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Try Describing Your Job Without Using Your Job Title
Do this now, out loud if you are somewhere you can get away with talking to yourself.
Describe what you do. No job title, and no list of tasks.
Most people last about four seconds. Then they reach for one or the other, usually the list. Diary, travel, board papers, expenses, the offsite, the thing with the auditors, and then a slightly apologetic "and, you know, everything else".
All true. All close to useless in the only two conversations where the description really matters.
What you will get out of this
Why a task list is an inaccurate description of your job rather than a modest one
The four kinds of work, and which three of them go missing when people describe themselves
A translation method with eight worked examples you can steal outright
The answer that sounds right and is somehow worse than the task list
Why you will have forgotten all your best evidence within six months, and the ten-minute habit that fixes it
A free two-page value ledger to print
The two conversations
The first is a restructure. Somebody who has never watched you work is looking at a spreadsheet of roles, trying to establish what is load-bearing and what is decoration. They have your job description, which was written in 2019 by somebody who has also left, and they have whatever you said in your last appraisal.
The second is any conversation about what you do next. The question there is not what you handle now. It is what you could handle, and nothing in a task list answers that.
In both, a task list works actively against you, because every single item on it sounds like something that could be redistributed, outsourced, or handed to a tool the organisation is already paying for. You have, without intending to, presented a business case for your own redundancy in bullet form.
Why the list fails
Not modesty, although modesty is in there somewhere. The list fails because it describes the visible surface of the work and almost none of the work itself.
Take one example and follow it properly.
You protect a slot in a diary. The visible output is a calendar entry. Anyone can see the calendar entry.
What produced it was a judgement about which of two competing priorities was genuinely more urgent, given that both people involved described theirs as urgent. A read on which of them would take a reschedule badly, and would therefore need a phone call rather than an email. And a piece of context about a decision taken three weeks ago that nobody else in the chain still remembers, which is the actual reason the second meeting can wait.
None of that survives into "diary management". It cannot, because diary management is a noun and what you did was a sequence of judgements.
Now multiply that by every item on the list and you can see the size of the problem. The description you have been giving of your job is not the modest version of the truth. It is a different job, and it happens to be a considerably more replaceable one.
The four kinds of work
This is the whole reason the Irreplaceable Audit splits the work into four rather than treating it as a single lump.
Kind of work | What it looks like | How replaceable it is |
Task-based | The structured, repeatable, describable part. Booking, scheduling, formatting, processing | Genuinely supportable by tools, and increasingly is |
Judgement-based | Deciding what matters, reading ambiguity, making calls under uncertainty on somebody else's behalf | Very hard to replace and almost never described |
Relationship-based | Trust, influence without authority, knowing who needs what and in what order | Effectively impossible to replace and completely invisible on an org chart |
Strategy-based | Connecting daily activity to organisational outcomes, spotting what others miss because you see across functions rather than down one | Rare, valuable, and the first thing people forget to mention |
Tasks matter. They are also the only one of the four that reliably shows up when somebody describes their own job, and the only one that is straightforward to replace.
That asymmetry is the entire problem in one sentence, and it is why capable people get restructured out of organisations that then spend eighteen months trying to work out what went wrong.
The translation
The mechanic is simple and it takes a bit of practice. Take a task. Follow it to an outcome. Follow the outcome to a consequence.
Task version | Accurate version |
I manage the diary | I protect around fifteen hours of executive focus a week, and I decide which of the competing demands earns that time |
I take the board minutes | I hold the record of what was actually decided, which is the document people rely on when there is a disagreement six months later about what was agreed |
I run the offsite | I design the one conversation a year where the leadership team has to align, and I build the agenda so the difficult item does not get pushed into the last twenty minutes |
I book the travel | I make sure the person representing us arrives able to think, which is a different problem from finding the cheapest flight |
I manage the inbox | I decide what reaches the chief executive and in what order, which is the single largest influence anybody has on what this organisation pays attention to |
I chase people for updates | I hold the delivery picture across eleven workstreams that do not talk to each other, and I know first when one of them is slipping |
I organise the team socials | I maintain the relationships that make cross-team requests possible without escalation |
I prepare the board pack | I decide what the board sees, how it is framed, and what order it is read in |
Read those again and check them, because the objection people raise is always that this is spin.
It is not. Every one of those is a more accurate account of the work than the version it replaces. The task version leaves out the judgement, which is the part that was actually difficult. That is not modesty, that is inaccuracy, and it happens to be inaccuracy that costs you money.
The trap that catches almost everyone
There is a version of this that sounds right and is worse than the task list.
