Why I don’t use CEO as a title
One of the basic tenets of software development is to use appropriate and descriptive names. When the words facilitate good thoughts, much of our work is made easier and so much more obvious.
The same is true for organizational structure, which is a meta-form of programming. It structures the way people interact and work together. So we need appropriate names for roles, responsibilities, and so on. And yet, the culture of hierarchy sends the wrong messages by using such titles as CEO or Head of Product. Above all, such titles betray a misunderstanding of what leadership is all about.
I suggest companies think hard about how they wish to work together, and the role of the different members of the teams. In knowledge work in particular, I believe a democratic and collaborative spirit should be emphasized instead of the militaristic ethos that popular business titles imply.
TLDR: Use “Lead” and not “Chief” or “Head”.
For a more extended explanation, read on.
Spooky language
Since Mark Zuckerberg created business cards with what must have felt like a good idea at the time, “I’m CEO…bitch”, founders of companies in the technology space have taken advantage of any opportunity to use the title. I don’t blame you if you do or if you aspire to. In a society where self-worth is so closely connected to job success, people would be remiss not to fasten that whale of a title to their email footers, LinkedIn profiles, Twitter handles, Tinder profiles, and all other places where dudes (and they are mostly dudes) go to brag and self-aggrandize. There is also a comforting simplicity that comes with using the title. It makes it clear to everyone involved who is calling the shots.
In spite of these advantages , I think the title is nonsense, and most people shouldn’t use it.
Firstly, as the great George Carlin taught us: we should prefer simple words over spooky language.
Chief Executive Officer is a collection of poor words designed to spook people who are less entitled than these (usually) self-anointed chiefs. Chief calls to mind the stereotypical imagination of a tribal patriarchal society. (Those of you who know your anthropology will also recognize that in many tribal societies, the chief was often ceremonial and a projection of Europeans while often more democratic organization was taking place.) In both the militaristic-survivalist and patriarchal connotations, it seems self-defeating in present-day knowledge work. Things don’t get better when the chief is involved. They just get more autocratic, which produces worse outcomes. The word implicitly disempowers others in your team and company. They must now operate in a culture where there are chiefs. That’s right. The concept of the chief itself holds back creativity and operational excellence of a company.
Executive is also a terrible concept to use at a company in the technology space. The dictionary definition makes some sort of distinction between ordinary employees and those who can “put policies or laws into effect.” Notice that this phrasing closely overlaps with the ordinary responsibilities of a software developer. After all, they create business policies in code. This observation exposes how the whole idea that a few grizzled “senior” people make executive decisions in board rooms is a terror upon any person’s basic understanding of knowledge work. The whole idea is that knowledge workers are constantly collaborating on aspects of informational systems required to power modern-day organizations and the production of their core product or service. This means that most team members are executives, and not just a few.
Do we even need arguments to decide why “Officer” is such a poor word? We may as well replace it with “sack of flesh” for all it disambiguates between different human people.
The alternative concept of a leader
If we agree that CEO is not the right title for someone who leads a company in the tech space, what would be a better one? The best I’ve come up with is simply: Company Lead.
Firstly, while “chief executive officering” may not be a real activity, leading surely is. So we need to gain a better grasp of our concept of leadership.
The majority of people wax lyrical about how the CEO role is about making a few decisions. This is very much in the spirit of the implication of CEO. But I even think that the error is not only in the words, but also in the meaning. A concept of leadership which focuses on monopolizing decisions is a pathetically bad concept of leadership.
It’s true, a great “decider” may add value to the endeavor if decisions would otherwise be catastrophic and the decisions of the leader are so much better. This is the basic argument and general core of the failed hierarchical organizational model that most companies, explicitly or implicitly, champion. The idea is that a few people are the best deciders and they should make all the decisions. Fair enough.
Except it doesn’t work. The concept doesn’t scale. If a single person should make all the decisions, how do you support a growing business which requires 10x the decisions from one year to the next? In fact, by monopolizing decision-making, a leader could actually atrophy the rest of the organization, and create a culture of indecision and inaction, which depends on the single autocrat to make any progress.
Instead, the leader should model and embody a triad spanning visionary execution, decision and cultivation aspects. Such a contributor has a wide-enough perception to understand the important dynamics of the arena in play, they know how to use strategic good sense to make decisions, and how to inform a decision with the grit of hands-on work. Such a leader should cultivate and coach others so they are strong leaders in their domain as well.
By deferring decision responsibilities to others, and coaching them, leaders inspire confidence in others to figure complicated things out. And as a last resort, such a leader may use their own judgment and experience to act as a back-stop that will prevent important mistakes from being made.
Yet this does not and should not prevent the organization from making small mistakes. For by making these, and recognizing them as such, the people who made the mistakes learn and grow more experienced and more capable. The organization may stumble in the short-run, yet in the long-run it grows a powerful sense of balance.
Therefore, the title for this kind of leader should not imply trigger-happy decision-making. Rather, it should imply vision, execution, decision and cultivation/coaching. For simplicity’s sake I use “Company Lead.”
What do you think?
What poor titles have you identified? Which do you recommend? I’d be curious to hear back.
