Giving Titles to your Staff
When I was young…
My first job in the tech-industry was an internship at RIM back when I was only 19 years old. My manager was the best kind of manager you could have at that age. He did something really neat — he gave me this really cool title of “Engineering Development Manager” even though I was young and fresh (and I didn’t manage anyone). His philosophy was two-fold: 1) if he gave me a good title, it would help me out in the future; with essentially no cost to him. But 2) giving me a bigger title would allow me to say to customers that called “I am the manager” when they asked to speak to a manager. (!)
Soon after my work-term ended I heard that HR at RIM told my boss he’d have to stop giving new students such big titles — it was making the other managers jealous.
But that big title at such a young age gave some much needed beef to my resume at a time in my life when finding things to put under “past experience” was a struggle. (Now my biggest concern is what colour of glitter to glue to the outside edge of my resume).
Now that I am a manager, titles are something I think about. If you run a startup, you may soon have people working for your company and this will be of concern.
Some of the patterns I’ve seen in startup title-giving include:
- Giving (overly) formal titles like “CEO” “Managing Director”, etc.
- Giving humorous titles like “Human Canonball” and “Chief C++ Wrangler”
- Not giving titles at all
Here’s what I think of each option:
Overly formal titles
The problem with giving overly formal titles is it seems like you’re pretending. Everyone knows, when you’re a two person startup, that no one is really Chief Financial Officer and no one is really a Managing Director. Sure you might be able to fool old-classmates who see your title on Facebook but all they have to ask is “how big are you?” to know its a joke. Investors will understand but probably still chuckle behind closed doors.
Humorous titles
I’ve seen a bunch of companies do job postings for silly-sounding jobs that sound like “Chief software Monkatech,” and “Super-Duper Code Debungler”.
These are positions your staff aren’t really going to put on their resumes, you are not actually going to use when doing investor talks, and are funny for all of 1 week.
No, I get it, the companies that use these titles are trying to show that they aren’t like other big, serious companies that use overly formal titles. Still…
Not giving titles at all
Etsy‘s CEO has a great post about not giving titles. He says:
We’ve deliberately ditched the corporate lexicon that cherishes its “Departments” and “Managers” [....] There are exceptions to this, though: sometimes when talking to people from other companies it’s beneficial to call Matt something weighty like VP of Communications; and on paper for legal purposes I’m the CEO & President [...]
Ditching titles is a great idea, I think, and the quotation above shows how there can be exceptions. Read the full post from Etsy’s blog to learn more about how they use teams and team leads as their structure.
My advice
What works well for us here is, instead of giving titles, we use sections. So instead of saying “Senior Software Developer” beside a person’s name on a business card or profile page, we might say “Software Development” — this makes it clear where they work, without specifying their theoretical “level”.
We do use titles here when we feel its necessary. We try to make sure, however, that titles are never used internally to assert hierarchy over other staff. No one should think they have more power because of a title — this goes with the team idea. At the same time, people need to know what they are responsible for.
But seriously, stop worrying so much about titles and get some work done ;)