You Didn’t Just Lose the Title

There is a perfectly innocent question that becomes surprisingly difficult when you move out of a long held role.

“And what do you do?”

For years, the answer came out before you had even properly heard the question. I lead Learning and Development. I’m a CFO. I run operations. I’m Head of HR.

Then one day, that sentence is no longer true.

Perhaps you were made redundant. Perhaps you retired. Perhaps you chose to leave because one more strategic transformation meeting might actually finish you off.

Whatever the reason, a perfectly ordinary question at a dinner table suddenly requires a small autobiography.

When I moved out of my corporate role, I wasn’t short of plans. I had coaching clients, I was completing an MSc in Psychology to add to my existing qualifications, and I was building Forum Next, which will launch properly, and rather excitingly, very soon.

On paper, I was practically bustling.

But being occupied is not the same as knowing where you belong. I had moved away from the shorthand I had used for years to explain myself to the world.

These days, I can say that I’m a psychologist, coach, writer and founder of Forum Next. But it took time to create a new sentence that felt like an identity rather than something generated by LinkedIn autocomplete.

The five things hidden inside a job title

Most of us think a job title is simply a label. In reality, it usually arrives with five other things quietly tucked inside it:

1. Time structure: a framework that tells you where to be and when.

2. Social contact: colleagues, clients and the wider circle of people you meet through work.

3. Collective purpose: something that matters beyond your own list of tasks.

4. Status and identity: a recognised place in the room and a sense that your judgement carries weight.

5. Activity and challenge: problems to solve, things to learn and expectations to meet.

I did not invent this list after a glass of wine and a difficult networking event.

In her 1982 book Employment and Unemployment, social psychologist Marie Jahoda argued that the impact of unemployment could not be explained by the loss of income alone.

She called these five things the “latent functions” of employment. Latent is psychology’s way of saying they were there doing quite a lot of work while nobody paid much attention to them.

None appears on the payslip. All can disappear when the role does.

Take time structure. For decades, work organises your life without asking for much input. Monday is different from Saturday. Holidays feel like holidays because there is something to be on holiday from.

Then the diary empties.

At first, this can be glorious. No alarm, no commute and no 8.30 meeting because somebody in another time zone has decided that 8.30 is perfectly civilised.

But free time and unstructured time are not the same thing. Free time sits inside a framework. Unstructured time means you have to build the framework yourself, and “I’ll see how I feel in the morning” is not always a robust operating model.

Work also supplies an astonishing number of people without requiring you to make any social effort whatsoever. Colleagues, clients, suppliers and the person from Finance you only ever speak to when something has gone terribly wrong.

They are not necessarily friends. That is partly why they matter.

These weaker ties connect us to information, opportunities and worlds outside our immediate circle. When the context disappears, many of those relationships quietly go with it. Nobody falls out. Everybody says, “We must keep in touch.”

And we all know how that usually goes.

Then there is collective purpose. For years, something needs doing. A target must be reached, a product launched, a patient treated or a customer problem solved. Other people are relying on you.

That is not the same as being busy.

You can fill every day with golf, Pilates, lunches and looking for the reading glasses currently sitting on your head. Your calendar can be impressively full while nothing actually depends on you.

I think that distinction matters more than we admit.

The one we pretend not to miss

Then we come to status.

Most of us like to claim that titles never mattered. We were completely above all that.

Possibly.

But most of us did rather enjoy being taken seriously. We liked being asked, being listened to and knowing that our judgement carried some weight.

Status does not have to mean a large office or the word “Senior” appearing three times in your job description. Sometimes it simply means having a recognised place in the room.

You notice when it goes. Not in one dramatic moment, but in smaller ones. The call that is returned a little later. The opinion that is heard politely but no longer alters the conversation. The introduction that begins with, “She used to be…”

“Used to be” is a remarkably efficient grammatical funeral.

Finally, work gives us activity. Not merely busyness, but demands. Problems arrive whether we feel like solving them or not. We have to learn things we would never voluntarily have placed on a personal development plan. Somebody expects something by Thursday.

