Easiest Way to Define Job Titles in Small Businesses

If you're managing a small team, job titles can become a little tricky. You don't have a junior support person and a senior support person because you only have one support person. And yet you still need a layer of hierarchy in your business to make it clear who reports to who. So in this video, I want to talk through a very simple framework that I use to define the job titles inside my small business. Let me just flip over. All right, so let's go into my secret framework here. It boils down to having every job title being one of three. That's, that's two, three categories here. These three categories can have any name that you want, but I'll tell you what mine are. This is coordinator, manager, and lead. Each of these columns reflects an area of responsibility in the business. When are things done? How are things done? What are we even working on, who is working on them and why are we doing this? In that way, each of these coincide with a different level of responsibility. So the very first section of responsibility is when, when are things executed? So for each of these layers, there's a different level of responsibility. When it comes to a coordinator, the very first layer of the business, they are responsible for when their own actions are done. They need to be responsible for their own deadlines, when they execute work, when they work working hours, all of that stuff, they're responsible for themselves. Now, once you've mastered ownership of your own deadlines and your own commitments at the manager and lead level, we're now looking towards other people as well. So, so at the manager level, we're going to be responsible for both ourself and other coordinating people who might be involved in an area of responsibility. So for example, if we're the manager of a YouTube video, we might need to coordinate with the video editor, with the thumbnail designer, with the content creator, with the clients who are featured in the video. And coordinating with those other people would happen at the manager level. So you become responsible for yourself as well as any other people involved in the areas you're working on. At the manager level, this is very much a tactical project management level of responsibility. Now when we move up to the lead level, we take a much broader look where we're responsible not only for ourself and for people involved in certain areas, but also future looking, future involvements, external stakeholders, pretty much everyone. We are responsible for coordinating the time and commitments of actions at the lead level. So our ownership of when things happen isn't just on a task or project level. It's for an overall business Level of what are the broad initiatives, what happens? First, that full team responsibility is the responsibility of a lead. So at a very basic level, you could use this one column of when things happen as a way to differentiate what are the roles in your business. If someone is responsible for themselves, they're a coordinator. If they're responsible for themselves and others, they're a manager. And then if they're involved in all stakeholders, they're a lead. Now, to make that a full job title, all you need to do is combine the title here with the area of responsibility. So you could have a marketing coordinator responsible for themself. You could have a customer support manager responsible for themselves and others. You could have an operations lead responsible for an entire functional area. All we're doing is taking the literal function that the person's responsible for and putting it at the right level to get the super accurate job title that you can use both now and into the future. Now, for many of you, just having this broken down will be plenty to start to figure out these layers of the business. But what I find really helpful is to also overlay this of how this area of responsibility extends to these other layers of the business as well. I'm going to fill it in then. Let me explain. By the way, I should point out that the three levels you see here on my chart of coordinator, manager, and lead are titles that I chose for ProcessDriven because they best reflected the culture and vibe we're trying to build inside of ProcessDriven. The titles you choose might be different, so you might have, you know, assistant, specialist, and senior or head of, or whatever it might be. Whatever titles you choose will still work. Just be sure to fill out this matrix so you have that clear definition in your head of what it means to you. Because as we all know, head of marketing at one company might be totally different than what head of marketing means at another. To help others who watch this video out too, I would encourage you to share what three levels you're going to use in the comments below. Let's all swap notes as to what possible titles might work. So that way, if anyone watching this video in the future is thinking, hmm, what, what should I call my levels? They can browse the comments of this video and get some inspiration. So go ahead, take that as a quick action item, write the three levels you're going to use below what those titles might be, and then let's continue with the video. All right, so here's what it looks like, all filled in for these other areas of the business, like how we execute things. I just put an X because the same thing we put over here applies to this column. When you're a coordinator, you're responsible for how you execute the things that you are doing. If you are in a more bureaucratic business, this actually might not be true for you, but for my business and most small teams out there, we want people to be innovating within the area that they own. If you're in charge of support tickets, I expect you at my company to make the way we do support tickets better just by you doing it. I believe that every person, even the newest coordinator on the team, is responsible for that. As we continue down, the manager is responsible for the how of both themselves and everyone that's involved in their process. So again, if you're doing YouTube videos, you're in charge of making that overall YouTube process better for everyone involved. At the lead level, once again, you're responsible for that how? Both for yourself, for for others, and every potential stakeholder involved. So a very broad area of responsibility. Next up, we have the what column. What are we actually working on? At the coordinator level, you typically do not have much of a say at this point because you are executing what is already scoped out. So that's not an area of responsibility I would typically put on a coordinator. They might be able to submit ideas, but they're not creating new things to do. They're just executing what's already defined. Now, at the manager level, this shifts a little bit. While they might not be able to make all changes independently, I would expect someone at the manager level to help inform what we actually do. So again, using that YouTube example, if you were owning YouTube pipeline, I would expect you to help shape what steps happen to publish a YouTube video. For example, if we notice, wow, we should be split testing thumbnails. That is a step of what that could be defined. And you, as the owner of that overall area, have all of the right and ability to add in those steps to better refine the area of responsibility that you own. That's what makes a manager different than a coordinator. And of course, leads also carry that responsibility to broader areas of ownership. Next column is who. Who is executing this stuff. At the coordinator level, you're only responsible for yourself, so there is no responsibility here for you. At the manager level, you do have more responsibility. You're in charge of yourself. What should you be doing versus other people as well as those people involved in the process. To continue with the YouTube production example, if you are in charge of that area, you do have Some influence over who is involved in the area you're working on, who is doing what, as well as who should be in that project at all. If the graphic designer you're working with is not doing a great job, you have a say in helping shift out who is responsible for that task or even bring to a leadership level of changing staffing on the team or just shifting who is owning certain areas. But when it comes to areas of ownership that you have, you do control that who at the manager level, continuing down at the leadership level, you absolutely have full control over the who piece, not just in processes you own, but also the team overall. So overall team performance, who should be on the team, what should they be doing that is ownership at the lead level. Finally, we have the why column. Recently at ProcessDriven, we actually made a core value of require the why. So everybody on our team has the mandate to understand why what they're doing matters. And if they can't answer that question as to why their action matters, ask for clarification. And if they can't get a good answer, don't do the thing. Stop wasting time on things that don't matter. And despite this being everyone's responsibility, I still view that the X is boldest for the leadership role, where you're responsible for setting that clarity and rippling that down. The organization, in theory, everybody should have this responsibility, but the leads carry this. The heaviest of explaining why the broader mission happens, which helps each person explain why their pipelines or their areas of responsibility matters and ultimately why their tasks and their, you know, individual contributions actually matter. So let me just make this a bolder X. There we go. Super X. Oh, and if we haven't met before, hello, my name is Layla. Frameworks like this are kind of like my love language. And here at ProcessDriven, we are helping small businesses systemize their operations through little shifts like this as well as big changes about how you operate. The main way we work with folks is through our ProcessDriven Foundations program, and that's actually where this question was originally submitted. So if you are interested in the topic of systemizing your small business and you're not quite sure where to start, definitely check out the training I'll put in the description below, which is called the blueprint. That video not only goes over our general approach here at ProcessDriven, but it'll also give you some tactical exercises, exercises as to how to start thinking about your business as a machine that you're building rather than this source of chaos. If you'd like to have your operations question answered in a future video. Go ahead and leave it in the comments below. Thanks so much for watching and until next time, enjoy the process.