Thoughts on Title Inflation

Thanks to China Challenges for bringing to my attention to the works of Frank Mulligan at the Talent in China blog. He has some similar domain focuses as me; this makes me very excited.

The latest post on at Talent in China is about Job Descriptions (JDs), with a focus on “title inflations”:

The difficulties often start with the title. This is very important because of the fact that Chinese professionals cherish the title they hold, and because of title inflation. The logic for Chinese professionals is: “If everyone else has a high title why shouldn’t I have one too? Especially when it is so important to me in the first place.” In the fast-growing China market companies feel they have to succumb to title inflation to get the right people but the result is a mismatch between what the person has to do on the job, and what it might appear they have to do when you look at the title. For example, Directors usually don’t have to actually get their hands dirty with actual work, but if the ‘Director’ is really just a Manager, then he will have to. (Directors are defined as someone who manages managers, each of whom manages a team.)

I must say that I am also guilty of creating title inflation. I know Jack Welch says all that hooy about being “compassionately tough.” However, in real-life, in China, it is often necessary to move under-performing employees “sideways”, or even up, in order to make room for people who actually deliver results. Firing people…especially in a JV or SOE environment…. is just not an option. Not too long ago I lead a project to re-organize my customer’s marketing department. The company had multiple marketing teams, each with dotted lines to multiple Product Line Units in Europe and America. Each team was poorly managed. The then-manager of the biggest marketing team knew how to do outbound marketing, but could not empower his team to perform Product Management and Strategic Marketing tasks. Consolidating different departments under one marginally better manager would have more organizational value by unifying processes, resources, and creating opportunities for support. It would also separate the new marketing organization from the dotted-line superiors. Said European superiors were not happy about this, but I didn’t really care. The European dotted-line bosses were not effectively managing the marketing organization from Europe.

To merge the teams, I needed to move out the manager of the larger marketing team and remove his direct reports. We didn’t want to lose him; he was good at customer presentations and he had given 6 years of service to the company. But as a manager, he was dictatorial towards his subordinates, but passively shriveling in his dealings with other groups. I determined he was not going to develop as a better leader anytime in the near future. So I created a high-level independent contributor position for him. He viewed this as a demotion…which it was. But we gave him face by giving him a better title. And I helped convince him he would be happier without having to manage people to create a strategic plan (which he knew he was not capable of doing). The problems didn’t stop there. Moving people around became a sort of organizational puzzle, because there were quite a few high seniority valuable managers who could not manage due to their educational and cultural background. But we had to give each some relative “face.”

I have seen some pretty bad examples of title inflation. But in my experience this usually does not occure, as Mr. Mulligan suggests, at the Job Definition stage. Title inflation often occurs as misguided employee retention policies. And sometimes it occurs because managers think that a higher title will motivate people to work harder without giving them higher pay. A scary example of this (which comes from my Am-Pharm case study). There, the EHS “Manager” was an operator whom an expat manager promoted and gave him EHS responsibilities. However, the operator could not / would not think of himself as a manager. So when auditors found barrels of hydrochloric acid sitting around in the warehouse, the managers gave a warning to the EHS Manager for not performing his duties. But the poor EHS person said “but… you never gave me instructions to move out the waste!”

Generally speaking, its best to avoid title-inflation like the plague. It is very important to promote people to management roles. But that comes from leadership development, not from “title development.”