Does your title matter?
When I am in meetings with clients, one thing I try to do is to understand how the organisation works, the different departments, what the decision-making is like, and what everyone’s mandate is within the organisation.
In these analyses, I often look at the names we put in our titles.
When I was a child, I remember there was only one question: Who is in charge?
When I grew up I started to hear the word CEO and the C-suite…
Have you ever wondered where the word CEO comes from?
Yes, “Chief Executive Officer”. That’s as far as we all (or at least, many of us) get.
But what do these words mean? If we develop this term we have:
• “Chief” from the French “chef” (“the leader”) which comes from the Latin “caput” and means “head”. If you ask me, this word should be enough to describe the role of the CEO.
• “Executive. From the Latin “exsecutus” originally its meaning was “performing or carry into effect”, and with time it became a person with authority to make decisions, … The curious thing, and as I will comment in the following lines, is that the word is closely related to “execution” which has a connotation of following orders, rather than making decisions.
• “Officer” from the Latin “officium” meaning “duty, service”. Over time, this word has also derived a sense of a person of authority, or one responsible for enforcing rules and laws.
That is to say that the three little words composing C.E.O., mean more or less the same thing.
Why did this term start to be used to define the person in charge of the company?
It turns out that the word comes from the US (as always giving marketing and resonance to something that simply saying “boss” would do), to describe the “leader” of the company “in charge of executing” the strategies defined by the board of directors. In other words, CEO could be called, “Chief Execution Officer”.
What I find funny, is how a term initially defined for large corporations, has become so popular in all types of companies and today we accept it in all types of companies, even when it should not really be applicable.
By extension and logic, the same as for the CEO, this reflection applies to the C-Suite, with the difference that instead of three words meaning the same thing, we have two; “Chief” and “Officer”.
Again, in my opinion, the Latin term “caput” “head” of a department, unit, division… would be a better fit. I guess the word “head” has a connotation of “thinking person”, and sometimes there is no such correlation with the actual person in that position, hence the term Chief Officer may fit better in many contexts.
Apart from the C-Suite, the rest of the organisations have very different structures with different titles. One name I often see, and it is confusing, is the vice-president. Intuitively, I think of it as the second in command. But in some organisations, Vice-Presidents report to Senior-Vice Presidents, who report to Directors. I have also seen the opposite, directors reporting to vice-presidents. Anyway, I often have to ask what that person does in the organisation to really understand his or her position.
In theory, “with great power comes great responsibility”, but the nonsense of many organizations is that the bigger the organization, the more difficult it is to discern the accountability and responsibility of the different roles in the company. To the point that in some companies I see titles that sound very important and that in reality have less responsibility than the lowest levels of a small company.
I don’t miss at all the time I spent in meetings and absurd committees where nothing was decided, or what was decided was far from reality surrounded by very nice people with large titles on their business cards.
Have you ever wondered how important the title on your business card is?
I was one of those who never worried about what was on my card. However, in time, I think that what you put on your card does matter.
A lot or a little?
If you ever get the chance to start from scratch, you will understand the value of the title, but more importantly, you will learn to put it in perspective and know who valued you for the person you were, not the title on your card.
I still think that more important than the title you have, it is what you do, and who you do it with.
As a very good teacher I had used to say, the role you have in the company is to do more than what your role says, and more than what you thought you had to do, to have more responsibility than your authority and to make decisions taking into consideration everything.
