Why your job titles might be driving turnover (and how to fix it)

What’s the motivation under people asking for titles? And that’s what I wanted to talk about today, because you might have your own strategy for how you develop titles, and I’ll get into that in a little bit towards the end. But before you assign people titles, it’s really important to figure out, well, what is this motivated by? Because your approach is going to be different if it’s one of these two directions. Welcome to the Managing Made Simple podcast, where you get a masterclass in managing your team with ease in 15 minutes or less.

I’m Leah Garvin, your host and team operations consultant. Through this show and my programs with small businesses and corporate teams, I condense a decade of experience driving team operations in some of the most influential companies in tech into strategies to save you time, money, and most of all, stress. Doesn’t matter if you’re a business owner who realized that running a team isn’t as easy as you thought it would be. Are a new manager learning the ropes, or a seasoned manager ready to up their game?

Everyone is welcome to hang out with Managing Made Simple. From conflicts to feedback to delegating and more, we leave no stone unturned when it comes to what makes us love managing, kind of hate it, and everything in between. Let’s go. Welcome back to the show. I just got back from a whirlwind of a trip to New York. Two days, two different teams working with an awesome F45 studio in Long Island, really working on optimizing their team to be the best, to get all their ducks in a row for expanding to more locations, hiring more staff and beyond, and working with an events production company in Long Island that does these really awesome, full-scale build-outs and interactive experiences for huge brands.

With that team, we were working on really getting the nuts and bolts of how does work flow through their agency, how to make sure we have all the roles we needed for the demand of work coming in next year and beyond. I love going in person. I do a ton of work virtually, and it’s always really awesome and impactful, but really nothing replaces being with a team in person. Before I even start, I got to say, if you have an opportunity to bring your teams together, even if it’s once or twice a year, it goes such a long way to put money in that relationship bank on your team.

This is something that I talk about in my upcoming book, The New Manager Playbook, which is a playbook for how to understand how to be a great manager. Whether you’re new at it or you want a refresher, this book is going to give you all the tools that you need. It has a ton of the stuff that we talk about on this show, exercises you can fill out, things you can try with your team, really, really practical, so I’m so excited for this.

And that comes out January 27th, so mark your calendars, and yeah, you’re going to be hearing more about that, so don’t worry. But anyway, so I just got back, and any time I come away from a workshop with a team or a day I spend with a team or doing anything, especially in person, I come away with a ton of ideas of things to talk about for the show. And one thing that came up when I was on my trip with this agency was folks were asking a lot about, team members were asking about titles a lot.

They wanted more clarity on their title, and this was coming up, kind of, it was more than just one person, maybe three, four, five people had asked. And there’s about maybe 20, 25 people in the studio, so it’s a good number of people were asking for clarity. And we talked about it a little bit, the head of accounts and the head of the design firm, and I think they had tried a number of things, having sort of more fun and creative titles.

They’ve tried having more descriptive titles, and we’re in a moment of inflection where it’s time to revisit that again. And it got me thinking, right, like, well, instead of just deciding what these titles are going to be, I started thinking about what’s the motivation under people asking for titles? And that’s what I wanted to talk about today, because you might have your own strategy for how you develop titles, and I’ll get into that in a little bit towards the end.

But before you assign people titles, it’s really important to figure out, well, what is this motivated by? Because your approach is going to be different if it’s one of these two directions. So I think there might be a number of reasons, but the biggest reasons I think folks ask for clarity on their title is first, like, clarity around their job description. A lot of times folks come in, and they have a title, and the work kind of evolves a lot.

Like, let’s say you come in as marketing coordinator, or you come in as project manager, or you come in as UX designer, or you come in as admin assistant, whatever it is. And your role changes a bit, and you feel like, well, you want to kind of make sure people know to come for you to that thing, or you want to make sure it’s actually connected to it. If you were to look for a job in the future, like, is the title you have even describing the nature of the work?