*I am the glue. I keep everything running. I am the person everyone comes to. I am the calm in the storm.*
These feel like value statements. They are unfalsifiable, unmeasurable, and word for word identical to what every other person in every other support function says about themselves. If you put twenty operations people in a room and asked them to describe their value, you would get twenty variations on glue and one person saying "hub", and everybody would nod.
Glue is a metaphor. Nobody has ever been handed a budget on the strength of a metaphor.
The test is simple. If you cannot attach a number, a named consequence or a specific decision to a claim about your value, it is not yet a claim about your value.
"I keep everything running" fails. "When the reporting lead was off for six weeks I ran the cycle and we did not miss a board deadline" passes, and takes exactly the same amount of breath to say.
Why you will not remember any of this in six months
Because you will remember the thing that went wrong in March with perfect fidelity, and you will have entirely lost the sentence somebody said in June about the paper you rewrote.
That is not a memory failure and it is not modesty either. Positive feedback is systematically discounted by people prone to impostor feelings, and impostor feelings are close to universal in roles like this. The praise arrives, gets weighed against your own private assessment of how it went, and loses.
Meanwhile impostor scores correlate at point seven three with talking down your own abilities. Correlations run from zero, meaning no relationship, to one, meaning the two move in perfect lockstep, so point seven three is very high for anything involving human behaviour. So the version you do remember has already been shrunk on the way out of your mouth, and then shrunk again in the retelling.
The fix is not to think about it differently. The fix is to write it down before your memory gets to it.
Four columns. What happened. What you did. What resulted. What was said. Dated, and verbatim on the last one, because paraphrase is exactly where the discounting happens.
Once a quarter, translate the raw entries into the units your organisation actually uses to talk about value: time protected, decisions enabled, risks caught, relationships held, cost avoided, conversations that would not otherwise have happened.
This is dull, it takes about ten minutes a week, and it is the highest-return administrative habit available to anybody in an operational role. It is also the only thing that reliably survives a restructure, because it converts a set of impressions into a document, and documents outrank impressions.
Download: The Value Ledger
Three pages, because the translation takes practice and one worked example is not enough.
What is inside | Why it is there |
The translation grid: task, outcome, consequence | Because the task list is the inaccurate description, not the modest one |
The four kinds of work, with space to log each | Because three of the four go missing when people describe themselves |
The glue test | Because nobody has been handed a budget on the strength of a metaphor |
Three drafts of your one sentence | Because the first draft will contain your job title and you will not notice until you read it back |
Free, no email wall, nothing to sign up for. Do the translation on five real tasks before you try to write the sentence.
The skill you already have and never point at yourself
There is a body of research on issue selling, which is the study of how people get something onto a senior agenda when they hold no authority to put it there.
Timing. Framing. Choosing which decision-maker to approach. Bundling an item with something already scheduled. Knowing when to raise a thing publicly and when to catch somebody in a corridor. Knowing which week of the month a particular director will say yes to anything.
If you are good at your job you do this constantly, at a level most senior managers could not match. You do it for other people's issues, on behalf of your executive, for causes belonging to somebody else entirely.
You almost certainly do not do it for yourself.
That is the largest available gain in this entire article, and it requires no new capability whatsoever. It requires pointing a well-practised skill at a target you have been carefully avoiding, and I will be honest, the first time is genuinely uncomfortable.
There is a related idea called job crafting, which is the finding that people actively reshape the boundaries and the meaning of their own roles rather than passively receiving a job description.
Nearly everybody in an operational role has crafted their job substantially, often beyond recognition. Very few have written any of it down. Which means the crafted version exists only inside your own head, and vanishes the instant somebody else opens the original job description in a spreadsheet during a restructure.
Three places to use this in the next month
Your next one to one. Open with one translated sentence instead of a status update. Not a request, not a complaint, not a list. One line about what your work produced.
Your appraisal form. Wherever it asks for achievements, write outcomes and consequences rather than activities. If there is a box for objectives, put something in it that only makes sense if all four kinds of work are visible.
The next time somebody asks what you do. Have one sentence ready that contains no job title and no task. Practise it out loud, because there is a real difference between having a good description of your value and being able to produce it in the eleven seconds you get when a director asks you in a lift.
Somewhere between those two things sits a large part of most people's careers.
Frequently asked questions
Does this not come across as arrogant?
The translated versions are more accurate, not more flattering, and accuracy reads as competence rather than ego. If it still feels uncomfortable, that discomfort is the sandbagging habit talking, not a signal about the sentence.
What if my organisation genuinely does not value this work?
Then you have learned something useful, and the record you have built is precisely what you need for the conversation somewhere else. The ledger is portable. Your reputation inside one building is not.
I do not have numbers for most of what I do.
Use consequences instead. "The reporting cycle did not slip" is a consequence. So is "the two directors who were not speaking both came to the offsite." Numbers are nice, named consequences are enough.
