Letters from America — You’re a director of what exactly..?

Shortly after I joined Skyscanner we did a review of job titles and discovered that we had around 97 different job titles for around 140 people.

For those of you in start-ups that have grown quickly, you may be familiar with this. You find people referred to as Head of “…” and yet they have a team of 1. Or as Lead “…” but again, they’re the only person working in that area.

People are given titles as a means to keep morale artificially high and to stop them leaving.

It’s a symptom of two things: 1) Lack of a clear plan and career path for employees and 2) Managers being too busy or too inexperienced to invest in developing career paths for their team.

Start-ups are generally built to a certain size by ICs (super high performing “individual contributors”) because they can’t afford experienced managers and quite frankly they don’t need nor want them in the early days either.

Direct, short term impact trumps long term sustainable impact in a start-up

If all goes well this starts to change, you bring in junior execs (what we call grads in the UK) and they’re interested in a clear and structured road for career progression.

Furthermore, you’ve developed proof of concept but you realize that “winning” won’t happen over night and things need to be more sustainable.

So, you put in career frameworks, streamline job titles, train managers to be managers and try to build a process that works whilst keeping it as light-weight as possible. People who thought they were grade 5 are now told they’re actually a grade 2. People who used to sit near to the CEO now sit on a different floor which they take as a personal affront. Morale tanks, people start saying “are we becoming too corporate”, it’s exceptionally hard.

Without doubt, moving from start-up to a “Start-up at Scale” or “Scale-up” is one of the most painful things a company can go through.

At Skyscanner, we now have clear competencies, a clear bonus structure and a simple hierarchy of titles.

We don’t advertise for new roles with “years in service” as we have clarity of the competencies we need and titles tend to map to these UK wide (broadly). We know that 2 years in one company can be like 5 in another from an experience point of view. Most people who join Skyscanner comment that when you’ve been here a week it feels like you’ve absorbed the equivalent to a month. A month is like six and a year is like 5. It’s almost like dog years due to the tempo and speed of change.

Since moving to the US and looking at hiring I’ve noticed that everyone puts either “years in service” or an indication of salary in their adverts. At first I wasn’t sure of the need but having started interviewing it’s apparent.

Role titles in the US are as diverse and inconsistent as the weather can be during a Scottish summer.

Take ‘director’ for example, this is generally much more junior than in the UK but that’s not always the case. So you can’t really tell until you meet someone what sort of director they are.

I’ve started asking about what causes this and it seems to stem for a strong desire from employees to be recognized (ideally annually) with title changes — even if the role or responsibility is essentially unchanged. This is coupled with a management system that (like a start-up) would rather tick the box than invest the time in a more constructive, if challenging, discussion.

This need for recognition would tend to be referred to as a fixed mindset as discussed in one of my favorite books; Mindset by Carol Dweck.

Having asked more people about it, it appears that the last 10 years or so in the US work environment has seen a stark shift away from constructive criticism to a more superficial approach of “encourage at all costs”.

I’m conscious this is a sweeping generalization and please treat it as such. In the UK we’re not better we’re simply less evolved.

I asked one colleague for their thoughts and she referred to the “entitlement generation” that I hadn’t had the pleasure of meeting yet but would no doubt come across shortly. Apparently this is fixed mindset at it’s most extreme led by years of being told “you’re awesome” by parents and then by teachers and friends.

Having now taken my kids to the park a fair bit and seen other kids playing there too I can see a generation of kids growing up with parents either glued to devices or telling their kids how great they are. I am somewhat saddened by it.

Growing up believing you are blessed with a personal hand of cards that you can’t change is a terrifying way to live life. At some point you will come across people with a better hand of cards (set of skills). At such a point you can either work to improve and be better (Andy Murray is a great example) or you have no emotional tools to deal with the situation and you capitulate (John McEnroe).

Being able to associate success with effort rather than born talent (or entitlement) has to be one of the most important things in life.

If you’re a leader in a start-up and haven’t done so already, then I’d urge you to do the following:

look at the number of role titles and see if it looks oddly large for the number of people;

Look at individuals who have been promoted and decide if it was through genuine merit and effort or through something more superficial like time with company;

think about developing a competency framework;

and, more than anything, be cognoscente of the long term damage you can do to people by giving them a superficial promotion for the sake of it rather than investing the time and guidance to help them develop into the employee they can be.

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