You might feel like, well, it’s describing the scope, like, I actually do way more than this, so it feels too narrow. So that’s one reason. I think folks want to match the clarity of what they’re doing with what they’re calling themselves. And I think it can be easy for leaders, bosses, to feel like, oh, why are we focusing on title? Just get the work done. But I got to say, this is very meaningful to people, to have a title, to have that clarity, to know it’s kind of an identity thing.

And so please don’t undervalue it if folks are asking about titles. Get more clarity and ask, you know, well, I want to make sure I understand, you know, what the motivation is. Is it around clarity? Is it around kind of scoping what you’re doing? Now the second reason, and when I say it’s about identity, and I say it’s about kind of folks really feeling a connection to that title, the second reason I think folks ask about clarity on title is that there’s a piece of recognition that they want in that title.

And a lot of times that is around seniority and level experience. So someone coming in and being associate versus coordinator versus, you know, junior or something like that, and going up the ranks and becoming manager or head of or director of, those things are really, or senior, right? Those things are really meaningful. And it’s funny, you know, when I worked at Apple, there was a designer there that had been there about 20 years, maybe even more, and his title was just designer.

And he, you know, he was like the most famous designer that was there at the time. He was the most widely respected and yeah, okay. He could just have a mic drop. I just have a one word title because everybody already respected him. He had earned that. But I got to tell you that if you’re coming in and you’re working your way up and you’re busting your butt and you finally go from junior to like, you know, standard and then to senior, like it’s important to you to have that title and you want folks to know that you worked your way up.

It’s also helpful to get, you know, folks to come for you for decisions and inputs. I know that, you know, when I worked in other corporate environments, a lot of people would sort of discern, oh, you know, is this person, should we consult them? Oh, they’re only this level. Or yeah, they’re not going to really have a lot of insight on that because, you know, they’re not a manager if they’re not this level. Well, if we’re making decisions on who we’re including conversations based on title, then of course title would be important to them.

So that’s the other thing I said. The first bucket was around like clarity and scope and sort of focus of the job. But the second one, and what I really believe is the bigger motivator is people want their title to match their experience. Do you want some hands on support for all of the topics I talk about on this show? Like a team expert who has worked within tech giants like Apple and Google, as well as small businesses on hand to help you delegate and get out of the weeds, handle tough conversations with team members, plan your hiring strategy, and get your teams to help bring in more revenue?

Then it’s time to sign up for my Team Whisperer Consulting Sprint. For 90 days, you have me in your back pocket to help you navigate any and every issue happening on your team. DM me the word sprint on Instagram or email me at hello at leahgarvin.com and let’s build your unstoppable team. If you have 20 years in the field and you want to be called head of or director of, you don’t want to be called junior or coordinator if this is a your career path you’ve been doing forever, right?

Maybe you don’t want that ambiguity, especially if other people in the company have titles like that. Right? Like if you’re in a company where nobody, it’s not really a thing, then yeah, okay. But if titles carry weight and they do in most companies, then you have to be thinking about how to make sure folks feel recognized for that. Now we also use titles to show people their growth path. So I talked about the two reasons I said scope and then the other one’s like recognition of value.

Now how to think about titles, right? We want to make sure that folks, whether it’s in titles or responsibilities, see when you’re at a company, you have this path to growing, right? So, you know, Hey, you go from coordinator to junior to this, to senior, to head up director, like, and maybe that’s introduces too many rungs in the ladder. Maybe you don’t want to have rungs in the ladder. So you say, Hey, this title, we, we don’t have a lot of steps in the title ladder, but here are the things that you can take on.

Here’s more scope you can add as you go. So it may not change with the title. You don’t have to just change your whole process, you know, just because, you know, folks want to have a title associated, if that’s not how you run your team, but sort of addressing that that person’s actually really hungry for clarity on how they grow in their career and talking about, okay, here’s the level of responsibility here. And then after about a year or two, you know, you can become a manager and then you can oversee a department.

