Link This | Email this | Blog This | Comments (2)

Job Titles: What’s the Point?

December 28, 2008 Titles have long been one of the givens in business, born alongside the concepts of hierarchy, bureaucracy and social structure that were fathered by Max Weber as part of his organizational, behavioral and societal theories.  At the time, labeling positions had as much to do with placement in an organization as it did with naming a role by function.  But today it seems that the idea of identifying jobs has spun completely out of control.  There are titles like “Director of First Impressions,” “Chief Evangelist,” and “CEO of Love.”  Now c’mon. 

Personally, I’ve never been a big fan of titles due to their tendency to create a dependency on authority as being superior and subordination as being mandatory.   Frankly, I find the whole notion stifling and small-minded, or at least I did.  That is until I worked for a title-less company where our baby pictures next to our names were all that identified us on our business cards.  Quirky?  Yes.   Quite ingenious?  I’d say so.  But there were problems.  No one outside our company knew what I did.  I was constantly explaining my role and using the titles of similar jobs in other companies to try to bring clarity to the situation.  I wasted more time doing that than it was worth.  Finally, to make life easier on everyone, I gave up and just called myself what the rest of the industry did.  The language had already been established and trying to change it, no matter how innovative an idea, was just too hard.   After that, I realized that titles had value in that they help us organize ourselves.  Plain and simple.  So what.  People needed to understand my role and yes, my rank.  Not a big deal.  Thanks to that situation, I learned that, like many things, they are what you allow them to be. 

Posted by Donna Flagg on December 28, 2008 | Comments (2)