About a year and a half ago, I had an interesting discussion with my boss. He wanted to give me a promotion—woo!—but there was one catch: he didn’t know what my title should be. Rather than tell me my title, he wanted me to think about it and then discuss it together.
This struck me as slightly bananas. The design firm I currently work for is the smallest workplace I’ve ever been in. (Even my internship at a local newspaper had more employees.) In my other roles, there was a set cadence of job titles, ranks that placed my colleagues into a (usually) clear hierarchy of command.
In the world of A/E/C marketing, I didn’t think it was much different. Even when there was only a single marketer at a firm, it still felt that there was a clear hierarchy of job titles. Depending on the organization size, it looks something like this:
- Marketing Coordinator
- Senior Marketing Coordinator
- Marketing Manager
- Director of Marketing
I had made it to that second level of “Senior Marketing Coordinator,” but my boss wasn’t satisfied with the next level up. I can’t recall him succinctly expressing his reasons for feeling uneasy with “Marketing Manager,” but I understand now that it had something to do with the challenges that arise with thinking outside the “box” of my own title. (I cover the history of “think outside the box” in another post.)
Austin Kleon provides a similar take on the problem:
Job titles can mess you up. Job titles, if they’re taken too seriously, will make you feel like you need to work in a way that befits the title, not the way that fits the actual work.
My boss didn’t want the job title of “Marketing Manager” to “mess me up.” He worried that I would curtail myself to work that made sense within that job title.
Together, we came up with “Strategic Growth Manager” as my title. The openness of the title suits the wide-ranging work that I like to do within the firm, but it also has one added benefit: I always have to tell people more.
When people ask about my role within the firm, I can’t leave things at: “Oh, I’m the Strategic Growth Manager.” “Strategic what manager?” they ask. “Oh, well, I help oversee the growth strategy for the firm, including marketing and new business processes.”
My boss’s ingenious gambit was one step removed from what some organizations have done, of removing job titles entirely. The erasure of hierarchy requires employees to articulate their own understanding of how they fit into the workplace, rather than the organization mandating that hierarchy from the top down.
Taylor Coe 