Is It a Value or a Job?

Twitter took some heat last week for hiring Jeffrey Siminoff as their VP of Diversity and Inclusion. EricaJoy took them to task for it, making the point that no company should have a VP of Diversity — the responsibility must rest with the CEO to effect real change.

One of the most important parts of building a team is differentiating between roles that get hired and values that are embodied by everyone on the team. “Strategy” is a commonly-cited example. Small companies shouldn’t hire people with “strategy” in their title. It’s not because strategy isn’t important, but rather because “strategy” isn’t a job in a startup — it’s a value that everyone on the team from the engineers to the designers to the CEO must own.

Value-or-job is a stage-dependent decision. Something that should be a job in a Fortune 500 company may be a value in a startup. This isn’t just due to a lack of resources — it’s because the spirit of the role shouldn’t be isolated; it needs to be owned by everyone on the team.

Screw this up and it’s all too easy for your other employees to point fingers as the “VP of X” when something goes wrong. Alternatively, they believe that X is not part of their job — “the VP of X must have it under control.”

At some size — and that size probably varies greatly by industry and business model — some of these roles may start to make more sense. For instance, Analytics. Analytics rarely makes sense as a job in a company under (say) 25 people. Everyone needs to be analytical — product managers, engineers, marketers, salespeople, and executives. They all need to own the numbers behind their discipline, and the numbers are rarely so complicated that an intelligent person with a spreadsheet can’t figure it out on his or her own.

That isn’t to say that every role in a big company that isn’t represented in a startup should be a commonly-held value. Not at all. For instance, investor relations: IR is extremely important at big, public companies, but early-stage companies shouldn’t dedicate too much time to it — and if you have to, you may have chosen the wrong investors.

So if you’re in a strategy role at a bigger company and are looking to move into a smaller one, think about how your skill set could translate into a role more commonly seen at an early stage — for instance, business development in a startup often owns many of the “corp dev” responsibilities seen in mature companies.