Late on Monday I received a call from a client in Chicago to postpone a team building session because of the impending snowstorm , at least three of members of the team were not going to be able to make the meeting. When I learned about all of the flight cancellations at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, I thought the decision to reschedule was a good one. The irony is that I am hunkered down in my office in Albuquerque, NM watching the snow pile up here! Yes, Virginia, it does snow in New Mexico , in fact, the official seasonal snow totals for Albuquerque are twice that of Minneapolis, MN! Go figure!
Since today’s snowfall will slow things down considerably, I thought I’d catch up on various projects and administrivia that mounts up when I’m on the road. I came across a file labeled “job titles. Early in my career, I became amused by some of the names people had for the jobs they held and started keeping track of them. For example, back in the early ˜90′s, when the British company Grand Metropolitan owned Pillsbury, the Pillsbury leadership team decided to organize the company around eating occasions. So that decision lead to the job title “Vice President of Breakfast , I always liked that one. I found my most unusual job title at a metaphysical conference I attended couple of years back at the invitation of some friends in Santa Fe, NM. This New Age gathering included many organic and health foods companies as well as massage therapists, tarot card readers, and astrologers and was quite fascinating and pleasantly unconventional. At one booth, was a young man who described himself as a “neoarchaic ecstatic shamanic technician. I never really got a satisfying explanation of what he actually did but he seemed very happy about it.
My point in this story is that the culture in some organizations places a lot of emphasis on job titles and the position power that comes from them. I have witnessed emotional pleas on the part of employees for their company to change their title by adding designations such as “director or “vice-president because those titles would provide “more credibility , even though such a designation would be totally inappropriate. I have also worked in organizations where job titles were totally absent , in order to find out who did what people had to talk with each other , and this approach works well in smaller organizations. Regardless of job title, we still need to clearly spell out the performance expectations for each job and ensure that everyone is contributing to the overall results of the organization in some way. That’s where the effort needs to occur.
Finally, a question that people often asked us in grade school was “what do you want to be when you grow up? In my era we answered, doctor, teacher, fireman, police officer, etc. I wonder how many elementary school students today would say a barista at Starbucks or even a neoarchaic ecstatic shamanic technician? My how jobs change.