Titles are killing your organization and how teams can save it

When I worked full time helping growth-oriented companies build into the new (not so new anymore) ways of thinking about how we organize ourselves in an effort to get work done I found a very common sticky point with those "stuck in the middle".

For such a natural sub-optimization that sound so good on paper. This seems to destroy early and absolutely for perhaps all of those that experience it. 

Here is how it goes. A few folks start the company, and it gets early success so they go into a round of early hiring. It is often at this moment that all the name-calling comes out. They rough up terrible job descriptions and go through all the drama involved with finding, evaluating and hiring new talent and poof it is the director of this, the department head of that. None of which at this time have any "direct reports" /shudder/. The next year goes pretty good, growth continues and those hires turn out to be great performers so yay you and yay them!

Little does anyone realize we are now painted a bit into a nasty corner. If we continue to honor titles, then our next round of hiring is when our great performers, with their great early titles (generally based only on the order in which they were hired), move from performers to "managers" of one sort or another. A job likely NONE of them spent their lives trying to get amazing at, as they did with their primary trade-skill. They get their first "direct-reports" /shudder/ and your company meets the first generation of staff hired when we were "out of orange chairs". Sorry, only green chairs left, the orange ones have been occupied by a "middle layer" that is now firmly stuck in the awful position of more stress, and less ability and seemingly droned to the chore of putting office furniture out on the race track for the high performers to navigate in addition to their trying to race around the track and the non performers to get high marks at, having no positive bearing on quality, time to market, or customer delight.

No one would do this on purpose, but it seems everyone does this on accident. In today's connected age there is no reason to form these rank-and-file, matrix driven, failed-predictivism-laden complexities knowing they are so hard to untangle and offer only waste to the model we can study, implement and be using today that replaced these older barbaric practices.

No it doesn't mean everyone in the middle has to lose their job, contrary to the Welch model. But it DOES mean everyone in the middle has to lose their job-roles. Yep, sorry, we hired you to perform a job that we no longer wish to fill. If it is about role security, we all lose. If is about job security, everyone's jobs, then we all win! Job descriptions, departments, and titles are all useful as thinking exercises, or as an insanely lightweight line through the servant leadership side of the organization but the 1900's approach has no place in today's organization and is a huge source of pain and waste when the organization is considered as a whole.

There is a HUGE divide between how it "feels" to be invited to "ditch the title and join the cross-functional team aka the internal mini-startup-company" when you have a big title and when you do not. Companies that avoid titles early get a +25 bonus to their roll from the start. When you are finally faced with all of the observable truth and available data and start to undo the previous top-down approach it hurts folks with titles in a unique way. Bottom line, in a top-down model, there is somewhere to fall from! In a flat, or rather nodal model, not only are you not going to fall, if you did, there is a strong net-work to catch you. So many adoptions are withheld their own best people because of the entanglement of identity in title and wanting to go back to job-descriptions as a way to measure both value and success.  The new world thrusts all of us into a new world where information is not contained in the binders and all of the staff can read, write, arrhythmic and dress themselves. This shift means that you should now pay all of your staff to think, instead of paying some to do the thinking and some to do the working.

Inviting you to do something very different than the traditional model, that is easy. For you to run a successful pilot in your company to prove that this change is worth the effort, that is easy. But turning that successful cross-functional, autonomous pilot towards the entire organization is a pain that can almost be measured by the 'titles' your organization has crafted. And for what? To have something to say to the competition when introducing folks on the call? We can do better than this.

Alas, how do teams change it all? It is quite simple. Every person you add to a team, decreases the per-person productivity of every member on that team. Keep em small. Team should have every resource on the team, shoulder to shoulder, every day, full-time, that are required to make good on the necessary work to deliver end-to-end for full customer realization with fewer and fewer external dependencies. Top down has us focused on activities and outputs. Teams have us focused on customer-relationships and outcomes. Top down has us focused on delivering parts. Teams have us focused on delivering wholes. Top down has us giving out project plan awards at the 27yard line for projects that go on to run 300% over budget and ultimately never deploy. Teams have us taking the ball all the way to the end-zone and scoring the goal in quick early successions. Top down has us working so hard trying to make one another happy. Teams have us all working together trying to make our customers happy.

The management layer was an invention of our early ancestors to serve as a physical communication conduit binding the organization together using the wires of physical bodies. Today we have offloaded the primary responsibilities that once fell upon the best of managers of the past to technology. Like all big evolutionary leaps it comes as great advantage to those that can simply accept the learning and incorporate it into their chief strategies for winning.

Hoping there is something in here for someone, high fives of awesome, cheers, -James