Listen instead on your Monday Morning Drive:

When clients come to me with organizational chart problems, often the issue isn’t the org chart itself. It’s the job titles.

Many times, businesses can’t make their org charts look right because the titles in it don’t correctly reflect the company’s hierarchy. It’s full of holes and misnomers, problems like managers who do delivery and supervisors no one reports to.

So how do you reconcile job titles with org charts? And, more importantly, how do you create an organizational system, hierarchy, and titles that actually make sense and help the people they’re intended to help?

Toss the Sacred Cows

I know the minds of some reading this immediately flew off into a whirlwind of anxiety. You can’t mess with people’s titles, Tom! They won’t stand for it.

Okay, for the moment, let’s just imagine we’ve all had one big company meeting that included everyone in our organizations. In that meeting, poof!, all our titles and job descriptions — all our sacred cows — vaporized. Now that we’re starting from scratch anyway, we agreed to take a fresh look at the matter.

So, for the sake of argument (and edification), assume everyone’s on board for the duration of this article.

The “Labor Coordinator” Stopgap

Let’s talk about the title “Labor Coordinator.” I’ve written about it before because it’s a problematic title I see our industry using far too often.

“Labor Coordinator” doesn’t speak to everything this person actually does. It’s a function, not a title. Plus, who wants to be called a laborer? And who wants their entire job to revolve around just coordinating labor?

In reality, what labor coordinators do is very strategic. They’re not just calling up crew and telling them where to go. That’s just one aspect of a critical role that directly impacts the success of projects and events.

Instead, I recommend using a title that better reflects the broad responsibilities and strategic nature of the work, like Project Coordinator or Project Assistant. You may have a project coordinator who specializes in coordinating talent and another who specializes in coordinating equipment or travel — or three coordinators who handle all those areas.

The key is that the title isn’t tied to one task but focuses on the person’s higher-level skills and contributions to your business. A Project Coordinator functions at the project level, while a Planning Coordinator operates at the system level. Your processes will determine what they actually do on any given day.

Titles Are Not Tasks

Here’s the big point: A title is not a task. People with titles do tasks.

The pushback I often hear is this: But that new title doesn’t tell people inside the company what the person does!

If you have to tell people inside your company what someone does, you have a different problem — a management problem.

Titles are for people outside the business — your customers, suppliers, and strategic partners. Titles help them understand an individual’s role within the company, which means those titles need to convey value. Project Coordinator conveys that a person is closely tied to projects and coordinates or manages some aspect of the delivery process. The specifics will vary.

On the flip side, our industry has been using the term Project Manager very loosely for decades. For the title to makes sense in the hierarchy of your org chart, it needs a bit more definition. If you define a Project Manager as someone who manages projects or who manages the people who coordinate projects, you give the title meaning by tying it to the business’s hierarchy.

The Scalable Hierarchy

This brings us to the bigger org chart question: Do managers manage people or processes? Most org charts are designed to define who reports to whom — but that might have nothing to do with their titles.

So now, let’s get clear on what a scalable hierarchy looks like:

• Assistant: Assistants have the lowest level of skills and training, and they’re always supervised and directed. They assist someone who’s higher up in the hierarchy in terms of title, knowledge, and responsibility, so “assistant” is a great scalable term here. It’s an entry-level role where anyone can start.
  
• Technician: Workers with greater experience or ability than assistants, but who are similarly supervised, are called technicians in our industry. They’re experts or emerging experts in some specific type of task. You might have warehouse technicians, computer technicians, AV technicians, etc., and they each might have assistants helping them.
  
• Supervisor (or Coordinator): Supervisors ensure the people under their purview are in the right places, doing the right things. Supervisors can exist throughout an organization. You might have a supervisor in your selling group, your planning group, your admin group, your warehouse, and more.
  
• Manager: Managers have multiple supervisors (or coordinators) reporting to them for internal or external project tasks. They make sure supervisors have all the resources they need; they manage processes so supervisors are freed up to manage people.
  
  This is where our industry’s project managers fit. The big failure we too often run into here is when project managers become project doers. Now they’re just supervising themselves and not managing the project.
  
• Director: As companies grow, adding additional managers and services and geographic differences, the sheer volume of people and processes becomes overwhelming. The reporting structure needs to be broken down so everyone gets the time and attention they need, so you bring in directors to manage a process sphere.
  
  In the scalable world, you’ll have a director of selling, a director of planning, a director of administration, etc. Larger organizations might even have multiple directors per sphere. In the selling group, for instance, you might have one director of all the sales managers, one director of all the marketing managers, one director of all the design managers, etc.
  
• C-Suite: Eventually, you reach the grand titles of the C-suite. These titles indicate responsibility for the overall strategy and direction of the organization. In companies with multiple significant lines of business, chief officers or execs are responsible for the success of each director across those lines.

How We Messed It Up

When laid out like this, the hierarchy seems obvious. So how did we mess it up? Easy. We started at the top and worked down. (And yes, I’ve been guilty of this, too.)

If we start at the worker level and look at what people actually do, then work up, we end up with a much better understanding of titles. By forcing ourselves to think about processes and who should perform them, we come up with titles that actually convey value to outsiders as well as insiders.

Example in Action

Let’s illustrate this with a little thought experiment.

Think of someone you’ve worked with who’s highly competent and skilled. They had the word “manager” in their business title, but they lacked any usable skills for managing people.

We’ve often glossed over this type of situation with a, well, they’re just not a people person. Okay, that’s fine for them personally, but a manager who’s not a people person is an oxymoron. By giving them the title, we undermined our entire naming system and org structure to fit them into a certain spot on the org chart so their title matches their salary.

If we can accept that a “technician level three” can make more than a director of marketing, then we’ll understand how effective titles work.

Titles and Action

A title gives a person the authority to ask people to do their jobs for a shared project. So a project coordinator, who has project responsibilities and walks a project through the system, needs to ensure project tasks get done. Their title doesn’t make them the “boss” of others, but it does mean everyone with task or service responsibilities on that project reports to the coordinator.

You All Work for Payroll

At any given time, you work for someone else in your organization — and not just who you report to. Let’s end with one more (crucial) example.

Payroll is a painful, tedious process, and it’s all-consuming for whoever take care of it. It’s also a predictable task, that you know happens every week or every other week, and one that benefits your organization.

So whether you’re a technician or a CEO, if your office manager needs payroll information from you on Monday morning, you work for her. That task is more important than your title or any other task you’re performing at that moment.

When I see an owner filling out their expense report on time, I know that’s an organization that understands the importance of roles and responsibilities — and that probably has titles to reflect it.