how to: name what matters

I think a lot about gaps. It's kind of the nature of the work: a lot of my time is spent helping purpose-driven professionals understand exactly how the work they're already doing looks when it's translated into management and leadership lenses outside the environment they're already working in.

If you've ever pulled together four departments, a grant deadline, and a group of humans with opinions and sat them down in a room to figure out "what we're all doing" at the start of an initiative: congratulations, you've been running project kick-offs.

Perhaps you didn't call them that? That's okay... it doesn't change what you've been doing. So today, let's give you some new language to go along with the substance that's been there all along... and let's see what happens when this new vocabulary hits your day-to-day.

Purpose-driven professionals in higher ed, nonprofits, healthcare, and social impact tend to describe their work in a way that downplays it, at best (and erases it, at worst). "I just pulled everyone together." "I made sure we were on the same page." "I kind of naturally do that." Those sentences aren't wrong, but it's kind of like looking at a thunderstorm and saying "it's wet out". Let's fix it.

The invisible work problem

First, some re-assurance: this "downplaying" isn't actually just a purpose-driven pros thing. Management in general has a reputation problem. A lot of the work we do is invisible... which, in the worst case, can get received as "unnecessary". (That's where we get "paper-pushing" as a derogatory. Boo!!!!)

Not to get too much onto my soapbox (... she said, as a girl who LOVES a soapbox), but we can look back spanning a hundred years to see why this is so. Technology – first factories, then computers, now AI, to paint with a broad brush – has drastically increased the amount of work we produce. Management, as a professional field, evolved along with that drastic increase to help rein it in.

The best-case scenario is that you work somewhere that recognizes this often-invisible work... and that's actually something I think the average purpose-driven pro's workplace does well. The problem is that I think they do it well because it's somehow tied to team development: you're doing the work of "pulling everyone together" or "making sure everyone's on the same page", but you're doing it for the sake of the development of the students you supervise, so that they can learn, too.

In my experience, the goal of the average purpose-driven pro is to be able to say: this work I do at the outset of a project to make sure it goes smoothly is real work. There's a professional vocabulary for it. Without it, we'd see decreases in efficiency and quality.

This stands in contrast with where they often are, which is: someone spends a decade convening cross-functional groups, aligning them on goals, surfacing risks, assigning owners, and setting a cadence. Then they sit down to update their resume and write, "Supported team initiatives."

Boooo!!! No!!!!!

The work you do naturally is still work. In fact, the stuff you do without thinking about it is often the highest-leverage thing on the whole project, because you've internalized a set of moves that other people have to be trained into. The problem is that "naturally" is a word that erases labor. When you say you naturally do something, the reader hears "anyone could do this" and moves on. When you say you "facilitated a stakeholder alignment session," the reader hears "this person runs project kick-offs."

So let's get THERE. :)

What a project kick-off actually is (and why the corporate version isn't the only version)

A project kick-off is the meeting (or sometimes the series of meetings) where a group of people who will be working together on a piece of work get aligned on what the work is, who is doing what, when it needs to happen, and how they'll know it's going well.

That's IT.

As with so many things in project management, there's not a single correct way to do it. There's a very corporate version (slide decks, RACI charts, someone from a project management office...... at a company that has a project management office..........), and that might be the version that has you shying away.

But we lead with defining what the meeting accomplishes so that we can say: oh, you're doing it differently? Does it check all the boxes for what a kick-off meeting is supposed to do? OK, great, that counts too. The format doesn't determine whether it's a kick-off. The function does.

If you've done any of the following, you've run a kick-off:

-> convened the people who need to be in the room (or on the call)
-> named the goal and the deadline out loud so everyone heard the same version
-> gotten people to say who owns what before they left
-> surfaced constraints and made a plan for them
-> agreed on how you'd stay in touch as the work moved forward

Those are the five moves. Let's map 'em out.

