In an effort to stand out in a competitive world many career-minded professionals try their hand at personal branding. Finding your niche is a useful endeavor, but when it degrades into ill-conceived monikers like IT Ninja or Marketing Architect, you come across as amateurish.

Recently the trend has jumped the shark into the girl power world with so juvenile titles as Girl Boss and Boss Bade. There are two problems with such terms like…besides being obviously offensive to many people.

First, if you feel like you have to give special branding to the fact that you’re “the boss”, you’re probably not ready to be one. Besides, employees don’t want a boss. They want an inspiring leader, a visionary founder or a competent CEO. Focus on what you do via an official role and then let your actions speak to style. Self-congratulatory titles speak more to insecurity than empowerment.

The second issue is, of course, calling attention to your gender (or any other attribute). First of all, who cares? You’re an individual not a representative of every female on the planet. The descriptor doesn’t offer your stakeholders anything of substance. What’s worse, it puts focus on you rather than where it should be – your customers, your employees, and your investors.

Combining these two words or other similar descriptors into a cute title is…well… just “cute”, as in not to be taken seriously… and I doubt that’s what the professional was going for.

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