Job titles are meaningless, sick days are for wimps and other observations

For those of you who read my last article, thank you. As I said when I wrote it, I’d never really written anything for public consumption before. I thought at the time that I wrote that article that if 500 people read it, I would be extremely gratified. The response has been simply amazing - as of this writing, over 16,600 people have read it and I have received comments and thoughts from people all across the globe, far beyond my personal network. I was touched to learn that it impacted people I’d never met in ways I could never have imagined. It’s a privilege to be entrusted with your time and consideration.

And I want to thank someone in particular - a woman that I haven’t spoken to for almost 30 years, my junior high school creative writing teacher Gretchen Portwood. I don’t know for sure if Ms. Portwood is still teaching (she started teaching in the 70s and could surely be retired by now and my Google skills failed me in my attempt to learn her whereabouts), but she was a true inspiration to me and helped me develop a set of writing skills that I haven’t really shared with the world until recently. Thanks, Ms. Portwood. The people whose lives you have touched have not forgotten and are a lifetime in your debt.

Many have encouraged me to keep writing - and since I now have more free time, I am honored to oblige.

One of the challenges of writing a second article for me was coming up with interesting subjects that I knew something about. You see, while I took only about four hours to write my first article, the content was a download of a lifetime of thinking about how to manage my professional career. Since I didn’t want to wait another 20 years to write again, I thought I’d spend this space digging deeper into a few topics that I know well. My friends and co-workers will recognize the themes.

“If you need to invoke your pedigree or job title for people to believe what you say, then you need a better argument” - Neil deGrasse Tyson

“Teldar paper has 33 different vice presidents, each earning over 200 thousand dollars a year. Now, I have spent the last two months analyzing what all these guys do, and I still can’t figure it out” - Michael Douglas as Wall Street Raider Gordon Gecko in the 1987 movie Wall Street.

The other day, I was killing time at an airport playing a silly iPhone Yahtzee app. I used to play Yahtzee with my mother when I was a kid and the game, while it only involves a small amount of skill and a whole lot of luck, is still fun to me. The app has a “level” system for players based on your success in heads up matches, tournaments, etc. I quickly leveled up from Level 1 to Level 2 to Level 3. Before Iong, I was playing past when it was fun because “if I win 3 more matches, I will make Level 20!”

I eventually caught myself and realized a simple truth - the iPhone Yahtzee app levels don’t mean anything. They are assigned arbitrarily by the app developers. There are no monetary prizes for achieving a particular level. Being a level 20 iPhone Yahtzee player doesn’t make me more talented than someone who is level 1. It was at that moment, that I realized that this app was a perfect analogy to job titles.

If you went to college, you probably remember a professor who condescendingly corrected you when you called him “Mister Smith” by saying “it’s Doctor Smith, please get it right.” I imagine you thought Doctor Smith and his PhD in English Lit was, well, kind of a pompous ass. But he had leveled up to level 20 and you were a mere level 1 English Lit player.

Throughout my entire career, but especially in the past five years, I have seen people utterly obsess over job titles. When you ask some people what they want to be they will say “a Director” or “a Vice President”, often without even mentioning WHAT they want to be doing.  

But, like levels in my Yahtzee app, titles are arbitrary. There are no accepted standards - Goldman Sachs would put Teldar Paper to shame - it has over 10,000 vice presidents. The federal government has only 1 and even that 1 has very little effective power. There are no cross-company standards for what constitutes a manager, a director, a vice president or the tons of other titles that companies have cooked up (Assistant Vice President, Senior Manager, Executive Director, Khalessi, Teen Exorcist, et cetera). What’s an “Analyst” at one company is a “Manager” at another. What’s a “Director” one place is an “SVP” another.

I think that the title obsession comes from two places - one is our desire to keep score and the other is our belief that a particular title instills a level of respect and credibility in our work that will enable us to have more influence.

The desire to keep score is natural and competitively healthy. I’m a competitive person - I play poker for money because that is how you keep score in poker. The NBA playoffs would be boring if you didn’t keep score and decide a winner. Some scores matter just to pick a winner. Some scores matter in more meaningful ways - achieving a level of wealth gives you security and freedom, managing a bigger team lets you influence a business more and touch more lives.

Unfortunately, the job title chase, is, like my Yahtzee app, a chase for a false achievement. If you are using it to keep score, might I suggest some more relevant metrics: your compensation, the revenue or cost that you can control or influence, the breadth of the organization that you lead, whether you have a voice in key business decisions.  

The second reason - that a job title will give you or your opinions more credibility and respect is largely false. If you work at an organization that only values your title, I’d suggest you leave and go some place that respects good ideas that are well argued. I’ve actually found that most companies listen to good ideas presented by people with credibility, or they soon cease to be companies. And I know a lot of “analysts” and “coordinators” who influence organizations a whole lot more than some other “Executive Vice Presidents” and “Chief Whatever Officers”.

One of the best compliments that I’ve been paid recently is “when you walk into a room with strangers, nobody ever suspects your organizational level.” I never introduce myself with my job title - I talk about what I do. Sometimes imperceptive people have assumed that the fact that I don’t immediately share a flashy title means I am someone unimportant and they proceed to talk to others or treat me like an underling. This is incredibly instructive as it a. gives me a ton of information about the person with whom I am dealing and b. often causes them to share information that they would never share with me if I had led with my title. I don’t do it to be deceptive, I do it because my title isn’t important, but it is a nice side benefit when people accidentally expose their cards.