The translation table: mapping what you already do to the language hiring committees expect

Here's the translation, move by move, using the exact same list above:

-> convened the people who need to be in the room (or on the call): this is stakeholder identification and convening
-> named the goal and the deadline out loud so everyone heard the same version: this is establishing scope and success criteria
-> gotten people to say who owns what before they left: this is assigning roles and responsibilities (this is such a foundational piece of PM that you'll hear PMs refer often to "R&Rs" because life is short)
-> surfaced constraints and made a plan for them: this is risk identification and mitigation planning
-> agreed on how you'd stay in touch as the work moved forward: this is setting a comms plan and reporting cadence

Notice: you're not doing anything new. You're training your brain to think differently about what you're doing – and therefore, training yourself to speak differently about what it looks like. All we're upskilling is your vocab.

How to talk about this in interviews, reviews, and cover letters without sounding like a robot

If you're reading all this and thinking "okay, but I still want to sound like ME, and NOT the version that swallowed a project management textbook"... great instinct, and great news. I've got two next steps for you:

1) Practice owning it. A lot of times, we sound unnatural (or "like a textbook") because WE feel uncomfortable with owning an idea. So your first step here is getting comfortable. Before your next convening – whatever you're calling it – practice saying this sentence out loud: "I'm running the kick-off for this project."

Not "I'm just pulling everyone together." Not "I'm setting up a quick sync so we're all on the same page." Just "I'm running the kick-off."

Say it to yourself in the car. Name it in the calendar invite. Say it to your boss when they ask what's on your plate that week. The vocabulary starts becoming yours the moment you use it in a low-stakes sentence about a real thing you're actually doing.

2) Name, then translate. When you're talking about your work, you want to signal that YOU understand its importance and context in a broader management picture... but you actually don't need to harp too much on it to make that understood. Use that professional vocabulary once, then translate back into the language you're most comfortable with. In an interview, that sounds like: "I led the kick-off for that program, which really meant getting our program team, our development officer, and our evaluator in the same room early enough that we caught a timeline conflict before it became a problem." You said the word. You proved you did (and understood) the work. You didn't sound like a robot.

You also spent most of your time on the "home turf" you're most comfortable in and got to add a little color to what your understanding of running a kick-off looks like. Everybody wins.

Frequently asked questions (aka everyone's favorite section: MYTHBUSTING)

What if my kick-offs don't look like corporate kick-offs?

Great! The kick-off that looks like yours is the one that will do the most work for you long-term, and we define that by function, not format. If you're aligning a group on scope, roles, risks, and cadence before the work begins, you're running a kick-off, whether it happens over a shared spreadsheet, a slide deck, in a break room, or on a walking meeting between two program staff.

Do I need a formal project management certification to use this language?

Nope! This is how certified PMs speak, but the vocabulary is descriptive, not proprietary. You're describing work you've actually done, which means you're allowed to use the words that accurately describe it. You should! Anything else contributes to that "invisible work" problem. A certification can be useful for other reasons, but you don't need one to say "I facilitated a stakeholder alignment session" if that's what you did.

How do I add this to my resume without lying or inflating?

The trick is that this should ALWAYS, ALWAYS root back to work you ACTUALLY DID:

-> Make sure you're describing a specific project you actually ran.
-> Write out what you did in plain language, then translate each move into the professional term. This is how you make sure that all you're doing is translating your work, not inflating or outright inventing it. If you can't honestly say you did the move, don't include it.

What if my manager doesn't recognize this as "real" project management?

That's a signal about the environment, not about the work. In purpose-driven fields, the professional vocabulary is often absent even when the work is present, which means part of your job is teaching your manager to see it.* Using the language consistently is how that translation happens.

*It is sometimes an appropriate choice to give up on that particular battle. Most environments are amenable, over time, to absorbing new language and professional vocabulary. Some environments aren't. If you're in that latter environment, you'll have to use some judgment on whether it's worth sharing your journey with those around you.

Isn't this just repackaging what I already do?

Yep! That's the point, and we love to see it. Repackaging is not fraud. Repackaging is how invisible labor becomes visible labor, and how visible labor becomes credited labor. And that is how we ultimately grow a world where those around us value management work as much as we do. (Soapbox creeping back up......)

If this way of thinking about your work lands, we hope you'll join the Boundless Library! Subscribers get weekly, plain-language notes on management skills for purpose-driven professionals (like this one!), plus the vocabulary translations that help the work count on paper.