findingyourlanguage
The way in is a 60-minute online workshop on 13 August, 10:00 to 11:00 CET, at no charge and no obligation. One hour, working on your own examples rather than a template. If September is something you are weighing up, start here, and bring the three questions above already answered.
Ready to Go Deeper?
Your next step is within reach
If you have ever been deployed against your skills rather than your title, hit reply and tell me what you were asked to do. I'm curious what was hiding on your team.
With you,
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