Charmain Bogue | The Lie That Lives Inside Most Job Titles

Charmain Bogue at work


What you are called and what you actually do are frequently not the same thing.

I have a habit, when I start working with a new coaching client, of asking her to describe what she did yesterday. Not what her title says she does. Not what the job description says. What she actually did, hour by hour, decision by decision, from the time she started work until the time she stopped.

The answer is almost never what the title implies.

The gap between the title and the work

A Chief Operating Officer who spends four hours a day in tactical coordination meetings and twenty minutes on operational strategy is not operating as a Chief Operating Officer. A Vice President of People who has no authority over compensation structure and cannot hire without three layers of approval is not a vice president in any meaningful sense. The title promises a scope of authority and accountability that the actual work does not reflect.

This gap is not unusual. It is the norm. And it causes two distinct problems. The first is that the person in the role is doing work that does not match her experience or ambition, which is how talented people end up frustrated in jobs they thought they wanted. The second is that the organization has a structure on paper that does not match the structure in practice, which means the accountability and decision rights are not where the chart says they are.

Why people stay in the gap

The honest answer is that the title carries social weight the actual job might not. It is easier to explain what you do when you have a credible title. The compensation is usually tied to the title rather than to the real scope of the work. And leaving means acknowledging that the thing you accepted was not really what it was presented as, which requires a kind of reckoning that is easier to defer.

I do not judge people for staying. I do try to help them see the gap clearly, because the gap is costing them something whether or not they name it. The skills they are not building, the authority they are not exercising, the progression they are not making, those losses are real even when the title looks impressive from the outside.

The question worth asking

Before accepting a role, I now encourage the women I mentor to ask directly: where does this role have genuine authority, meaning the ability to decide and act without a chain of approvals? Where does it have budget control? Who does the person in this seat actually influence, and by what mechanism? Those questions reveal more about the real scope of a job than any title or description. The answers are worth knowing before you accept, not six months after.

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