Beyond Titles: Unraveling the Complex Web of Status and Leadership

Reflections on when I started to despise status.

It was in the early days of the Internet, and I was chatting with a professor I met through a game we both played. (Do you remember ICQ? I miss that animated flower.) In a conversation about goals, dreams, and wishes, he espoused a need for status. I don’t even remember what status he was trying to achieve—tenured professor, perhaps? All I saw was red. How could someone with such a kind heart want status?

Did you know that it’s required to have a president and a secretary for a non-profit? It is. Not just because the paperwork has the line for you to fill in but because the federal and state statutes require it. Embedded in our systems are forward-facing people and record keepers. Embedded in our systems is status.

When considering our feudal influences, it makes sense that this is a holdover from centuries and thousands of years of tradition.

And, something in me has always wanted to smash it down. (Another aside: I shared with my son the evening of this writing what “Down with the Man” means.)

So back to 1998 and my vehemence with status. In my interrupted college years, I found myself at jobs where the only way to make decent money and utilize untapped skills in strategic thinking was to become a manager. I found myself touching the things I hated - status and honorifics. I wanted to be in charge. I wanted to be the one to shape the vision, set the tone, and do things differently.

For the next two decades, I found myself slogging through get-in-the-door positions, volunteering as a president in many capacities (this is relevant because there was no pay attached to the honorific even though the workload was large). I was in the push-and-pull between having status and not having status. And now, almost ten years later, I am more settled into that young twenty-something who detested the honorific.

What does status do? It is a social norm that suggests someone deserves to have a position of power. Did they earn that role? Were they born to it? Did it fall into their lap because they were in the right place at the right time? Did they painstakingly explore and study until they found the right combination of skills and education that merited the honorific?

I am interested in our world radically transforming into a space that truly serves people—from the least to the most. Presidents and monarchs don’t do that. Real people on the ground making change transform our world. So, for my part, skip the honorific and status and hold to your values.

Do you have strong feelings about honorifics? Share in the comments.