Many people overlook the value of a strong title system in encouraging people to work harder for the company. There have been numerous studies on the effects of titles related to performance.
The key to a strong title system is as follows:
Part VI: The Power of Recognition
- 1. At least 10 different levels of achievement: Even if your goal is simplicity you need to give the hard working leaders something to aim for. If all you have is "Distributor/Manager/Director/RVP" once they become an RVP you can bet they won't work as hard because they will believe that they have reached the "ceiling of achievement".
a. The benefits of different titles wanes around the ten mark. Creating other titles isn't really a detriment to the system but the continued benefit of the titles diminishes significantly.
- 2. Use attractive titles: There is a reason that nearly every company has a "Diamond" level. It's because it is universally accepted to be something great to be. The other titles should be attractively named as well.
- 3.The titles should follow a progression which denotes their value in a reasonably obvious fashion to anyone that would hear what the titles were. In other words, don't have "Diamond" and then "Gold" above it as that, to most people, will not seem to be a "value increase".
- 4.Try to minimize the usage of "1 star", "2 star", etc. This is a common practice among some companies but it is actually self defeating for two big psychological reasons.
a. First, it makes a "2 star" seem to be only minimally different than a "4 star". The upper titles should denote achievement and a distributor should be able to take pride in their achievement. Incrementing the numeric portion of a title is a far less effective method of achieving this. Monavie is a tremendously good example of this with their well named titles that denote increasing authority with each level.
b. Second, most people do not enjoy numbers except those that are preceded with a dollar sign. Seeing a list of 1/2/3/4 is actually a turn off to the majority of people.