When I was young, my middle name caused no end of confusion. With a first name like Glenis, people often misread Denise as Dennis, as in Dennis the Menace, the mischievous cartoon character always plotting trouble.
My mum enjoyed a good laugh, so I wouldn’t put it past her to find the mix‑ups entertaining. But as a child, I took it seriously. I even went through a phase of reading Dennis the Menace comics, trying to understand this character people kept projecting onto me. He was cheeky, disruptive, always up to something. None of which matched who I was, but the label lingered long enough to make me wonder.
That small childhood confusion taught me something I now see in leadership teams every day:
how easily a label becomes a story, and how quickly a story becomes an imitation and a limitation.
Mislabeling is harmless in childhood, but in organisations it becomes a quiet menace – shaping expectations, narrowing possibilities, and obscuring who people really are and who they are trying to become.
Much of my work now is helping leaders look again at their group dynamics. Beyond the shorthand. Beyond the caricatures. Beyond the inherited narratives. Groups of senior and middle managers often describe themselves as a team. Yet when I highlight the characteristics of a working group versus those of a high‑performing team, they quickly realise they begin as a working group. Only after practising the discipline of interrelating do they understand what it truly takes to become a team.
The early work I did on myself, deciding whether to give in to being called Dennis, features in my current work. I now understand how and why I help senior leaders assess whether their own efforts warrant designation as a member of the Senior Leadership Team. By providing initial clarity, I let them see that they could be a siloed working group of senior leaders, rather than showing the dynamics of a team. The menace is when groups within organisations mislabel themselves.
Mislabeling yourself as a senior leadership team becomes especially problematic when your annual report announces to shareholders and stakeholders that you are a team, while in reality you are operating in silos as a working group. That is the real menace in leadership:
misrepresenting the senior group dynamics.
From these thoughts about names and labels its important to remember that people, and groups, thrive when they’re recognised accurately, not through someone else’s misreading.
This piece was written in response to the WordPress Daily Prompt: “What is your middle name? Does it carry any special meaning?”
I’m Glenis Wade, an Executive Team Coach who writes about the small human moments that reveal big leadership truths.
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