PR is Chief among the reasons for corporate title inflation.
So what are we to make of the “Chief Whatever Officer” titles that are proliferating across corporate America? Where even the common Chief Marketing Officer was considered a novel title just a decade ago, today’s companies are filled with masters of every conceivable domain:
Chief Reputation Officer. Chief Talent Officer. Chief Solutions Officer. Chief Geek. Chief Privacy Officer. Chief Diversity Officer. Chief Innovation Officer. Chief Relationship Officer.
Wharton business professor Betsey Stevenson says this Sweet-C title inflation is the result of companies eliminating levels from their management structures. “People want to be distinguished in some way from everyone else, but in a flat organization there is less hierarchy and therefore less opportunity to be distinguished,” she writes in the school magazine. “One good thing about hierarchy is you can climb a corporate ladder. If there is no ladder, there is nothing to climb."
But for many companies, chiefly titles are more than granting rhetorical indispensability to keep talent. It’s also good old-fashioned spin.
Chief-whatever titles are another way for companies to define themselves by their good intentions. A Customer Service Director only helps the company if he or she does a good job. But a Chief Stakeholder Evangelist supposedly helps the company just by being on the org chart. It shows the company’s commitment to being, well, committed.
Overstated? Self-serving? Obvious? Of course it is. But it is the American way. It’s the same mentality that got companies to start calling themselves solutions providers. It’s how customers became stakeholders, how publicists became public relations professionals. It’s why business spends countless hours and money concocting lofty mission statements that boiled down all say the same thing: We sell things because we mean well.
The problem is where we go from here. How do you differentiate your dedication to solutions and innovation when every other company uses the same inflated titles? And what if your flat organization adds a layer? What if someone needs to be promoted? What title beats a Chief?
Big Chief?
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