What's in a Name?

What does the future hold for job title hyperinflation?

By Emile-Jean-Horace Vernet (Sotheby's) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

A few years ago I was at a meeting attended by a group of franchisees who sold medical insurance to corporate businesses and the self-employed.  The chairman went around the room and asked each in turn how they preferred to refer to themselves when introducing their business to potential clients or when out networking - many suggested the term ‘advisor’, but by far the most common label was that of ‘consultant’. Having gone around the room, he then posed a further question: “what’s wrong with being a salesman?” Seemingly everything. He was met with a room full of blank faces and a tacit admission that salesman was not the title that any of the people seated in that room had the intention of adopting any time soon, despite the appropriateness of the label. 

So, what’s in a name? Names do matter, as my previous example suggests, whether they are our personal names, and the umbrage that we take when they are mispronounced or forgotten, or else those arbitrary and temporal names and labels that we are given with our job. At a basic level, the job title should provide a signpost that signifies what we do and what our responsibilities are. One of the other roles that a title fulfils, most importantly for its owner, is that it can confer status and engender respect – as such, it can also be a very powerful, yet cost-effective, tool in encouraging the recruitment and retention of staff.  The latter has perhaps been the most compelling reason why we have seen such drastic changes in the way in which job titles are ascribed, particularly in competitive marketplaces for talent, such as Silicon Valley.

The upshot of this is that we have been witness to an increasingly upward trend of ‘job title inflation’, with a greater use of more elaborate and expressive titles.  Now we are seemingly in a period of hyperinflation, in which excessive and hyperbolic names are increasingly outdoing each other! There is no doubt that a title can be a quick and cost-effective method to improve recruitment of new people and aid the retention of loyal staff, but the overuse of the term ‘manager’, has now rendered it a poor indicator of the management responsibilities of the individual concerned and it has led to a certain degree of cynicism regarding its continued misuse.  More recently, Apple has christened the staff who work in their stores ‘geniuses’ and a number of Silicon Valley businesses have swelled the ranks of their senior management teams with the addition of a Chief Happiness Officer: someone charged with the contentment of the workforce. With regard to the former, I tend to set the bar fairly high when it comes to someone I might choose to call a genius, Stephen Hawking and Isaac Newton certainly fit that description, but the guy that knows how to get my iPad working again deserves my respect, but not the epithet of ‘genius’.

Whilst the increased use of evermore elaborate job tiles seems to show no sign of abating, there is one company that is bucking the trend, Zappos, the online clothing and shoe shop. Whilst they are still retaining, what they term, ‘hashtag names’ to help external stakeholders to identify who does what, internally they have decided to do away with job titles altogether. This is a bold move, but it is also motivated by the fact that job titles are increasingly a very imprecise and ineffective way of indicating what someone does within the organisation. A member of your team may find themselves involved in a range of tasks, from project management to marketing, and trying to shoehorn their responsibilities into a single name, increasingly misunderstands the complexity of the modern workplace and the role of the individual within it.  It will be interesting to see how the Zappos experiment develops.

Nevertheless, names and labels do matter to people – as those franchisees demonstrated in their dislike of the label salesman - and the trend of job title hyperinflation is sure to increase for the foreseeable future, both in the corporate world and also amongst the self-employed.  What it may prompt is a debate about whether titles will matter so much longer term, in a world in which we increasingly need people with a range of skills and abilities and where the lines between specialist tasks are increasingly blurred.  It doesn't take a genius to work out that we may become a little cynical of some of these more outrageous titles, but if I was a ‘futurologist’ - which is a real job title - I might predict that the period of job title hyperinflation hasn't yet fully run its course.

Written by Will Trevor, Founder and Training Consultant at Windsor Training
Email: will.trevor@windsortraining.net