And this is really what we see for you as your potential. Okay. So titles aside, you may actually, the conversation might more be around that person’s career growth. Now, super quickly, I want to touch on just how to think about titles as you are, especially if you are in a smaller business where you have more decision-making power over what the titles are. When you bring somebody into your team, the title is not just the title. The title comes with expectations of seniority, of pay, of scope and responsibility.

And if that person is going to have a team to support them, or they’re supposed to be doing a lot of the execution on their own. So when I advise small business owners specifically, and they’re, you know, wanting to bring in a head of operations or director of operations or head of marketing, director of marketing versus a, you know, marketing coordinator or director or manager, whatever, we’re looking at like, what are all the levels of titles?

A lot of times people want to use it like a senior sounding title because it’s appealing and it’s attractive as a candidate. Like, oh, I want to go to a company and run marketing. Yeah. Hell yeah. But if you’re showing up as director of marketing and you’re asked to be like doing granular detailed social media, you might feel like, well, I really should have a team to be doing this. Like, why am I doing this? So when you’re hiring someone for a role called director, head of, has an O in the word, COO, marketing officer, whatever, a senior level title, that’s going to be coming with the expectation of senior level pay, senior level scope.

You’re really more setting a strategy. You’re not doing a lot of implementation and the expectation you have a team under you to do some of that. So think about it, you know, and then of course the paired, the level of experience behind that. So if you have budget to pay somebody, you know, let’s say you have budget to pay someone $70,000 a year and you want them to have about five years of experience and they’ve got to do, you know, they do have to set the strategy, but they’ve got to do all the tactical implementation of whatever their role is about.

That person, I really caution you against calling them a director of, head of, that person is a kind of early to mid career person and that’s going to match with their expectations. They’re going to have a ton of runway to grow with. You can say, Hey, you’re coming in as marketing coordinator. Here’s what we see. Here’s how you get to marketing manager. Here’s how you get to head of, here’s how you take on more. We see so much opportunity for you, but don’t just call that role director of marketing because you want it to be an attractive sounding role.

Because that person’s going to say, director of marketing for 70K, are you serious? No way. Not in this world. Right? So the title is not just something you throw out there because people are going to associate, right? What is the scope of the role? Like I said, they’re going to associate the value they bring to it. And then all the other things about pay, seniority, do I have a team support me or not, right? So that is what I wanted to share with you, really how to think about titles and what to think through.

If your team members are asking you, Hey, I want more clarity in my title. Getting under the surface, asking them, you know, how you can, you know, is it more around, you know, scope and clarity? I don’t know if you should ask, like, is it because you want to be recognized for your work? I think we should always be recognizing people for their work. But if you are tuning into, well, they do have a lot of clarity around their scope.

And it answers your own question. And it’s a real opportunity to be recognizing the value they’re bringing to looking at talking about like, Hey, like I want to make sure you’re really clear on how to grow here. You know, we have a really flat organization. We don’t have a lot of title changes, but there is so much opportunity. Let’s walk through what that looks like, right? And then last but not least, I know I jumped around a bit, really making sure you are matching the title with the level of seniority and experience required with the pay.

If that person will have a team or anyone to support them or not. All right. That is my hot take on titles. And again, if you want support with your team across conversations like this, across any of the things that I talk on the show, please reach out. I had the best time working with these teams in person, whether it’s in person or remote spending time investing in your teams. There is nothing more important to help folks navigate uncertainty, be resilient to change, be able to do more with less and really, you know, help your team reach its full potential because there’s nothing more important than your team, right?

That is your most valuable resource. So we always want to make sure we are giving them the support they need. All right. If you know, if you need support, reach out at helloatleagarver.com. Talk soon. That’s all I have for today. Thank you so much for tuning in to the Managing Made Simple podcast, where my goal is to demystify the job of people management so that together we can make the workplace somewhere everyone can thrive. With that said, let’s spread the word.

If you love this episode, please pass it along to someone who might benefit from it. See you next time.