Why titles don't reflect true "seniority"
People think about titles way too much... Director this. VP that. Associate/Senior/Distinguished/SVP/EVP...
Forget titles. Let’s talk about real seniority… the kind that leads to more responsibility, influence, and compensation over time. Look around your company... who's more senior, the person who runs a large established team or the person who is leading a new line of business? The person who has lots of reports or the individual contributor working on a strategic project? At most companies, seniority is culturally defined by the size of your team, the size of your budget, or the scale of your customer base. None of those work for me.
Here’s how to calculate your real seniority, or perhaps I should say “role impact”. Figure out what would happen to the business if the person in your role did a fantastic job over a three year period. Then figure out what would happen to the business if he performed poorly. The difference in revenue, profit, or market cap is your “role impact”. For non-profits you might use metrics like donations collected, lives saved, or children educated. By the way, if you’re having difficulty estimating this for your role… that’s a big problem.
Role impact measures your ability to move the needle for the company, and it throws out all of the structural garbage that comes with an org chart. This is a unifying measure of “seniority” across the company, and if you wanted, you could even rank yourself within your team, your division, or the whole organization, or even across companies.
Why does this matter? Because when we think about which job to take or which company to join, we should be thinking about role impact rather than title seniority because role impact is the true measure of your opportunity to create value. I’ll also venture to suggest that over the long-term, people with large “role impact” get paid a lot (though that also has to do with skill scarcity).
So many people ask… “How do I get promoted to Director?” A better question would be “How do I get into a role where my performance could drive $50M in incremental market cap over 3 years?”
Calculating role impact is even a bigger deal for thinking about managing your team. More to come on that in a future post.
Director of R&D at Pixelz Inc
1 年One thing to keep in mind when you look for a job with a big role impact: if you screw up, it will show. So this may not be something that low to average performers would like to try.
Fmr Founder Bridging the Capital Divide in Venture
10 年I really believe in this. Blake Mycoskie speaks to this notion in his book, "Start Something That Matters". It even challenges you to think beyond the traditional vertical career path. Seeking skills vs. titles will help you get where you want to be. Career adjacencies can be just as valuable as formal promotions.
Managing Partner, Pandora's Junction Box
10 年In academic publishing, the "role impact" of authors listed on a paper varies greatly between fields but much less within a field. You can't swing a cat in a bank without hitting three vice presidents but in most other industries the title means something. Titles aren't completely meaningless but context is everything.
Student-Centered Educator/Researcher/ Mentor/Community Outreach Leader/ Environmentalist/Perennial Learner
10 年Role impact should be the bases of promotions not seniority. This is a true indicator that that skills, talents and contributions are valued. This practice will motivate the best skilled and talented people to be more collaborative and productive.
Senior Dev Ops Engineer at Oracle
10 年I say who cares as long as your getting paid well and you're happy.