What’s in a Title?

One of the biggest challenges faced so far as I've been spinning up my consulting career at Maxady was to settle on a title for my role. Colleen's title has been Chief Maximizer - a play on the fact that her most dominant Strength according to the Gallup Strengths assessment is Maximizer, and which is also the root of the name of her consultancy, Maxady. I share this as a top five Strength of my own, but my top Strength is Arranger. Chief Arranger doesn't have the same pop, so the search was on for an appropriate title.

Adding to this challenge is that my experience is quite broad. As the former President of a small business and VP of Marketing for a mid-market company, I earned experience in entrepreneurial leadership, culture-building, marketing expertise, operational excellence, and client relationship management that complements Colleen's strengths-based leadership and organizational development work.

When prompted, AI liked the title Chief Growth & Engagement Officer, offering that this title reflects my experience across business development, client success, marketing, communications, partnerships, and culture. However, that seemed a mouthful, given the simplicity of Colleen's title.

As we started exploring keywords to leverage in the title, we quickly landed on a familiar two-word structure and started to assemble Column A and Column B lists, where you could pick your own title from choosing one word from each column:

Column A:
Culture
Growth
Engagement
Leadership
Relationship
Chief
Strategic

Column B:
Advisor
Strategist
Consultant
Catalyst
Speaker
Leader
Officer
Executive
Connector
Builder
Coach

Culture Advisor. Engagement Leader. Strategic Coach. Relationship Strategist. We likely had more fun than we should playing with this "Consultant Title Generator". As we kept iterating on options, we ultimately landed on Chief Connector - leveraging the same structure as Colleen's Chief Maximizer. Colleen remains Maxady's visionary leadership expert, while I, Dave DelVecchio, become the Connector, focused on growing our practice and building relationships to expand Maxady's reach and impact.