From my monthly col­umn in form. The Ger­man design mag­a­zine.
Of Chief Pen­cil Sharp­en­ers and Senior Meet­ing Conveners.

About mean­ing­less titles and unnec­es­sary hierarchies

A recent study about the eco­nomic sit­u­a­tion of the design pro­fes­sion in the US listed six hier­ar­chies for the posi­tions in an aver­age design firm: owner/partner/principal; creative/design direc­tor; art direc­tor; senior designer; designer; junior designer. This rea­son­able list attracted a lot of atten­tion in online forums and weblogs, with large agen­cies sub­mit­ting their lists of up to 18 lev­els of titles in the design depart­ment alone ? from junior designer through copy­writer and media designer to Chief Cre­ative Offi­cer. Not only does this take on infla­tion­ary pro­por­tions, ren­der­ing them increas­ingly mean­ing­less, but there is also a con­tra­dic­tion in the terminology:

Some of the titles denote where some­one is placed within the ranks of their com­pany, while oth­ers explain what they do there. Titles, roles and job descrip­tions are all con­fused. We have already learnt in this col­umn that unprecise lan­guage indi­cates unclear think­ing. What, then, makes an agency use such con­fused lan­guage, which they would never tol­er­ate in a client brief­ing? Their employee?s van­ity? And what of design­ers who have pro­gressed to design direc­tor after a few years, only to have entered the end of the career street? And if you want to name a dozen hier­ar­chies, you need three times that many employ­ees. Which is why small stu­dios love to fake it by giv­ing an impres­sive title to every intern (how about Research Assis­tant?), while the cleaner is upgraded to Vice Pres­i­dent of Recy­cling Oper­a­tions. And even in Ger­many, those titles have to be in Eng­lish, the more to impress gullible clients with. Unfor­tu­nately, the Chief Design Offi­cer sounds very much like a mil­i­tary rank in German.

The peo­ple who are most impressed by this sort of lan­guage tend to be the ones who can­not really speak it. Apart from designer van­ity, another rea­son quoted for title­ma­nia is often the fact that clients would rather call a Design Direc­tor than a lowly designer. The direc­tor gets paid for tak­ing the call and then relays the mes­sage to the lower lev­els who do the actual work. In the real world, how­ever, teams are nei­ther run nor dom­i­nated by the peo­ple with the top title, but by those who com­mand the high­est respect from their peers. Unfor­tu­nately, the sound­est teams often tend to take on new col­leagues only if their com­pe­tence is below the group?s aver­age. Over time, every­body in a small team will have risen to Senior Designer level at least, but at the expense of design qual­ity. The desire to keep the sta­tus quo tends to be stronger than that of tak­ing risks.

Design­ers, too, fall vic­tim to the Peter* Prin­ci­ple: Employ­ees within an orga­ni­za­tion will advance to their high­est level of com­pe­tence and then be pro­moted to and remain at a level at which they are incompetent.

* After Lau­rence John­ston Peter (1919?1990).