What’s in a name?

I’ve decided it’s time for a confession. Inevitably across the breadth of a long career in the UK and working with teams in multiple countries I’ve interacted with thousands of people – colleagues, clients, prospects and salespeople. Some I worked with just once, others on multiple occasions and many for long periods of time.

The thing that I had to mask across all of these interactions and relationships was a significant inability to remember names. I was always impressed with media salespeople who quickly learnt names and had the ability to recall a one-off meeting from years beforehand.

I’m aware of some of the techniques that should be used - repeating someone’s name back to them when introduced etc – but I never really mastered any of them. I went to a networking meeting recently, and marching up to somebody I recognised, I boldly said “Hello Ian”.

The fact his name is Mike was only a minor inconvenience.

On the occasions when my wife joined me for work events, we had one simple rule in place. If I’m talking to someone and don’t introduce you, that means I can’t recall their name, so please go ahead and introduce yourself. It seemed to work OK.

In many ways, the world of Teams and Zoom has suited me well as people’s names are on screen the whole time. Except for the occasional person who appears as iPhone 10 or something. Please don’t do that, it makes me seem forgetful.