How Prince Harry’s new job created an impact on job-titles
Nowadays when I decided to get away from my daily reading routine, following royal family news is my escape. The latest catch of the recent weeks was Prince Harry’s new job as Chief Impact Officer in a mental health firm in US (BBC, 2021). According to BBC news, his roles and responsibilities are still not clear but firm confirmed his position and title in their leadership team (2021). The part I and probably many people who were looking for to find some quality gossip in royal news was their relationship with the rest of the family and their new life in the USA. But I was also interested in his new role and title. What is a Chief Impact Officer? At C-level, are we flexible enough to include new ‘Officers” to the club? And maybe the broader question how can we manage titles in HR?
Let’s begin with first question. I googled Chief Impact Officer which looks like a recently created title on C-level. Only 2 positions other than Prince Harry’s job revealed in my search. According to one job description in a commercial company, the successful candidate will be leading the impact and management practices and design, develop company’s portfolio, play an significant role in the development of products. In another job description at a non-profit organization, the future CImpO will provide an oversight in organization’s portfolio and manage community, partnership, staff relationships and lead innovative programs. I shared here very briefly the responsibilities.
The job responsibilities on these job ads have some common grounds as managing and developing portfolios but they differ from each other in other aspects. I believe that having only 2 detail job-descriptions did not provide me enough insight about what a Chief Impact Officer is doing. So I searched for a Chief Impact Officers on LinkedIn to see understand it better. I was able find only 1 person who began her role only 3 months ago. In my opinion, this answered my second questions. Since there are not many CImpOs in the market as I can see via LinkedIn, this title is recently created and the role could be a need for C-level.
Let’s move on to my third question. What about the titles? How do the recruiters manage or create titles? I do not have a simple or direct answer to a question. In their article, Job titles as Identity Badges, Grant, Berg and Cable discuss the issue very broadly. They claimed job titles have both social and cultural meaning beside their self-expressive function. Employees often would like to merge meaningful aspects of their identities and their daily work tasks on the job titles. Therefore the titles can mirror not only their identity at work but also their personal skills and interests as well (2014). In their article they also share few examples of newly created and self-created titles such as an event organizer is known as “director of chaos,” Yahoo! spokesperson Heidi Burgett calls herself the “Yahoo! evangelist,” and some IBM employees also have titles such as “data detective” and “creative technologist.” (Grant, Berg & Cable, 2014). This article helps me very much to understand how titles can be an reinforcer for employers on organizations. It also proves that titles can be chosen by individuals or employers to reflect their identity in an organization beside their roles and responsibilities in their role.
Therefore the titles are prone to alter from organization to organization as well as they may change from person to person on the same role. As we have seen Prince Harry’s new role as a Chief Impact Officer, the title can be on HR literature quite new.
Looking from this perspective, someone who is looking for a new job or new opportunity searching a job with titles could restrict their opportunities. For example if you are interested becoming a Chief Impact Officer at any company, congratulations only 2 companies are actively looking for. But if you analyze any job description and responsibilities that is interesting for you, you may list some keywords. Combining these keywords, with your preferred location, and your skills on search bar, you may get a longer list of opportunities rather than 2 with a certain title. Another point that came to my mind that following companies and creating a job alert for these ones.
I am quite not sure if Prince Harry landed on this job whether by searching for it or company approached him, it seems that he had already had an impact on me to conduct a small search about titles. Hopefully, his impact became sustainable and broader when his roles and responsibilities became clear!
References
BBC News Harry to become chief impact officer at US coaching firm BetterUp Retrieved date : 08/04/2021 Retrieved From: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56500298
Grant, A., Berg, J. & Cable, D. (2013). Job Titles as Identity Badges: How Self-Reflective Titles Can Reduce Emotional Exhaustion. Academy of Management Journal. 57. 1201–1225.