From the May 2016 Issue
Job titles don t usually generate much excitement. They re printed on business
cards, emblazoned on LinkedIn pages, and used in formal introductions. Some
organizations, however, see them as a chance to get creative. Consider Disney,
which calls its theme park workers cast members and its engineers and
multimedia experts imagineers. Subway s line workers are sandwich artists.
At some companies, receptionists are directors of first impressions and PR
people are brand evangelists.
It would be easy to dismiss retitling as a silly exercise in euphemisms. But
over the past decade London Business School professor Dan Cable has come to
view it as a legitimate tool for improving workers attitudes and boosting
recruitment. The traditional view of job titles is that they re about
standardization and benchmarking, he says. But titles often send the wrong
signals and fail to attract the best applicants. Companies should recognize
that they are powerful symbols of who we are, what we can do, and what others
can expect from us.
Cable and two colleagues published a 2014 study on self-reflective job
titles, and Cable has since expanded his work in the area. The paper took a
deep dive into a local chapter of the Make-A-Wish Foundation, whose CEO invited
employees to create fun titles to supplement their official ones. Although we
were skeptical in the beginning, our firsthand observations and in-depth
interviews made us wonder whether there are real psychological benefits to
retitling work, Cable says. Employees described how their new and improved
titles made their jobs more meaningful and helped them cope with the emotional
challenges of serving families with sick or dying children. The researchers
concluded that the initiative reduced stress by helping people focus on the
more purposeful aspects of their jobs.
To see if that dynamic would hold up in a full-fledged experiment, the
researchers worked with employees at a hospital chain. With one group, they
outlined how the retitling had improved life at Make-A-Wish and then asked the
workers to suggest new titles for themselves. (An infectious disease specialist
became a germ slayer, a nurse who gave lots of immunizations became a quick
shot, an X-ray technician became a bone seeker. ) The researchers surveyed
the workers, along with members of two control groups, about their attitudes
toward their work before the retitling and five weeks later. They found that
those who had been asked to choose new titles had lower levels of emotional
exhaustion, felt more validated and better recognized for their work, and
experienced greater psychological safety, which can promote free information
exchanges. They concluded, Rather than viewing titles solely as sources and
reflections of formality and rigidity or mechanisms of bureaucratic control,
our research suggests that titles can be vehicles for agency, creativity, and
coping.
Cable has continued to explore how firms can benefit from retitling. At a large
European brewery he tried a different approach: Instead of having each employee
create a unique title, he asked workers who performed the same function to
agree on a new title that everyone would share. A survey three months later
showed that those employees were 16% more satisfied with their work and 11%
more closely identified with the company than employees in a control group.
Cable has since created a methodology for companies looking to launch retitling
initiatives. In step one, employees reflect on their job s purpose (including
who is served, who is affected by the quality of the work, and what value is
created) and on questions of identity (including what aspects of the job the
employee does particularly well or differently from other employees or
competitors). In step two, employees brainstorm potential new titles, perhaps
crowdsourcing ideas from other employees, and, with their manager s input,
decide on new ones. Much of the value of this activity lies not in the new
titles but in the process that leads to them. The exercise causes job
incumbents to ask themselves, What is the purpose of the work, and what is my
unique connection to it? Cable says. Most employees knew the answers to
these questions at some point, but it is easy to forget them in the midst of
day-to-day hassles.
It Gave Employees Ownership of Their Roles
Courtesy of Phillip Kucab
Courtesy of Phillip Kucab
A few years ago, when Susan Fenters Lerch, former CEO of the Make-A-Wish
Foundation of Michigan, attended a seminar at the Disney Institute, she heard a
discussion of how people s titles influence their feelings about their jobs. So
when she returned to the office, she let her 31-person staff create their own
titles to supplement the ones on the org chart. She recently described the
process to HBR. Edited excerpts follow.
Why did you try self-created titles? We faced challenging situations, working
with families whose children had serious health issues. I was looking to do
something fun that would give employees a sense of control. People kept their
traditional titles, but everyone created an additional, fun title. I became
the fairy godmother. Our finance director became the minister of dollars and
sense. The office manager became the keeper of keys, from Harry Potter. I
used both titles on business cards and in e-mail I put the supplemental title
in italics.
What did it accomplish? Creating new titles gave people a way to describe how
they felt about the job. It gave them ownership of their role. The new titles
often became a conversation starter with external people they d ask about it,
and it created an opening to explain what you do.
What if someone couldn t come up with something clever? We d sit down, talk
about it, play around with words together. Most people came up with things they
felt really good about.
I m not sure how this would go over in my workplace. For it to work well, the
leader has to be comfortable with it, and it has to make sense for the
organization. It could be challenging in a large one, where many people have
the same title. It s probably better suited to a smaller, less traditional
organization.
Some may be slow to warm to the idea. Laszlo Bock, Google s SVP of people
operations, was initially turned off by his novel title; among other concerns,
the fact that it wasn t clearly an HR job made him worry that it would be
harder to find a new job if he left Google. But he s grown to see the benefits,
including that the title sounds less administrative and more strategic.
Retitling won t work in every organization. The practice has been more common
at start-ups and at dominant companies such as Disney and Google. Cable
suggests that large companies try it with small units to gauge employee
reactions. For those that want to experiment with retitling, there s another
significant benefit: Unlike many HR initiatives, this one costs almost nothing.
Says Cable: Rebranding job titles around the why of work, unique cultural
traits, and employees personal identities can have important effects on how
outsiders respond to the jobs and how people in the jobs see themselves.
About the Research: Job Titles as Identity Badges: How Self-Reflective Titles
Can Reduce Emotional Exhaustion, by Adam M. Grant, Justin M. Berg, and Daniel
M. Cable (Academy of Management Journal, 2014)
A version of this article appeared in the May 2016 issue (pp.24 25) of Harvard
Business Review.