The Job titles inflation

This morning edition of The Age, an article’s caught my attention.

Entitled “Job Title inflation”, this article is about what seems to be a huge trend during the days – The renaming of job positions.

That made me think about the reasons why the jobs positions are in such accelerate movement. Is the Job Title Inflation an ego booster or an answer to the modern needs?

Either being a ego booster or filling of needs is the Job Title inflation a good marketing tool inside and outside the companies?

I don’t have the answers but yes I’d like to think about it!

What happened to corporate hierarchies where there were only a few chiefs and many, many subordinates reporting to them?

Betsey Stevenson, professor of business and public policy at Wharton says that Job title inflation seems to go hand in hand with the flattening of the organization. People want to be distinguished in some way from everyone else, but in a flat organization there is less hierarchy and therefore less opportunity to be distinguished. One good thing about hierarchy is you can climb a corporate ladder. If there is no ladder, there is nothing to climb. Employees want to feel they can get promoted, but because some companies have a very flat structure, there are no jobs to get promoted into. So the company starts to invent titles for people they value and want to keep.

Is it one way to the companies to compete in the marketplace offering key employees a little more money but also a more prestigious title that would help their resumes down the road?

According to Peter Cappelli, director of Wharton’s Center for Human Resources, “the original title inflation goes back to the 1970s during wage and price controls when you couldn’t give employees an increase higher than a certain level, but you could give them a promotion. Your compensation wasn’t going up, but your [job title] was. That began to die in the 1980s when we started restructuring and flattening the organizational chart. There just weren’t that many promotions anymore. Then, in certain industries, when labour markets got tight, you began to see title inflation again.”

It seems that many times it is cheaper to give people a title increase than a raise increase.

We’re all familiar with titles like chief executive officer, chief financial officer and chief operating officer.

But what about chief talent officer, chief cultural officer, chief innovation officer, chief privacy officer, chief reputation officer, chief apology officer, chief geek, wiki chief officer, to name just some of the more contemporary titles that have cropped up in today’s companies?

Companies send a big message about their images when they create positions as chief blogging officer.

What’s the first thing that comes up on your mind about this company?

You should think about it, and so should the companies.

If this is well coordinated can signal the importance of that particular issue to the corporation.

A Company can have a chief diversity officer if they realize that diversity is an important initiative. Inside the company, a title of chief learning officer suggests that “learning is important as opposed to just having someone in the HR department look at training and other stuff”.

But what does it happen when the titles/positions of President and Vice-President don’t mean “what they used to mean” (whatever that was). Is that a sign that title inflation has gone too far? Don’t forget that even that a VP title did not come with a raise, emotionally, people would still much rather be called vice-president or team captains than senior analysts. They can hand businesses cards over, update their profiles at Myspace.com, Orkut, Linked, facebooks and start their self promotion using Blogs.

When the title is hollow, the individual (and everyone else) knows it. However, when an individual represents an organization in a meeting or formal gathering of many other organizations, it’s critical that the individual at least appear (via title?) to be a peer with others at the table. If not, unless the individual possesses extraordinary communication skills, it’s likely that he and his organization will be at a strategic disadvantage.

But as I said at the start, this post is provocative and I’ll learn more and perhaps write down more about it.

Ahhh…by the way, below a list of positions (some funny) extracted from The Age’s article and comments:

- Supreme Flight Commander – CEO of a major Australian clothing line
- Environmental Services Engineers – Cleaners at resort
- Fearless Leader – CEO
- Chief Fantasist – Douglas Adams’ position in his company The Digital Village
- Director of First Impressions – Receptionists
- Lost Time Manager – formerly known as sick attendance recordkeeper
- “Super Tech’s” – Supervisory Technician
- “GOD” – General Operations Director
- Hygiene Assistant – Cleaner
- Ambient Replenishment Assistant – Shelf stacker
- Marketing and Promotions Assistant – leaflets delivery.
- Underwater Ceramic Supervisor – Dishwashers

Do you know more?
Cheers
Lucio Dias Ribeiro

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