The Title Lag

A few months ago, I sat across from someone who had been running engineering for the better part of two years. Hiring decisions, architecture calls, vendor negotiations, budgeting, org culture, people development, strategy, the conversations with the board when something broke at 2 AM, all of it ran through this person. The title on the org chart said Engineering Manager. The job, in every way that mattered, was CTO.

I've coached enough leaders now to know this isn't a one-off. It's a pattern I keep running into, across sectors, across company sizes, across the spectrum from nimble startups to established corporates. Someone is already doing the senior job. The title hasn't caught up. And the person doing the work rarely says anything about it, because saying something feels like asking for a favour rather than naming a fact.

What strikes me most isn't that this happens. It's how avoidable it is once you see the shape of it clearly. This isn't a story about something broken in Indian companies. It's closer to an open opportunity sitting in plain sight, for the person living the gap, and for the organisation that hasn't yet built a way to spot it.

Who it happens to

In my experience, the title lag rarely happens to people who are loud about their ambitions. It happens to people who are good at the work and quiet about the credit. Many of them grew up on a version of advice that sounds wise on the surface: focus on the work, recognition will follow. It's not bad advice. It's incomplete advice. Good work that nobody in a position to act on it actually knows about doesn't disappear, it just sits there, unconverted.

The more useful version of that advice isn't "focus on the work and stay quiet." It's "focus on the work, and make sure it's visible to the part of the organisation that can act on it." That's not the same as broadcasting it. It's the difference between doing excellent work in a closed room and making sure the right two or three people, the ones who actually decide on titles and scope, have a clear, current picture of what you're carrying. Most people never make that distinction, and they pay for it quietly, for years.

Why it doesn't fix itself

Organisations are not deliberately withholding titles out of malice. Most of the time, nobody is tracking the gap at all. Performance reviews measure output, not role evolution. A person can be smashing every KPI in their current title while the actual shape of their job has quietly outgrown it, and the review conversation never once asks the question: is this still the right title for what they're doing?

The other reason it doesn't fix itself: the person living the gap usually doesn't ask, partly for the conditioning reasons above, and partly because there's rarely a formal moment built into most organisations where this kind of conversation is expected to happen. Compensation reviews have a calendar. Role-scope reviews mostly don't.

This is where I think the real opportunity sits, not just for the individual, but for the organisation. A simple, recurring forum, even once or twice a year, where managers are explicitly asked "is anyone on your team currently operating a level or two above their title?" would surface this in minutes. Pair that with deliberate stretch assignments and visible sponsorship for the people it identifies, and what looks today like a quiet, unaddressed gap becomes a structured pipeline for promoting from within. The data is usually already there. What's missing is a system designed to ask the question on purpose, rather than waiting for someone to work up the nerve to ask it themselves.

What actually moves it

The shift I've seen work isn't a dramatic confrontation. It's something much smaller: helping someone separate the discomfort of asking from the legitimacy of the ask. Once someone can see clearly that they're not requesting a favour, they're naming a fact that the organisation has simply not gotten around to acknowledging, the conversation changes shape entirely. It stops being a negotiation about ego and becomes a straightforward update to a record that's out of date.

But the individual can only do so much of this work alone. The organisation has a role here too, and it's a harder one, because the resistance it needs to remove is largely invisible to it. Engagement surveys, performance dashboards, skip-level meetings, none of the usual tools are built to capture quiet internal conditioning, the kind that keeps a high-performing person from ever raising the gap in the first place. If the data looks clean, it's tempting to assume there's nothing to fix. The safer assumption, especially for an organisation's highest-impact people, is the opposite: assume some resistance exists precisely because it isn't showing up anywhere, and then build the kind of forum or conversation that proves that assumption wrong. An organisation that goes looking for this, rather than waiting for it to surface on its own, finds out who's ready for more long before that person ever has to ask.

This is, in miniature, what most genuine progress on this kind of problem actually looks like. Not motivating someone to want more, and not handing them a script to recite. Mostly, it's creating enough clarity and quiet in a conversation that someone can see their own situation precisely enough to act on it themselves. I sometimes describe this approach, presence first, then root-cause before solution, as PRISM, but the label matters far less than the result: people already know what they need to say. They mostly need the room to hear themselves say it.

If you're reading this and recognising the shape of your own situation, the question worth sitting with isn't "how do I convince them to give me the title." It's simpler: have you actually said, out loud, to the person who can change it, what the gap between your role and your title currently is? Most people haven't. That conversation, once it happens, tends to be far shorter and far less dramatic than the years spent avoiding it.

And if you're reading this from the other side of the table, running an organisation or a team, the question is just as simple: do you actually know who on your team is currently operating a level or two above their title, or are you assuming you'd know if it were happening? Most leaders haven't built a way to find out. The ones who do, usually find that the answer was sitting in plain sight all along.

Deepak Narayan is an independent leadership coach and consultant at Rivi Consulting.