Bottom line - Mr. Tyson (who I’m sure wouldn’t mind me calling him Mister or even Neil in spite of him having a BA from Harvard, an MA from UT Austin and a PhD from Columbia in Astrophysics, lest you think he dismisses title and qualification due to not having any) is right - build your brand, your reputation, your credibility and your work. And ignore your job title. Buying those power-ups in Yahtzee gets expensive anyway.

“I’m saving my sick days for when I’m feeling better” - Actress Salma Hayek

“All I really try and do is live up to my potential and do as well as I possibly could and to bring to the ballpark each and every day a good effort” - Hall of Fame Orioles Shortstop Cal Ripken Junior, my childhood hero, who played in 2,623 consecutive games from 1982 to 1998, a record which no current player is within 2,200 games of breaking.

I’ve never taken a sick day. Not once. Well, at work, at least (I used to use any excuse that I could in High School to not be in class). And being that I only have 3 weeks of work left in my career, the odds are good that I will finish with that streak alive - although it would be funny to call in sick on my last day.

Most people think this “streak” is stupid - and they are partly right. Sick days exist for a reason and certainly nobody should wheel themselves in from the ER to come to work and risk their health. I’ve been blessed to have not had any serious health problems to date. And there is a valid argument, especially in this day and age of mobility, to not be in the office when you have an infectious disease as you could potentially infect others. I’m not judging you for taking sick days (the title of this article was admittedly a form of provocative click-bait), but I’m also still pretty proud of my streak.

The origins and reasons for my streak all tie back to my early career. Let’s start at age 19, when I was a co-op at a manufacturing plant in southwest Georgia. I was working down there six months out of the year, doing continuous improvement projects while attending Georgia Tech in Atlanta the other six months out of the year. My first week at the plant happened to be the week that they had their annual perfect attendance luncheon. I got to see hourly employees at this plant presented awards for 5, 10, 20 and 30 years of perfect attendance. These employees made a decent wage for their work, but nothing that would ever make them wealthy. They weren’t going to be fired if they took a couple of sick days a year, but they exhibited obvious pride in their achievement. This was only a small subsection of the plant population, but it was immediately obvious, these were the best employees there. That level of commitment to show up to a job in a factory for 30+ years without missing a day, was inspiring to me. It made me think “how can I hold myself to a lower standard?” The answer was that I couldn’t.

Now, let’s move ahead in my career a few years to when I was in my mid-twenties and working as a supply planning manager. I lived in Northeast Pennsylvania and commuted 34 miles each way to New Jersey for my job (housing in Pennsylvania was a LOT cheaper and, if you’ve read my prior article, you know that saving money has been pretty important to me). This was a different era for technology - I didn’t have a cell phone and my computer was a desktop at my desk in New Jersey. If I didn’t come in, I wasn’t going to get any work done. I braved a number of scary 12”+ snow storms on rural roads and a number of colds and flus in those years for a simple reason - I was committed to getting my work done and it wasn’t going to get done if I didn’t make it into work.

The final reason has to do with the culture of my first employer, Mars. At the time (I have no idea if this is still the case there, but I hope that it is), ALL employees from the CEO to the janitor punched a time clock every morning. 10% of your pay was tied to something called a “punctuality bonus”. You punctuality bonus was paid if you showed up to work and punched in on time - if you didn’t, you lost the bonus. While a single sick day didn’t cost a tremendous amount of money (effectively 10% of one day’s pay), the policy set a clear standard within the culture - showing up for work every day and on time is important.

These reasons may be relics of a bygone era and the streak is also reflective of a lot of luck. If you have a flu now in a lot of jobs, you can work from home on your laptop and smartphone and potentially be as effective (or in some cases, maybe more effective) than if you came into the office. And clearly, any number of potential health problems could have made my streak impossible.

But the spirit of being committed to your work and your obligations remains an important principle. And I wouldn’t be very committed if I couldn’t be bothered to show up when it is a little bit hard. Cal is still my hero.

Some quick observations about heroes 

Don’t make the mistake that many people make that because someone is brilliant in one aspect of their work lives that they are brilliant at everything.

Steve Jobs was brilliant at design but famously known for being abusive to employees. He was successful because of his brilliance at design and IN SPITE of his abusiveness.

Elon Musk has been a brilliant visionary from rockets to electric cars. He also has amazing lapses in judgement from SEC violations, to promising things publicly he clearly can’t deliver, to getting into public feuds that are counterproductive and petty. He’s successful because of his vision, not because of his bad behavior.

Michael Jordan, depending on your point of view, is either the best or second best player (if you have him ranked below number 2, then we need to have a serious talk about basketball) ever to step on a basketball court but gave a profoundly narcissistic and mean hall of fame induction speech. He wasn’t a better basketball player because he was a narcissist.  

I try to learn the things that make business leaders successful and emulate the good, while recognizing with a clear eye that they are human and flawed and try NOT to emulate the bad. We are all flawed. My list of personal and professional mistakes could fill a large book, as could most of us. Except maybe Bradley Cooper. I mean, seriously, it wasn’t enough to be a brilliant actor, a heartthrob and an all around nice guy, you can sing brilliantly too? Give the rest of a chance, Bradley!

Finally - if you have enjoyed reading my first two articles, I’d love your input on topics about which you would like me to write. LinkedIn appropriately being a business forum, I’ll keep my articles here confined to business and leadership topics, but beyond that, I’m very open to feedback and suggestions. Drop me a line in the comments or send me a message and let me know your thoughts.