Whether you are a senior director, a Vice President, or a cashier, you may be doing the same job and fulfilling the same responsibilities. Although the prestige that comes with any job title has a nice ring to it, the real glory comes from your accomplishments and progress on the job. There are department directors and managers who do not direct or manage anyone by themselves.
In the beginning stages of any business, entrepreneurs who successfully or unsuccessfully run their businesses can hypothetically work in their business by themselves with no employees and handle every job responsibility. They work in the accounting, marketing, finance, and shipping departments and do the work of five to twelve managers while carrying one job title: owner. They are the manager, director, CEO, CIO, CTO, CFO all at once. As a business owner, you can pick one job title, add it to your business cards, and expect to perform every task from CEO to cashier, even after you hire more employees. To me, “business owner” is not a job title. It is a type of person who runs his/her own business. I advise my clients to pick a more prestigious job title and stick with it, but expect to work in as many job titles as possible to make your business a success. Also, adding the phrase “business owner” to a business card looks boring since everyone is a business owner today. Your business card can include the title as Vice President of Marketing or Senior Director of Technology. That looks more exciting.
If you have a job, do not dwell on your job title either. In most cases, you have that excellent job title that makes you look like a department manager, but you are doing the job of a single person rather than an entire department. If you are working for a large corporation, the more department heads that the company employs, the larger their corporation appears.
If you have a job title as a director, CEO, manager, supervisor or any other title that entails managing people, other factors can also determine your responsibilities and job description including, but not limited to:
- Salary: Do you have a salary making a senior employee’s annual salary or a junior position. In my field when I was working for other companies, I would receive several job offers as a senior manager but was offered junior manager’s salary. I, of course, turned down the job until I was offered a better salary that would make me happy. My experience commanded a higher salary and any offers for a lower one made the recruiter look unprofessional.
- Workspace: Do you have your own office or a cube in the middle of the floor?
- Meetings: It is a well-known fact that most upper management spend at least 50% of their work day in meetings. How much of that workday do you spend?
