Beyond Job Titles: A Flexible Approach to Organizational Design
Rigid job titles can impede effective collaboration and decision-making. You should prioritize clear roles over standardized titles.
Semantics
We were recently working with a client (a mid-size, well-established tech SaaS) where some of the leaders were dissatisfied with the use of the word ‘manager’ in some job titles. They felt that ‘manager’ should mean ‘ultimately accountable for hiring, growing and (if needed) firing other people’. In other words, a People Manager. Obviously this caused some bemusement with ICs whose job title included the word ‘manager’ (Project Managers etc).
Similarly, earlier in Andre’s career, he worked at a video games studio. Because they needed people who were experts in building entertainment experiences, their recruiting pipeline was full of people from TV and film studios. One day, there was a meeting where someone said, confidently, ‘a director is a manager of managers’ … almost immediately followed by one of the people from a film studio background saying ‘well, to me, a director is a person getting a film set to do the right things in the right order’. This then led to a conversation about the title of Producer. Needless to say they went around the houses a lot because the organization had not established any common definition of these words.
Commonality
Of course it would be obtuse to suggest that the various kinds of manager / director in the examples have nothing in common. If we squint, we see that they are all ‘people who are accountable for driving the results of something involving other people’.
Indeed, there have been many attempts to standardize levels of seniority and definitions of disciplines. The Radford database is a commonly used tool to establish job and compensation ladders, for example.
The problem with standardization, however, is that it’s an attempt to create a model of reality. While it might be useful a lot of the time, it can’t hope to address all the unique activities and roles in any given organization. As George Box put it, “all models are wrong, but some are useful”. More specifically, one of Box’s key points was that the value of a model lies in its ability to help us make decisions about the real world.
The Real World
In thinking about how real teams operate, roles are usually a lot more fluid than titles. Imagine that…
This week I’ll be mostly thinking about what the customer wants.
Next week I’ll be working with my engineering colleagues to sketch out the tech we’ll be using to deliver it.
The week after that, as the other technologists get started on the implementation, I’ll be mapping out a way to manage all the delivery deadlines.
In the above sequence, my role goes from Product Lead to Tech Lead to Project Lead. My title might be something like ‘Engineering Manager’ but that would most likely be because that’s the sort of title we’ve come to associate with someone who can generally do all of these things (at least to an acceptable standard).
Reclaiming The Word ‘Manager’
All of which brings us to our suggestions about where / when to use the word manager. Our guidance is as follows…
Manager should be a word used in labelling someone’s career choices and experience. If they’ve focused their energy on keeping projects running and effective, their expertise and experience make them a career ‘Project Manager’.
When someone is actually leading a specific thing, call them an ‘X Lead for Y’ where…
X is the domain: Project, Engineering, Product, Quality, etc.
Y is the scope: ‘our website’, ‘our ecommerce systems’, ‘all sales channels’, etc.
Additionally, neither a Manager nor a Lead should have to manage other people in order to gain such labels. That practice confuses people-leadership with general leadership.
More general confusion arises because, a lot of the time, our example person occupying the Project Lead role will happen to be a career Project Manager (that’s their craft). The key insight is that this isn’t always true.
Labels containing the word ‘Lead’ describe ‘what I’m accountable for right now’. Labels containing the word ‘Manager’ describe ‘what I’ve been hired to be nominally accountable for’ or ‘what I’ve built my career around doing’. These two framings overlap so often that job titles and roles frequently get conflated in organizations.
That said, by applying the principles above, you can drive your team towards a more modular, agile way of organizing work and collaboration.
What About…?
If you transition successfully to using role-centered language to describe peoples’ positions in the organization, one thorny problem remains. What are they supposed to put on their resume / LinkedIn page so that the rest of the world understands their focus and seniority?
The answer to this conundrum is to maintain a loose mapping of roles to titles. This isn’t too hard if you take a look at the bulk of someone’s work and accountability and ask yourself, “What job title would the rest of the world give that person?”
To take the video games example from above, there would be at least two such mappings…
Engineering Lead for The Platform Team (involving managing other managers)
=> Director Of Engineering
Creative Lead for The Film Unit
=> Director
Next Steps
Think about places in your organization where job titles are preventing people from making good decisions about ownership and collaboration patterns. Consider the following questions…
What are the most important ideas/questions that need someone to care for them in this team?
Examples: ‘What’s the definition of value?’, ‘How do we coordinate work?’
Can we group those questions into buckets where each bucket feels like a coherent area of accountability?
Examples: product-related, process-related
Can we identify the person who’s wearing the accountable hat for each area (noting that it’s OK for one person to wear multiple hats)?
Examples: Product Lead, Process Lead
Then assign those roles to people regardless of job title by assessing who’s best equipped to occupy them based on experience, fit and availability. This approach aligns well with the idea of an internal job marketplace.
If you’d like to dive deeper into the implications of applying this kind of organizational thinking to your team, add a question/comment here or set up a time to talk 🙌
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