Your Org Chart Called. It Has No Idea What Anyone Does Either.

I spent two days recently with a client trying to understand their organisation. They handed me a thick stack of org charts. Boxes, lines, arrows, dotted reporting lines going sideways in ways that defied geometry. And titles. Lots and lots of titles.

Chief Experience Transformation Catalyst. Head of People Success. Director of Revenue Enablement and Stakeholder Engagement. VP of Growth Ecosystems.

I read through all of it and, hand on heart, I still wasn’t entirely sure what anyone did for a living.

Then I went home, turned on the television, and a trailer came on for an old film. Snakes on a Plane. And within four words, I knew exactly what was happening, who was involved, why it mattered, and roughly how it was going to end.

Which got me thinking. If Samuel L. Jackson can describe a job in four words, why can’t we?

The Snakes on a Plane Test for Job Titles

Here is a test I am now formally proposing for every job title in every organisation. I am calling it the Snakes on a Plane Test, and it goes like this: can a reasonably intelligent outsider read your job title and know, within one sentence, what you do and why it matters?

Head of Sales, Asia Pacific. Passes. Clean, clear, accountable.

Director of Revenue Enablement and Stakeholder Engagement. Fails. Revenue enablement of what, exactly? Which stakeholders? Engaged to do what?

Chief Happiness Officer. Fails, and also raises separate questions about the culture.

Head of People Success. Fails. This is HR. It is fine to say HR. HR is a respectable and important function. It does not need a rebrand.

Growth Hacker. Fails. And sounds mildly alarming.

The point is not to be cruel about individual titles. The point is that vague titles are usually a symptom of something, and that something is worth paying attention to.

Jargon in Job Titles: Where Accountability Goes to Die

Here is the uncomfortable truth underneath all the wordplay. Jargon is how organisations hide from accountability. When a role is clearly named, it is clearly owned. When it is clearly owned, performance against it can be clearly measured. And that, for some organisations, is precisely the problem.

A “Head of Sales” either hits their number or they do not. A “Director of Revenue Enablement and Stakeholder Engagement” can always argue they were enabling, engaging, and directing, regardless of outcome. The vagueness is not accidental. It is load-bearing.

In my experience, vague job titles tend to cluster around one of three organisational problems.

The first is that the role itself was never clearly defined, so the title is vague because no one ever really agreed on what the job was.

The second is a culture that prioritises how things sound over what they do, which is a flag worth noting when you see it. The third, and most common, is that someone got a new title instead of a pay rise and the title had to sound important enough to justify the decision.

None of these are good signs.

A Fair Counterargument (Which I Will Now Briefly Acknowledge Before Dismissing)

Someone will argue, not unreasonably, that modern work is genuinely complex and that some new roles simply do not have simple names yet. A Data and AI Ethics Lead, for example, is a real job that did not exist fifteen years ago and there is no cleaner way to say it.

Fair enough. That is the exception. The problem is that organisations are using the exception as the template, applying the logic of genuinely novel roles to functions that have existed since commerce began. Sales is sales. HR is HR. Finance is finance.

Wrapping them in transformation language does not transform them. It just makes the org chart harder to read.

What Good Job Titles Look Like

The organisations I have worked with that have the clearest strategies tend to have the clearest titles. This is not a coincidence. Clarity of language reflects clarity of thought, and clarity of thought is what strategy actually is.

If you cannot name the role plainly, the odds are good that you have not fully defined it.

So here is a practical suggestion. Next time you are writing a job description, before you post it, put the title through the test. Say it out loud to someone who does not work at your company. Ask them what they think the person does. If they get it right, you have a title. If they look confused or vaguely impressed in a way they cannot explain, you have a lanyard waiting to happen.

Snakes on a Plane knew what it was. It was not ashamed of what it was. It delivered exactly what it promised, efficiently and without unnecessary complexity.

Your org chart should be so lucky.

• Bio
• LinkedIn

Justin Miles

Manager Partner, Melbourne at Generator Talent

Justin is the Managing Partner of our Melbourne office, an outcome focused leader with a track record of driving business performance through proven talent and organisation development practices. Justin’s methods and skills have been shaped by working with performance oriented leaders in great companies including PepsiCo, The Campbell Soup Company, Diageo, Rip Curl, Fonterra and Wesfarmers, in Australia, the USA and Latin America.