The perils of mangling a colleague’s name

“I would like people to pronounce my name correctly,” she told one of my colleagues who checked on the matter in an interview with her during the conference.

In an effort to make it clear the Gs were hard, Georgieva said she once tried to spell it with a U after each G, so it looked like Gueorguieva. But this caused so much confusion she reverted to the original. “Luckily, my first name is very easy to pronounce, so I encourage people to just call me Kristalina.”

Georgieva denied rumours that she took a dim view of underlings who mauled the pronunciation and, as the bearer of a tricky name myself, I suspect she is very used to answering to all sorts of permutations of the original.

(For the record, my name is pronounced Pill-EAT-ah, as opposed to PILL-eat-ah or, as automated voice transcription services are fond of writing, Polluter.)

Still, Georgieva’s story underlines the hazards of mucking up names at work, and not just if the owner of the name is one’s boss.

At COP28, I moderated a panel of speakers that included the acclaimed Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate, whose second name is constantly pronounced Nah-KAH-tay.

Just before the microphones went live, I leaned over and asked her if that was definitely correct. No, she said, “it’s NAH-kah-tay”, with a slight emphasis on the first syllable.

This was a flummoxing piece of news to receive as the microphones switched on, and a reminder of the perils of assuming anything when it comes to names.

For this reason, I was pleased to receive an email from a woman in the COP28 president’s media team in Dubai named Nikkie Shike.

Her email signature included something I hadn’t seen before: “Nikkie Shike pronounced: Ni-ki Shi-kay.”

When I caught up with her later, she said she works for the PR firm Edelman, which had done a campaign on the importance of getting names right for Race Equality Matters, a group that tackles racial inequalities in the workplace.

Polling shows name botching is common at work, and irksome, so the group suggested spelling out the right pronunciation on email footers and social media sites such as LinkedIn, which lets you add a recording of your name on your profile.

Shike was among a number of Edelman staff who took up the email signature idea, which she says has been very useful.

“I’ve found that since I’ve used the signature, my clients get it right, my colleagues get it right, so it’s been a nice prompt,” said Shike, who has a Japanese father, an Australian mother and recently moved from Melbourne to Brussels.

When I mentioned the email explanation idea to another economist at COP28, Bogolo Kenewendo, Botswana’s former trade minister, she immediately saw the benefits. That makes sense considering how many people get her name wrong, even in Africa.

It’s pronounced “Bo-HOH-low,” with a ‘hoh’ that “sounds like a Spanish J”, and she still remembers studying ballet as a teenager in the US where, for an entire year, her teacher called her “Bungalow”.

“I didn’t have the guts to correct her because I was new,” Kenewendo told me, adding that she had done a spectacular bit of name-butchering herself at COP28, when she referred to French climate envoy, Stéphane Crouzat, as “Stephanie”.

“He said, ‘It’s Stephane!’” she hooted. “And I said, ‘Well why is there an ‘e’?”

That’s a fair point. But so is the reason that Kenewendo, who used to go by her middle name Joy because it was easier to pronounce, decided to switch back to Bogolo.

“As I got older I realised the power that comes with my Setswana name,” she said. “It’s a daily reminder of who my parents hoped I would be.”

Financial Times