Is this only relevant to Executive Assistants?
No. It applies to anyone whose contribution is mostly judgement, relationships and coordination, which includes Chiefs of Staff, project and programme people, and a great deal of operations.
How do I describe my job on LinkedIn using this?
Same translation, shorter. Lead with the consequence rather than the remit. Most support-role profiles read as a job description, which means they are competing on title rather than on contribution.
What if I have been in the role for years and never done any of this?
Start the ledger today and backfill three entries from memory. They will be your three most memorable, which means they are probably not your three most valuable, but they will get the habit started.
My manager writes my appraisal from their impressions. Does a ledger help?
Enormously, because impressions are formed from whatever is most recent and most visible. A dated record with quotes in it changes the raw material your manager is working from.
Now try it again
Describe what you do. No title, no tasks.
If it came out better than the first attempt, that is the whole exercise working, and it took you about fifteen minutes.
If it did not, the Irreplaceable Audit walks you through forty-eight observable activities across those four kinds of work and shows you where your contribution actually sits. It is free, and it is built on published research rather than a hunch.
If you want the capability picture alongside it, the Connected Leader Assessment measures five dimensions in about twelve minutes.
Neither will make you comfortable talking about your value. Nothing does that quickly, and anyone promising otherwise is selling a feeling rather than a skill. They will give you something considerably better than a task list to do it with, which turns out to be most of the battle.
Meg ✌️
A worked example: the restructure conversation
This is the conversation the whole article is for, so it is worth walking through properly.
Somebody senior, who has never watched you work, has forty minutes and a spreadsheet. They are trying to establish what happens if this role goes.
What most people say. A list. Diary, travel, board papers, expenses, events. Delivered slightly fast, because the situation is uncomfortable, and finished with "and a lot of other things that are hard to describe."
Every item on that list has an obvious answer sitting next to it. Redistribute. Outsource. There is a tool for that now.
What the translated version sounds like.
"Three things would break. The executive team would lose about fifteen hours a week of protected thinking time, because nobody else is making the call about which demands earn it. The record of what was actually decided in board meetings would become whatever people remember, which is a governance problem rather than an admin one. And there are four external relationships that currently run through me rather than through the org chart, including the two that were difficult last year."
Same job. Same person. One of those descriptions survives a spreadsheet and one does not.
Notice what it is not. It is not a plea, it is not a list of hours worked, and it does not mention how busy you are. Busy is not a value proposition. Every single person in that restructure is busy.
Scripts for the three moments
When somebody asks what you do, socially. You get about eleven seconds and the wrong answer is your job title.
"I make sure the person running the organisation is thinking about the right thing at the right time. Most of that is deciding what gets to them and in what order."
In a one to one, instead of a status update.
"Two things worth knowing from the last fortnight. I caught the resourcing clash on the launch before it hit the timeline, which bought us about three weeks. And I have taken the reporting cycle off your desk entirely, so you only see it if something is wrong."
In an appraisal, where the form asks for achievements. Write consequences, not activities. Every line should answer "so what" without being asked.
"Redesigned the board pack so risks appear before the progress update. Result: two risks were discussed at March board that would previously have been noted and skipped."
If you manage somebody in one of these roles
You are in a better position than they are to fix this, and it costs you very little.
Ask them what would break. Not what they do. What would break. It is a completely different question and it produces a completely different answer.
Write your feedback down. Spoken praise gets discounted, which means most of what you say evaporates before it reaches them. Two lines in an email survive a bad Tuesday in a way that a kind word in a corridor does not.
Put judgement in the objectives. If their objectives are all tasks, you have told them, in writing, which part of their job you value. They will optimise for it, because that is what reasonable people do with written objectives.
The formula, if you want one
A usable sentence has three parts and takes about eleven seconds.
What you protect or produce, then the decision or judgement inside it, then the consequence if it stopped.
"I protect the executive team's thinking time, I decide which demands earn it, and without that they spend their week reacting."
Write yours twice. The first draft will contain your job title and you will not notice until you read it back.
Meg ✌️
Twelve more translations
The eight above cover the most common ground. Here are twelve more, because the objection I hear most often is "that works for the examples you picked".
