The "Heavy Hitter" and the "Big Guy"

You would have heard the Term "Heavy Hitter" if you've worked in an American company.  Some others use the simpler "Big Guy".  Typically used in an Operations context (and hence my interest), these are Managers who head and manage large teams - read head count or FTE.  I heard of these and, possibly, even used these terms in GE and other companies I worked for.
Nice informal terms in themselves.  The problem lies in their association with head count.  Recently, I came across this term again.  Nothing wrong you might say, its only a name.  Disagree.

I think it reinforces the wrong kind of behavior.  Measuring only the size of the team you lead to identify the big guy, is all yesterday.  If you really want to drive a culture that focuses on core competency, global sourcing / out sourcing and sub-contracting, measuring a managers potential or experience by the number of people s/he handles can only result in building large teams, turf wars and politics.

Chatting informally with Nagi Nagendran, Managing Director of Operations at Citi, Kuala Lumpur, just confirmed this! He notes that while on the one hand, large banks and financial institutions encourage headcount and cost reductions, when it comes to grading operations jobs, number of people managed still plays a big role- an intrinsic disconnect! His personal take is that with increased digitization and and spreading of work across multiple sites and entities -including captives and third parties- senior operations managers will really be managing a 'network' where it is tough to employ 'people managed' as a primary measure of job size. Other factors, taken across the network as a whole, will become more important in his view.

The 'only a name' logic doesn't work either.  As the wag said, a rose may be a rose by any other name, but order a bunch of bougainvilleas for your girl friend and you'll learn something new!   More importantly, a name connotes a brand.  Also, give a name to anything and you begin getting attached to it.  Inversely, give something ugly or undesirable a nice name and you start accepting it.  I am reminded of "putting a pet to sleep".  You get the drift...

I am not arguing a case for banning the terms.  My attempt is to re-define them.  "Heavy Hitter" and "Big Guy" should, may be, look at the budget a manager controls, or even better, the change he is able to make in key ratios: say, revenue per head or profit per head.  And don't just use these ratios in absolute terms.  It is even better to measure the year-on-year change in these ratios.  Now, if you increase profit per head by 15% over previous year, that's a Big Guy, ready for the bigger job!  Agree?

Sri

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