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Elon Musk, founder and CEO of Tesla, announced this week that he no longer has a professional title at the electric car manufacturer.
He had removed his honorable mentions from his bio-page Tesla, where he had previously been named president, product architect and CEO, he said. in a tweet. "I am now the nothing of Tesla. This seems to be going on now, "he wrote.
Of course that's okay. Why would something change? Musk can not, with mere words or in the absence, stand out psychologically or literally from his position at the electric car manufacturer. By magic, he can not become a commoner in a realm of his own creation. More, as he discoveredsocieties are legally obliged to have a president, a treasurer and a secretary; He remains the general manager on the Tesla investor page.
But Musk may be right in general with regard to the futility of job titles, which greatly distract knowledge workers from the current economy.
We are all project managers now
According to Roger Martin, a leading management and strategy expert and former dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, we may not be doing a good job structuring job. By extension, our reliance on titles as status signs could be just another example of how humans – as individuals or in groups – act in patterns based on habits, without reacting to the world. as it really is.
Last week, at the Brightline Initiative's Strategy @ Work conference in New York, Martin presented his perspective on several major changes in the way we organize or modify our business. should organize, job.
Let's get rid of "jobs," he told the public, and give everyone "a portfolio of projects."
He realizes how subversive it may seem. Most people who talk about removing jobs actually suggest that robots replace them, not that the job is completely eliminated. But Martin asked the public – mostly executives in strategy and development roles – to consider their daily work: is it more or less the same task, day after day, for months or years, as in a manufacturing sector? plant?
No of course not. In many ways, he continued, most people in knowledge-based jobs, whether it's marketing, sales or software development, do not have static jobs. They are already project leaders, called to jump on this or that initiative, some of which can be repeated each year, some of which may not be repeated.
In most office jobs in developed economies, people make decisions, he says, turning an office into a decision-making facility. Raw materials are data; memos and presentations are products; and meetings are production processes.
On paper, we give the impression that the title of a given position represents a set of repetitive tasks, but when we come to work, the analogy with the factory is no longer relevant and the job description does not is more than a memory. He has already described this phenomenon in an article in the Harvard Business Review:
Think of a freshly hired brand manager assistant for Olay at P & G. At first, she may consider her role to be rather classic: to help her boss guide the brand. However, she will quickly learn that work is constantly changing. This month, she may be working on the pricing and positioning of a brand extension. Two months later, she may be totally absorbed in managing production problems that cause delays in shipping the best-selling item in the Olay lineup. Then everything is quiet until the boss approaches his office with another project. In a few months, she will realize that her work consists of a series of projects that come and go, sometimes in a practical way, sometimes not.
The problem with not recognizing this phenomenon is that companies employ professionals from all walks of life (all decision-makers) who need to be fired in the event of a decline in cash flow or a major change in strategy. he declares. tend to witness massive layoffs in multinationals, followed by massive hires Knowledge workers "experience large variations in decision-making intensity between peaks and troughs," he writes in HBR. In addition, when project managers hiding behind other titles have fewer projects to manage, they do not raise their hands to say, "I'm not busy enough." looks busy. (Cue the rise of bullshit work.)
The solution, he believes, is not to turn every employee into a freelancer and not to accumulate more instability and precariousness than the entertainment market economy has already introduced. but to manage large organizations in the same way as some professional services firms.
Even in the largest law firms and lawyers, employees are employed full time. They are assigned to projects after in-depth deliberations and not at random. Smart companies will want to retain their talent and train them to manage projects better and better, which will make the company more profitable and more powerful in turn.
Rather than jump from title to title, climbing the ranks and accumulating praise from the "senior" and "director" would naturally reflect this.
As an advantage, employee engagement levels should skyrocket, knowing that each person would now feel responsible for their own domain, making calls on issues for which they would feel able to do business. calls, rather than playing the role of redness. You will develop a company of leaders. Like the artists themselves, they will do several concerts at once.
Strategy or chaos?
A member of the audience at the conference asked Martin if his vision was not a recipe for chaos. His answer, in a nutshell: Companies are already operating in chaos. They spread and multiply, communications fail between levels and departments, the strategy loses all meaning.
According to Martin's vision, senior executives would still exist in order to serve as captains of a company's top management, and one of the most important people in the business would be a bit like a chief of operations, who would assign people and budgets to specific projects. . This person should know how to maintain the right pace and understand who is particularly skilled in which roles.
But even in this world, he also noted, a business would always need a CEO, the ultimate decision-maker, whose portfolio will be crammed with high-profile projects of the highest order.
Sorry, Elon.
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