To outshine in dignity is more offensive than in personal attractions. To pose as a personage is to be hated: envy is surely enough... Those who insist on the dignity of their office, show they have not deserved it, and that it is too much for them.
Baltasar Gracián, 1647 (tr. Joseph Jacobs, 1892)
The diagnosis is surgical: insisting on the honours of your office reveals that the office is too big for you, since those who fill a role never need to point at it. Esteem cannot be demanded, only earned and received; the harder you claim it, the less of it exists to claim. And there is a practical circuit beneath the psychology: rank paraded creates distance, distance starves information, and starved leaders make exactly the errors that end ranks (maxim 74's supply lines). The secure alternative is to be valued for the qualities the position merely houses, so that if the chair vanished tomorrow, most of the authority would remain standing in your shoes.
Practice
- Let the office speak through its work; introduce yourself by name, not by designation, and watch who already knows.
- Audit your protocol needs honestly: which honours do you require, and what would their absence actually cost you? The list is a map of insecurity.
- Build chair-independent authority: the judgment, the record, the relationships that would survive the designation; that is the part rooms actually obey.
Use this when
- Use this hardest immediately after elevation; the first weeks decide whether you wear the rank or the rank wears you.
- Use it reading others: the senior who needs his full title in every sentence has told you where he is weakest.
Ignore this when
- Don't abandon the legitimate dignity of an office you hold in trust; some protocol protects the institution, not your ego, and that kind you maintain (maxim 103's due limits).
- Don't parade humility either; conspicuous plainness is the same insistence, printed in reverse.
A picture of it
A senior consultant walks into a new client as a name, not a title: no corner seat claimed, no fuss at reception, an hour of questions before a single assertion. Half the room takes him for the junior of his own team, until he speaks, and the room reorganises itself around the only rank that transfers, which is knowing things. He never once mentions his designation. The contract renews, and the client cannot quite say why this one felt safer than the alternative.
Real rank walks in unannounced and gets recognised. The other kind announces itself and gets tolerated.