In recent years job titles have been up for reinvention. It has been particularly popular in human resources, and helped play a role in disrupting how we think about people management and the employee experience. A common change I have seen is moving away from the classic VP of HR title, to titles such as VP of People & Culture or VP Culture & Employee Experience. There were five unique HR titles which the people analytics company, Culture Amp, presented the Google Trends data, where we see a decline in the term ‘Human Resources’ and incline for ‘People Operations’ in job titles. A welcomed changed and modernization, though these slight differences in terminology are merely updates, not revolutionary.
In organizations that promote a flattening in the hierarchy, I am perplexed that they are still using ranking nomenclature for the roles that seek to disrupt how people are managed. A VP or Director is still describing the rank in a hierarchy, whether you are Director of People or Director of HR, your title is still focused on communicating status and position. The change we need to move towards is creating roles that describe how you serve others. A job title that is descriptive of your actual skills and tasks increases collaboration, so that when I’m looking for support in something I can easily relate my need to what you do. I recently came across a company that has completely removed the title ”manager” from their organization.
FiveStars is a San Francisco based customer loyalty network for small and medium businesses, and they intentionally call their 80 Managers “Coaches.” A Coach is expected to lead, manage, coach, and mentor team members to help them do their best work. This, in turn, leads to more impactful employee lifetime value, no matter their tenure with the company. It also leads to higher engagement rates, a more productive team, and a robust community of employees focused on achieving something big together. Claudia Fry, VP of People Operations and Courtney Bigony, Employee Success Researcher at FiveStars, share their thoughts on the shift away from managing and moving towards coaching and leading.
