What's in a Job Title?

Job titles look like administrative trivia and behave like constitutional documents. They tell people inside an organization who may commit what, who answers for which outcome, and how far up the building a question has to travel before it can be settled. They tell people outside it who is worth talking to. And they tell the holder something rather less useful, which is where they stand in a queue.

Titles drift. They inflate in the good years and get used as currency when salary budgets are frozen. New ones appear faster than anyone agrees what they mean. The result, in a great many organizations, is a title structure that no longer describes the work being done, and a workforce that has quietly stopped believing the structure means anything. That is not a cosmetic problem. If a title no longer signals accountability reliably, then accountability itself has become a matter of local knowledge, and local knowledge does not survive a reorganization.

The fundamentals of management titles

Underneath the local variation, the traditional management ladder is reasonably consistent, and it is worth restating because the distinctions are real ones.

• Supervisor. Accountable for the completion of work by others in the immediate term - a shift, a week, a task. The supervisor's judgement is applied to whether the work in front of them is being done correctly, and the time horizon is short and concrete.
• Manager. Accountable for the achievement of results over an annual or quarterly cycle. A manager is expected to plan within a given approach, to allocate resources across competing demands, and to deliver a number that was agreed in advance.
• Director. Accountable for performance beyond results: for how the results were obtained, for the health of the function producing them, and for whether the approach itself is still the right one. This is the first level at which the answer to a problem may legitimately be that the method must change.
• Vice-president. Accountable for a whole area of the enterprise, including its direction, its capability and its interaction with the other areas. At this level the work is substantially about trade-offs between functions rather than optimization within one.

Around that spine sit the variations: general managers, executive directors and country managers, each carrying a broad general-management remit over a defined unit or territory; and senior and executive vice-presidents, which usually indicate either a wider span or a stronger claim on succession, and occasionally indicate neither.

The C-suite, and why it kept growing

Senior executive titles have been standardizing, slowly and incompletely, around the chief-officer form. The core three are stable enough to describe plainly.

The chief executive officer holds the relationship with the board, carries the organization's direction and its external face, and is accountable for the whole. The chief operating officer carries the internal machinery: delivery, execution, and the coordination that makes the strategy actually happen. The two positions must work extremely closely and must trust one another completely, because the boundary between them is negotiated rather than defined, and an organization can tell within weeks when that negotiation has broken down. The chief financial officer carries financial stewardship, reporting integrity and the capital structure, and in most jurisdictions carries personal obligations that no other executive shares.

Then the list opens out. The chief information officer emerged as information technology stopped being a support function and became the medium the organization operates in. After that came a long tail: chiefs of staff and chief talent officers as senior variants of the top human-resources role, chief strategy officers, chief knowledge officers, chief risk officers, and a great many titles that appeared once and did not recur.

Some of this proliferation is genuine. When a domain becomes strategically material, elevating it to the executive table is the correct response. Much of it is not. A new chief title that carries no new accountability, no new decision rights and no new resources is a promotion in name only, and the organization reads it correctly as such.

The partnership variant

Professional firms use a parallel and largely incompatible vocabulary. The managing partner holds the firm's direction and the relationship among the partners. Partners hold ownership, client relationships and the firm's obligations, sharing in both the profits and the liabilities. Associate partners occupy an intermediate standing, carrying much of the work and some of the standing without the full ownership stake.

Translating between the corporate and partnership vocabularies is a recurring source of confusion, particularly in joint ventures and in professional firms that have incorporated. The two systems are answering different questions - one about hierarchy of judgement, the other about ownership and shared liability - and neither maps neatly onto the other.

A more rigorous account: requisite organization

The most serious attempt to put titles on a defensible footing came from the body of work known as requisite organization, and its central claim is worth taking seriously: the number of levels an organization needs is not a matter of taste, it is determined by the complexity of the work and the time span over which a role's judgement must reach before anyone can tell whether it was sound.

That yields a stratified account of organizational levels, roughly as follows. At the lowest strata, work is concrete and its quality is apparent quickly. Above that comes diagnostic work, where success has to be accumulated and assessed rather than observed. Above that, the creation of alternative pathways to a goal - the level at which a unit manager operates. Then the running of parallel processes with multiple routes to success, which is general-management work. Then the oversight of complex systems, and finally the construction of them, which is where a chief executive's judgement is supposed to operate.

The framework is demanding and it is not universally accepted, but it does something no other account of titles does: it gives a reason why a particular number of layers is right, and it makes over-layering visible as a defect rather than a preference. Organizations that discover they have three levels doing work of identical complexity have found a real problem, and requisite thinking is what let them see it.

Applying it: rethink, then redesign

The practical exercise is unglamorous. Take the titles actually in use. For each one, write down the accountability it is supposed to carry, the decisions its holder may take alone, and the time horizon over which its judgement will be assessed. Where two titles produce identical answers, one of them is doing no work. Where a title produces no answer at all, it is decoration. Where a level's answers are indistinguishable from the level above, the layer is spurious and is costing the organization both money and speed.

Then redesign, and do it in that order. Titles should follow from an account of the work, not precede it. Boards should take an interest in this, because title structure is one of the more reliable outward signs of whether an organization understands its own accountability - and accountability is board business, not merely a management convenience.

So: what is in a job title? Properly used, an unambiguous statement of what its holder answers for. Improperly used, a substitute for that statement. Organizations that keep them honest find a great many other things get easier. For the wider argument about accountability and its reporting, see Issue 8 on transparency, and for the whole library, the Leadership Acumen archive. Contemporary writing on organizational design in Harvard Business Review continues to return to the same questions.