When You've Just Been Promoted to "Manager of" from "Manager"...

A friend of mine (I'll call him Johnny) emailed me last week and told me he had been promoted to "Manager of Customer Service" from "Customer Service Manager".

Ah yes, nothing says "I've arrived" more than an in-line promotion that tweaks your title a little bit but really changes nothing else.... Why do companies do this?  Sometimes real considerations drive the process, other times it's just the usual organizational madness...

I once worked for an organization that had "Manager of" titles and "Manager" titles.   Some of you are now questioning my aptitude to host an HR-related site.  The rest of you have worked on a Death Star before, and kind of understand that the compensation folks can come up with some crazy schemes to back up the whim of any organization.  By the way, Darth Vadar was a "Operations Manager" until The Empire Strikes Back, at which point he got the in-line promotion to "Manager of Operations" at Empire Industries... Even though things weren't going great, the Sith understood he might have a retention issue and wanted to lock him in for at least the remainder of the fiscal year.  You get the vibe...

Example of how it works:  In the past company I worked at, the "Manager" title was the lessor of the two designations, with the "Manager of" being preferred.  So, you had "Customer Service Managers" running around call centers, with the "Manager of Customer Service" being the senior designation of choice.  How did one promote to the "Manager of" title?  Good question.  There were some loose designations about Call Center size impacting eligibility, but over time the Directors of the centers kind of used it at their discretion, and it became impossible to manage or explain.

So Johnny, here's to you and your promotion.  Take a look at the clip from The Office below (hat tip to Michael at Career Revolution where I found the clip) and by all means, order new business cards instead of "fixing" your existing ones with white-out....

Comments

[Lisa]

Impossible to explain or imagine? You are not so far off at all . . . we have XX Director vs Director of XX; Chief vs. Officer; Assistant to Director of XX vs XX Administrative Officer; supervisor vs lead. Organizationally we differentiate between service lines vs departments (hint: size does not matter) and annually get to sort this all out on our org charts. Add a just a touch of grade creep and well, the fun begins!