That stretch matters.

I am increasingly suspicious of the advice to “keep busy” as we get older. Busy is a very low bar. You can fill a diary, reorganise a cupboard or spend three hours comparing electric kettles online.

The better question is whether anything in your life still asks something of you.

When I moved out of corporate life, I had to rebuild these elements separately. Client work gave me structure and connection. Forum Next gave me a larger purpose. Completing my MSc and playing competitive Scrabble gave me challenge, although Scrabble offered considerably less sympathy.

The aim was not to recreate my old life. It was to understand what that life had secretly been providing.

You can lose the job before you leave it

Here is the part I find even more interesting: you do not have to lose your job to start losing these five things.

You can still have the title, salary and company laptop while something quietly changes.

You are invited to fewer of the important conversations. The interesting project goes to somebody younger because it will be “a good development opportunity” for them. People value your experience but appear less curious about your future. Your work becomes increasingly about maintaining what already exists.

Nobody has said you are finished.

Nobody needs to.

Then somebody notices that you seem less engaged. Perhaps you are. But perhaps the more useful question is this:

Did you withdraw from the work, or did the work slowly withdraw from you?

Sometimes people genuinely want to wind down, and there is nothing wrong with that. But sometimes what looks like declining motivation is a perfectly rational response to declining purpose, challenge, influence or connection.

How did our job become our identity?

There is nothing strange about work becoming part of our identity. We spend years doing it, invest ourselves in it and build relationships through it.

But somewhere along the way, the job title stopped being one part of the answer and became the whole answer.

The question is, “What do you do?” Yet we often answer with the name of the organisation that pays us and our position inside its hierarchy.

We have handed employers an extraordinary amount of power over how we describe ourselves. They can reorganise a department on Thursday afternoon and, by Friday morning, apparently we are no longer quite sure who we are.

That seems a little careless.

A job may provide structure, people, purpose, status and challenge, but it does not own any of them. Once we understand that, we can begin to rebuild them elsewhere.

Rebuild the five

If you are no longer working, or no longer want another conventional job, start by creating a present tense description of yourself.

Try not to lead with, “I used to be…” It makes everything that follows sound like an epilogue.

Choose a title based on what you contribute now, not what an employer once called you. It does not need to be grand, and it should not involve appointing yourself a global thought leader before lunch.

It simply needs to be true.

If you write regularly, you are a writer. If you mentor people, you are a mentor. If you advise a charity, you are an adviser. If you are developing a new venture, you are a founder. A payslip is one way of confirming what you do. It is not the only one.

Then rebuild the rest deliberately:

1. Create structure that has some weight. Put recurring commitments in the week, particularly ones involving other people. A plan that exists only in your own head is remarkably easy to renegotiate.

2. Replace the social world of work. Join a professional group, course, community project or regular activity where you meet people beyond your existing friends and family. One networking event rarely replaces regular contact.

3. Find somewhere your contribution is needed. Purpose is not merely doing something pleasant. It comes from knowing that your involvement makes a difference to somebody or something beyond yourself.

4. Move from positional status to earned status. You may no longer have authority because of a title, but your experience can still carry weight through mentoring, advising, teaching, writing or contributing to a serious project.

5. Choose a challenge with consequences. Learn something difficult, publish something, enter a competition, take responsibility for an outcome or commit to a deadline that somebody else knows about. Challenge requires the possibility that you might not be brilliant at it immediately.

You do not need to find all five in one magnificent new purpose. That merely puts the same impossible burden on a new activity that you once placed on the job.

Your work used to give you the bundle. Now you can create a portfolio.

Structure might come from consulting. Purpose from mentoring. Social contact from a community. Status from sharing your expertise. Challenge from learning something you are currently rather bad at.

This may be less tidy than a single job title, but it is also less fragile. No employer can take the whole thing away in one reorganisation.

So, the next time somebody asks what I do, I think I have my answer:

I’m Mags, Head of Unfinished Business.

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