Matt Cardwell used to be the Web Marketing Director at Quicken Loans. Not any more.
He came across a post of mine called Who cares about your job title – tell me what you DO! and was inspired to kill of all the traditional job titles.
He explained it further in an email to employees:
If you are concerned about someone not recognizing how important you are because you no longer have a standard title, then here’s your chance to create a title for yourself that will convey exactly how important you are. And because you are creating it, it will be all yours. No one else will have that title. Think of the conversations your new title will start with complete strangers. Think of the opportunities it can create for you in terms of expressing who you are, not what someone CALLS you.
“But what if I don’t like my description in three months …” you ask? What if what I do CHANGES? Well, then you can change your description. It’s that simple. No one ever stays the same … we are all growing … so let your “title” do the same when it’s time.
Here’s your chance. You have until the end of the day to let us all know who you are. Have fun, be creative, be humorous, but above all, be real and true. Remember, this will be on your e-mail signature, so please be aware of that.
I can’t wait to see what all of you come up with.
DEATH TO TITLES!
So what titles did people come up with? Well, as I said, Matt is no longer the Web Marketing Director. He’s now the Idea Salesman, Energy Focuser and People Unleasher. Some other new titles are:
- Royal Storyteller & Propaganda Minister
- Supreme Challenger of the Status Quo & Wicked Web Site Innovator
- Innovation Maven and Revenue Raiser
- Mastermind of Possibilities, Visual Linguist, and Czar of the High Fiber Revolution
- Art Juggler
- Flasher
- Idea Launcher
- Conceptologist
- Head Brother In Charge of Chat
- Reality Check Provider
- Sentence-smoother-outer with an Ad Girl twist
- Pixelardo da Vinci
Woo-hooooo!!
I know the whole choose-your-own-wacky-job-title things has been done before, most notably during the dotcom days, but I still love it. And I still marvel at the fun, creative titles people come up with.
Death to business titles, indeed!
A great big thank you to Kelly LaVaute for blogging about this!
Glad to hear that other comapnies are doing this as well.
My company (Officejobs.com) goes with the , um…, untraditional titles.
Me: Digital Provocateur (web side of things)
Recruiter #1: Chief Togethering Officer
Recruiter #2: Director of Bringing In Cool People
CEO: CEO, Surrounded By Great People
And so on. Great company to work for; the titles reflect the culture. I *love* my title – describes me perfectly, describes my role and lets me get away with a lot of unconventional thinking.
I am a registered nurse and adult nurse practitioner. Because everyone “assumes” they know exactly what I do, my business card says, “Expert Obstacle Remover.” I received this title from a retiring Department Head who gave descriptive titles to all the nurses who had worked for him. I think it fits what I do quite nicely.
I love the idea. It seems like titles only matter at large companies anyway. As long as you are delivering value to your clients they quickly forget what your title is. It seems like when someone does not deliver value and a client needs to complain they being to ask who is this person’s supervisor? How do I speak to the CEO, then titles begin to matter. Keep the value up and your client won’t give two-cents if your are director of this or manager of that. Value rules.
Justin
http://www.justindriscoll.net/blog
Dave: Excellent, excellent titles! And kudos to Officejobs.com for not going with the boring titles.
Mary K: Expert obstacle remover – not bad. And to have it conferred upon you from a (hopefully) respected manager is even better :o)
Justin: Exactly. And part of the problem with titles is, that it’s now about the title, not the value! This is what Quick Loans found and why they decided to kill off titles.
okay, I’m one who is not embracing the “cute, clever” side of the titles. I latched on to the concept of explaining what it is that you _really_ do, not what HR says you do. So, at Quicken Loans, I’m now known as “Making sure people find us when they search.” Death to “SEO Manager”!
This post really struck a chord with me and then I was just reminded of it again today while participating in a discussion on the ASTD discussion boards. This discussion thread is a good supplement to what you are discussing in this post. Thanks for the enlightenment.
http://community.astd.org/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/6401041/m/10110634/p/1
Some people do go overboard with the creative titles though. Just look at the profiles on Twitter – half of them are “evangelists” of some kind, or “advocates”, or some other ridiculous buzzword.
I’m all for killing off job titles as they really aren’t a great way to describe who you ARE. But let’s be careful not to just make the same cookie-cutter titles with newer wording.
Now that is an interesting change. Do they just say Analyst, Supervisor, Manager, Director to differentiate between the different levels of authority ? Also, this is an interesting article Alex. Would you mind if I post this on my site http://www.jobtitles.org ? I will duly link to your website as the source/credit/copyright holder ?