Task version | Accurate version |
I onboard new starters | I decide what a new person's first fortnight teaches them about how this place actually works |
I keep the CRM up to date | I hold the only complete picture of where every relationship stands, which is what the forecast is built on |
I manage the office move | I am responsible for the fortnight where nobody can do their job, and for making it three days instead |
I handle expenses | I am the last check before spending leaves this organisation, and I have caught four things this year |
I schedule the leadership meetings | I control the sequence in which decisions get made, which shapes what gets decided |
I take notes in one to ones | I hold the continuity between conversations that the participants themselves do not retain |
I answer the main inbox | I am the first impression this organisation makes on people who do not know anybody here |
I run the intranet | I decide what four hundred people know about their own organisation this week |
I coordinate the audit | I make sure the auditors get a clean story rather than a scavenger hunt, which is worth several days of fee |
I organise the away day | I design the one occasion a year when people who cannot get in the same room, do |
I gatekeep the diary | I say no on behalf of somebody who finds it very difficult to say no, which protects their credibility as well as their time |
I keep the risk register | I am the last place a concern lands before it disappears, which is a heavier job than the spreadsheet suggests |
If yours is not on this list, the pattern still holds. Take the task. Ask what would break. Ask who would notice. That is your sentence.
Your first ninety days in a new role
If you are moving into something new, this is the moment where the ledger is worth ten times what it is worth later, because you are still noticing things that will become invisible to you by March.
Weeks one to four. Write down every question you have to ask somebody, and every thing you discover that nobody told you. That list is the most accurate map of the organisation's undocumented knowledge that anybody will produce this year, and in six months you will have forgotten you ever needed it.
Weeks five to eight. Start the ledger properly. Four columns. You will feel self-conscious about it, and you should do it anyway.
Weeks nine to twelve. Have your one sentence ready before your first proper review. Not the job description version. The version with a consequence in it.
Most people spend the first ninety days proving they can do the tasks. The tasks were never in doubt, or you would not have been hired. What is genuinely uncertain, to everybody including you, is what you are going to be for.
The one question to ask your manager
Next time you are in a one to one and there is a gap, ask this.
"If I were not here, what would you notice first?"
It is a better question than asking for feedback, because it does not invite reassurance. It makes them do the same translation exercise you have done, about you, out loud.
Three things tend to happen. Sometimes they answer immediately and precisely, which tells you they see the judgement rather than the tasks, and you can stop worrying. Sometimes they answer with tasks, which tells you exactly what your next one to one needs to change. And sometimes they cannot answer at all, which is uncomfortable and is the most useful outcome of the three, because you have found out something you needed to know while there is still time to do something about it.
Free tools
The Connected Leader Assessment, five capability dimensions, twelve minutes, free
The Irreplaceable Audit, forty-eight activities across four kinds of work, free
Skill Sprints, one topic built properly, one to two hours
P.S. Want to Go Deeper on Articulating Your Value?
If this resonated and you want to go further, here is the evidence the piece is built on. These are the papers that shaped my thinking on issue selling, job crafting and how people describe their own contribution, and they are well worth your time.
Every DOI below has been checked. Where a popular claim did not survive that check, I have said so in the piece rather than quietly leaving it out.
📃 Wrzesniewski and Dutton (2001) Job crafting, and employees as active shapers of their own roles rather than passive recipients of a job description. https://doi.org/10.2307/259118
📃 Dutton and Ashford (1993) Selling issues to top management: how people get something onto a senior agenda without the authority to put it there. https://doi.org/10.2307/258903
📃 Dutton, Ashford, O'Neill and Lawrence (2001) Moves that matter, and the tactics that determine whether issue selling succeeds. https://doi.org/10.2307/3069412
📃 Morrison (2011) Employee voice behaviour, and the conditions under which people speak up about their own contribution. https://doi.org/10.5465/19416520.2011.574506
📃 Gullifor, Gardner, Karam, Noghani and Cogliser (2023) Impostor feelings at work, including links to reduced self-promotion and lower motivation to lead. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.2733
📃 Fleischhauer, Wossidlo, Michael and Enge (2021) The point seven three correlation between impostor scores and talking down your own abilities. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.764030
📃 Rohrmann, Bechtoldt and Leonhardt (2016) Impostor feelings do not prevent attaining success, only enjoying and asserting it. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00821
P.P.S. Why Do I Even Have the Nerve to Write This?
Fair question.
I am someone who has spent years working alongside remarkable executives, navigating chaos, translating vision into structure and figuring things out, sometimes beautifully and sometimes the very hard way. I have had the privilege of being the steady right hand to leaders who move fast, take risks and expect a lot. That environment has shaped me more than any classroom ever could.
I also happen to have an MBA, and I am studying psychology because people fascinate me. How we work. Why we disconnect. What actually holds us together when the pressure rises.
But really, none of that is the point.
I am here because I have lived the erosion and rebuilt from it. I have seen the cost of carrying too much and the relief that arrives when you finally stop disappearing inside your own competence.
So I share what I have learned in case it helps someone else. Take what is useful. Leave the rest. And remember this one truth that professionals like you often forget:
You are probably doing far better than you give yourself credit for.
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