When we founded Orchard in 2006, there were a bunch of rules that we tried to put in place. We said we wouldn’t do time sheets, everyone would have their birthday off and we would never have job titles. It was our way of shaking off the constraints of big agency culture.
In those early days, our people had areas of responsibility as opposed to a title. It allowed them to take ownership without feeling restricted. If there was something that needed to be done, people would simply do it. It didn’t matter if they were remitted to or not. By forgoing titles, people would step up. A natural hierarchy was assumed while politics and jostling were eliminated.
And that was fine for the first five years. But then, over time, as we got bigger accounts and there were more people working on various pieces of business, we felt the need for some sort of structure. We reluctantly accepted the need for titles.
But I’d like to imagine an adland without them. The celebrated former CEO and chairman of GE, Jack Welch, sure thinks they are an outdated notion. “Job titles and parking spaces are relics of the past,” he said on his careers podcast.
Welch’s view on the subject is a call back to the concept of the Boundaryless Organisation which he coined. It’s essentially an organisation without walls, founded on interdependence and trust. Boundaryless Organisations, or those with flat management structures, often do away with job titles.
Online shoe retailer Zappos is one of the best-known examples. In 2013, the business adopted a Holacracy, a fancy word for a flat management structure. According to Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, Holacracy “enables employees to act more like entrepreneurs and self-direct their work instead of reporting to a manager who tells them what to do.” One of the tenets of the structure is a lack of job titles.
While a number of Zappos employees weren’t so sure with a staff exodus following its introduction, Hsieh could be onto something. The Harvard Business Review notes that flat management structures work best for companies in rapidly changing environments since being organised around small, autonomous teams allow the business to be more nimble than those with large hierarchies. And businesses with flat structures tend to be much more innovative so if innovation is important strategically, a flat structure is the way to go. It sounds a lot like today’s advertising industry, doesn’t it?
A cultural concern
Of course, the staff of an agency aren’t the only ones affected by the presence of job titles. The culture clients operate in also dictates whether having a team without titles is possible. If you’re working with a Korean company such as Samsung, Kia, LG or Hyundai, job titles are crucial. They are a sign of respect. Similarly, for highly corporate sectors in the US where every second person is a Vice President of something, there’s no avoiding putting job titles on business cards. In these cultures, hierarchy and experience play a role and it would be naïve to ignore this.
It would also be difficult for agencies without job titles to appear competitive when it comes time to pitch. You don’t want to be going up against an agency that is creating seniority simply to give it away as a value add. When the client is comparing apples to apples, the bigger the title, the higher the head hour rate and the greater the perceived value.
A matter of ego
Possibly the greatest reason adland is unlikely to do away with job titles is ego. There’s no avoiding the fact that there are a lot of egos in our industry. Many people in this business have a fixed as opposed to growth mindset and getting rid of titles would likely damage those egos.
You can see ego at play with the creation of various job titles that sound important but mean very little. From Digital Overlord to Wizard of Light Bulb Moments or the seemingly benign but utterly meaningless creative technologist, if we are going to have job titles, let’s forget about the wank.
The issue of ego also applies to client side. We’ve all come across a client at some point in our career that only wants to talk to people at a similar level, regardless of whether that person can solve their query or not. There are marketing directors that only want to speak to the partner of the business, the client services director or the managing director. It’s no secret that clients have been known to rely on titles for escalation or ego purposes.
At Orchard, we believe that progression of job titles allows us to show our people that they are recognised and rewarded for their efforts, contribution and smarts but I’d like to think that if your career is based on a shared purpose, there are other ways to achieve that than the title on your business card.
While our experiment with ditching job titles may have been short lived, to this day we still don’t put them on our email signatures (we no longer do business cards). And yes, people do still get that day off for their birthday. As for timesheets, well, it turns out they’re irritatingly unavoidable.