You Are Not a CIO. And That Is Fine.

Holding an inflated title does not make you more effective, more respected, or more prepared for actual leadership responsibility. Clarity about your real role, your actual scope, and the decisions you genuinely own is far more valuable than a prestigious label that obscures rather than defines your contribution. Honest positioning builds credibility; title inflation quietly erodes it.

Title inflation is not a strategy. It is a symptom.

1. Fifty chiefs

There is a company somewhere right now with fifty people holding the title of Chief Information Officer, and the word chief, by any reasonable definition, implies a singular thing, a point of ownership where the decision stops moving around the room and lands on a specific human being. When you have fifty of them, you do not have fifty chiefs. You have a vocabulary problem that somebody decided to solve with a promotion budget.

This is not a harmless eccentricity of modern corporate life. It is part of a wider pattern where titles are increasingly used as cheap compensation, as retention theatre, as recruitment bait, and sometimes as a substitute for the harder work of building real career paths. The market has noticed. Senior-sounding titles are appearing earlier in careers, manager titles are being stretched beyond actual management work, and employees increasingly understand that a grander label often arrives without the authority, pay, scope, or consequence that should come with it.

2. The rot sets in

This is happening everywhere and we should stop pretending it is harmless, because title inflation is never just cosmetic. When the label detaches from the scope, when the word stops mapping to the accountability, the organisation develops a particular kind of cultural rot where people begin to optimise for what they are called rather than what they do. The quiet competition for impressive nouns on a business card displaces the harder and more important competition to actually solve something for a client.

The person in the room who owns the real decision, who carries the actual risk, who will still be sitting with the consequences after the meeting ends, becomes invisible inside a crowd of equally titled peers. The clients notice. They may not say so immediately, but they notice, and when every person they encounter arrives with a title suggesting executive authority and nobody in the organisation seems able to make a call without a committee, they have their answer.

3. Why organisations do this

Title propagation almost never happens because an organisation set out to be dishonest. It happens because organisations want to solve real problems without changing the underlying economics that caused them.

When a company cannot offer more pay, more equity, more genuine scope, or the organisational redesign that would create real authority, it reaches for the one thing that costs nothing to manufacture: a better noun. Promoting someone to Chief costs nothing on the day. It defers the harder conversation about whether the person has the accountability, the resources, and the organisational standing that the title implies. In the short term it feels like a win for everyone involved. In the long term the organisation has handed out a symbol that no longer corresponds to anything real, and it has done so at scale, across dozens of people, until the symbol itself is worthless.

This is not a cynical observation about malicious leadership. It is an observation about incentive structures. When the path of least resistance runs through the title rather than through the work, organisations will take it. Understanding why it happens is more useful than simply condemning it, because it points to the actual fix, which is not vocabulary reform but the harder work of building genuine career architecture.

4. The title is supposed to describe the burden

A CIO is not a decorative acronym. It is not a senior badge for someone who works near technology. It is not a nicer way of saying experienced IT person. The role exists because an organisation needs a clearly accountable executive for the technology, information, operational resilience, investment choices, risk decisions, delivery capability, and business outcomes that depend on that estate.

That does not mean only one person matters. It does not mean the CIO has all the answers. It does not mean every good idea flows from the top. In healthy organisations, the opposite is true. Good CIOs build strong teams, distribute decision making intelligently, and create leaders who can operate with confidence. But delegated authority is not the same thing as duplicated accountability, and when the same executive title is spread across a crowd, the organisation has not empowered people. It has blurred the map.

5. I cleaned toilets on a building site

I want to tell you something about my own career that I do not say to impress you and I do not say to perform humility. I have cleaned toilets on a building site. I have made dog food from offal at a butcher. I have cleaned industrial freezers and poured concrete cubes for crush testing, and for years if a company needed a genuinely unpleasant job done with reliability and without complaint, I was the right person to call.

I was Andrew Baker then and I am Andrew Baker now. Not once in the decades between those building sites and the position I hold today has a title been the thing that defined the quality of what I produced or the integrity I tried to bring to it. The work was the credential. The title was the receipt. I have never once framed a receipt.

6. I work in Capitec tech

In meetings I introduce myself as working in Capitec tech. I do not lead with my title, not out of false modesty and not as a performance, but because a job title at the opening of a discussion is asking the other person to be impressed before you have said anything worth being impressed by.

In my experience, the rooms where real thinking happens are the ones where nobody is particularly interested in the scoreboard at the door. If my ideas are good, the title adds nothing. If my ideas are poor, the title saves nothing.

7. What are you compensating for?

So here is the uncomfortable question I want to ask directly: if you need a blatantly overstated title, what are you compensating for?

The people I have worked with who are most secure in their capabilities, most grounded in the value they produce, and most genuinely respected by the people around them are almost never the ones lobbying for a more impressive noun. They are too busy doing the thing to worry much about what the thing is called.

The chase for the inflated title is anxiety in a suit. It is a signal that the work alone does not feel like enough and that an external label needs to carry weight that confidence should be carrying instead.

8. The fair counterargument

There is a fair argument against taking this too far. Titles do matter. They help people understand scope, navigate organisations, signal expertise externally, and create identity around work that may otherwise feel invisible. A thoughtful title can give dignity to a role. A self-reflective title can help someone express the value they bring. A clear title can make career progression less opaque.

So the problem is not that titles exist, or even that they evolve. The problem is when the title lies. The problem is when it implies authority that is not there, compensation that is not there, accountability that is not there, or seniority that the organisation has not actually entrusted to the person. A title that gives dignity to real work is healthy. A title that disguises the absence of real progression is not.

9. A question for the actual CIO

And if you hold the genuine CIO role in your organisation and you are permitting, or worse encouraging, fifty other people to also hold that title, I have a sincere question for you about what you think you are doing.

If the title carries authority, distributing it freely dilutes that authority. If it carries accountability, sharing it dissolves that accountability into a crowd where nobody can ultimately be found. You cannot have accountability without some form of exclusivity, because if everyone owns the final outcome, the honest answer is usually that nobody does.

Are you waiting to become the Chief Chief Information Officer? At what point does the escalation become absurd enough to pause?

10. The real damage

The real damage is not semantic. It is operational.

Consider a production outage at two in the morning. Three people in the incident bridge all hold the title of CIO. Nobody knows who owns the final call. The conversation loops. Time passes. The system stays down. That is not a hypothetical. That is what accountability diffusion looks like in practice, and it is entirely predictable once you understand that the title has been separated from the terminal decision authority it is supposed to represent.

Inflated titles distort hiring because candidates cannot tell what a role actually is. They distort pay because compensation expectations rise without matching scope. They distort career development because people appear senior on paper before they have built the judgement the title suggests. They distort client trust because the person in front of the client looks empowered but still has to go back into the machine to ask for permission. They distort culture because ambitious people learn that the fastest route to status is not always impact, but vocabulary.

Once that happens, the organisation starts teaching the wrong lesson. It teaches people to manage optics instead of outcomes. It teaches them to seek recognition before contribution. It teaches them that seniority is something you announce rather than something others experience when they work with you.

10. The throughline

Chase the work. Chase the impact. Chase the version of yourself that your clients, your team, and your own honest reflection would be proud of. Do not chase the title, because the title is downstream of all of that.

You were someone before it and you will still be someone after it. I have cleaned enough toilets to know that the throughline was never the words on the door.

References and Further Reading