How to Have Better Discussions About Roles and Job Titles

Have you ever been in a discussion about the roles for a new project in which somebody reacted defensively as they perceive their power and status was not appropriately represented in the names of the roles they have been asked to play? Have you found that your role in a project is not what you expect it should be considering your job title? These two concepts are often confusing and confused. Here it is how I think about them when applied in a professional and corporate context.

A job title is a short and catchy way to communicate who we are as a professional and within our company and industry. One can be a Partner in a law firm, an Executive Program Manager, a Machine Learning Consultant or an Assistant Designer. A title often communicates our field of expertise, as a proxy for an industry standard skillset, and our seniority in that field. Our Job Title acts as a status signal that we belong to an industry and how important we are in it.

A role communicates how we contribute value within the context of our company or team. One can be the Intellectual Property Litigator , the Head of the Program Management Office, the AI Adoption Advocate, or a User Experience Research Trainee. We can play multiple roles, although typically no more than a few. The role signals to other what is our list of responsibilities and how much decision power we have in each context. I feel it signals value contributed to the team more than status, even though we humans will also read status in it, as in almost any other signal. How much value we are expected to deliver signals how much status we have within the team or project.

Explaining these differences when discussing roles may help us avoid hurting or threatening others when their assigned roles and job titles do not match the way they imagined they should. The approach that worked better for me so far is to start explaining what roles are and how they are different from titles, then discuss all jobs to be done in the organization or project and ask people for input both about role names and responsibilities, and only then list the available people and discuss the role assignments. If you have tried some other approaches, please share and let me know how they worked for you.