I’ve recently moved into a new role at work.

Another promotion.

Very exciting. Very grown-up. Very “please update the organisational chart.”

My new title is:

Operational Excellence Lead.

Which sounds important.

It sounds like I should be walking through an airport in a navy suit while someone waits nearby holding an iPad with my surname on it.

It sounds like I have opinions about quarterly performance, transformation roadmaps, and whether we are truly leveraging our strategic capabilities.

It sounds like I probably use the phrase “future state” without irony.

But what does it actually mean?

Excellent question.

Operational excellence.

Am I making operations excellent?

Were they previously just okay?

Am I improving processes, driving consistency, fixing gaps, enabling teams, leading change, and generally making things work better?

Yes.

Am I yassifying the business?

Also yes.

And I’ve started to realise this is a very specific category of gay employment.

Gay men rarely seem to have straightforward job titles.

We are not simply “sales manager.”

We are Commercial Growth Partner.

Not “office manager.”

Workplace Experience Lead.

Not “training person.”

Capability and Enablement Specialist.

Not “helps everyone understand what is happening.”

Change and Communications Business Partner.

Not “fixes the mess.”

Operational Excellence Lead.

There is always a noun.

Then another noun.

Then a word like “strategy,” “experience,” “transformation,” “capability,” “engagement,” or “excellence.”

And somehow, despite the title containing several recognisable English words, nobody outside the company can tell what you actually do.

Sometimes nobody inside the company can either.

You tell someone your job title and they pause for half a second before saying:

“Oh, cool.”

Which is not a response.

It is a holding pattern.

They are waiting to see whether you are going to explain it or whether everyone can politely move on.

And I understand the confusion.

If someone told me they were the Senior Culture and Experience Optimisation Partner, I would assume one of three things:

They organise office cupcakes.

They are about to restructure my department.

Or they know how to make a very beautiful PowerPoint deck explaining why my role no longer exists.

Possibly all three.

Gay men seem particularly drawn to jobs that sit between departments.

We are not fully in operations.

Not fully in strategy.

Not fully in product.

Not fully in people.

Not fully in change.

We are simply somewhere in the middle, wearing a nice shirt and asking whether everyone has been consulted.

We connect things.

We translate things.

We turn chaos into a framework.

We take a problem that six people have been discussing in separate meetings and say, “Could we maybe put this into one document?”

Then everyone looks at us like we have invented electricity.

That is operational excellence.

Probably.

The vague title also gives you enormous freedom when people ask what you do.

You can adjust the explanation based on your audience.

To someone at work:

“I lead operational improvement, customer readiness, change governance, and enablement across the business.”

To a friend:

“I make things work better.”

To Mum:

“I’m a manager now.”

To someone at a party:

“I work in strategy.”

To a man whose attention span is already fading:

“Corporate stuff.”

All technically true.

And maybe that is the beauty of the vague job title.

It sounds senior without giving away enough information for anyone to ask a useful follow-up question.

“Operational Excellence Lead” could mean almost anything.

I could be improving business processes.

I could be developing frameworks.

I could be coaching teams.

I could be standing beside a printer whispering, “You can do better.”

It is mysterious.

Corporate.

Slightly camp.

Like a drag name designed by Deloitte.

And look, I am making fun of it, but I am also proud.

Because underneath the title is a job I have been working towards without necessarily knowing the exact name it would eventually have.

I have always been someone who notices when things do not connect.

When information is missing.

When teams are working from different versions of the truth.

When a process makes perfect sense to the person who designed it and absolutely no sense to the person expected to use it.

When a change is technically ready but nobody has thought about what the customer or frontline team will actually experience.

I like pulling those threads together.

I like taking something complicated and making it clearer.

I like finding the gap between what was intended and what is actually happening.

I like asking the annoying question early so it does not become an expensive problem later.

That is the work.

The title is just the fancy little hat we put on top of it.

And maybe that is true of most of these vague corporate roles.

Behind every “Experience,” “Transformation,” “Capability,” and “Excellence” title is usually a person trying to make a large organisation function slightly more like a group of humans who have spoken to each other.

The title sounds abstract because the work is broad.

It crosses teams.

It changes depending on the day.

It involves planning, problem-solving, communication, influence, documentation, judgement, and occasionally asking why something has been done that way for six years when everyone agrees it does not work.

You cannot fit that neatly into “does admin.”

Although, on some days, it is absolutely admin.

So yes, I have been promoted.

I am now the Operational Excellence Lead.

What does that mean?

I will continue to work that out once the business cards arrive.

But for now, I think it means I get to take the things I am already good at—connecting people, translating complexity, improving how work gets done, making change easier to understand—and do them with more influence, more responsibility, and a job title that sounds like I own at least one expensive coat.

And honestly?

That feels right.

Because gay men have spent generations taking things that were confusing, inefficient, poorly communicated, and lacking in style and making them better.

Nightlife.

Fashion.

Pop music.

Chosen family.

Corporate governance.

It was only a matter of time before someone formally put us in charge of excellence.

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There is something slightly absurd about reaching a point in your career where your job title becomes harder to explain at the exact same time that you become more certain of what you are good at.

The title gets vaguer.

The purpose gets clearer.

I know the kind of problems I want to solve.

I know the way I want people to experience change.

I know that clarity, consistency, and good communication are not boring administrative details. They are often the difference between something working and something merely being launched.

So maybe Operational Excellence Lead is the right title after all.

I take operations.

I find the gaps.

I make them more excellent.

And where appropriate, I yassify the framework.