Access Over Title
Choose roles that put you near great leaders and consequential decisions
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 95%
Evaluate a role by the access it provides rather than by its title alone. Determine whether the position places you close to skilled leaders, important decisions, and consequential business problems. A title can be useful when it grants that access, but it is only a proxy; an intern, chief of staff, or specialist working directly with executives may learn and advance faster than a nominal executive managing a small function elsewhere. The mechanism is proximity compounded over time: observing decisions builds judgment, trusted collaboration creates autonomy, and difficult assignments produce credible evidence of capability. Select the role with the strongest combination of access, learning, responsibility, and capability fit, then let compensation and titles follow the impact you create.
Origin
Extracted from Marketing Against The Grain, where Kipp Bodnar and Kieran Flanagan contrast inflated titles with roles such as chief of staff that provide direct access to executives and important work.
Core principles
- 01A title is valuable only when it unlocks useful access or responsibility
- 02Proximity to strong leaders accelerates learning
- 03Consequential work builds more career capital than external status
- 04Compensation and stronger titles often follow demonstrated impact
How to run it
- 1
Name the room
Identify the leaders, decisions, and business problems from which you most need to learn. Be specific about the access that would accelerate your development.
Pro tip Look for people whose judgment and operating experience you want to acquire.
Watch out Do not treat generic executive visibility as meaningful access.
- 2
Inspect the role's reality
Determine who you will work with, which meetings you will enter, and what decisions or projects you will influence. Ignore the title while performing this assessment.
Pro tip Ask for examples of projects previously owned by people in the role.
Watch out A prestigious reporting line may still provide little genuine interaction.
- 3
Test capability fit
Compare the role's actual scope with work you have successfully performed. Seek stretch without accepting a title that creates implausible expectations.
Pro tip Translate the scope into team size, revenue stage, decision authority, and problem complexity.
Watch out An inflated title can make the next employer misread your real skill level.
- 4
Compare career capital
Rank opportunities by the quality of leadership exposure, problems, learning, autonomy, and evidence of impact they can provide.
Pro tip Prefer access that leads to real ownership rather than passive observation.
Watch out Do not let brief public affirmation outweigh years of daily work.
- 5
Earn deeper access
Deliver reliable work, build trust, and use the resulting autonomy to take on increasingly consequential problems.
Pro tip Make your manager's trust visible through completed missions and sound decisions.
Watch out Access without dependable execution will not compound.
In the wild
A marketer compares a chief-of-staff role working daily with an experienced COO against a vice-president title at a small company where the job is primarily campaign management. She chooses the chief-of-staff role because it offers exposure to planning, pricing, hiring, and cross-functional decisions.
→ She develops executive judgment and becomes qualified for genuine operating leadership faster than the title-first alternative would have allowed.
The hosts describe people who began as interns or executive chiefs of staff and worked directly with senior leaders. Their proximity to important decisions and assignments accelerated their development beyond peers who prioritized formal rank.
→ Those professionals became successful executives faster because they prioritized access and consequential work.
Common mistakes
Mistaking title for scope
The same title can represent radically different team sizes, responsibilities, and levels of business complexity.
Choosing public affirmation
A promotion announcement produces brief recognition, but that feeling fades and leaves the person with the actual work.
Ignoring capability mismatch
Taking an inflated title too early can create expectations that the professional's experience cannot yet support.
Is it for you?
Best for
It is best for people choosing among roles with different titles, reporting lines, and levels of exposure to experienced leaders.
Not ideal for
It is not ideal when immediate compensation, employment security, or formal authority is a non-negotiable requirement.
From the transcript
“And if a title grants you access to a group of people that you can learn from and you can work on cool things with,…”
“then the thing to solve for is not your title and compensation, it is to get into the room where it happens.”
“they prioritized the right thing.”
From the episode
HubSpot & Zapier CMOs Share Their Career Advice For Marketers