One of our clients has been on LinkedIn for the last seven years and he was talking to one of our in-house counselors about the fact that a lot of professionals are carried away by job/professional titles. According to him, many people use titles to judge the value of a position, without necessarily thinking about the impact of such position.

If you are on LinkedIn, you will agree that a lot of times, people view profiles, mainly to see if the person holds ‘important’ titles, and when they see that the person does not hold the titles they are looking for, they reject connection requests.

This same mindset applies to the way professionals are viewed even outside LinkedIn. Many times, we get carried away by certain qualities and we use such factors to judge whether a person is a capable professional or not. This is wrong!

Why are we more likely to accord a certain level of regard to those who schooled in foreign countries and we place them on a pedestal over those who schooled in local universities or polytechnics, without even finding out their level of competence or commitment?

Why also are we more likely to respect people with titles like CEO, CFO, General Manager, as opposed to those who do not bear the same title? The important question here is do titles automatically mean competence? The answer is no!

So, the next time you are tempted to value titles over competence, prompt yourself to find out more about the person who holds the titles, you are so carried away with. What impact has that person made with the titles, s/he holds?

Is there any visible impact in the person’s career journey? I am not talking about those who are charging one million naira for their mentoring classes. I am talking about real impact – shaping people, society and culture.

Source - https://lingoafrica.com/titles-are-distractions-the-real-focus-should-be-on-impact/

Lingo Africa.

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