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?
Without drawing away from your point about headcount tending to indicate the complexity or importance of the job, I have seen some fairly accurate definitions and usage of the term. A heavy hitter/big hitter is a guy you would look for and put in charge when your business needed someone who could take BIG steps forward; He has the ability to take big risks without "betting the farm"; typically you need all this when you want to catapult from a position of an "also running" business to a (say) top 5. Or when you wanted to profitably continue a business that is at inflexion.
To transform DBS from a sleepy Singapore centric infrastructure financier into a no 1/2 regional retail giant over 24-36 months – required a new guy who could take big hits. The earlier team just would not have been able to cope however good they were in day-to-day ops.
Karthik,
I too have seen 'correct' usage of the terms. The point I – and Nagi – are making is that in common parlance, the terms have got associated with the number of heads reporting into a manager. If this is left unchecked, there could be a tendency against driving productivity aggressively.
Sri, what you highlighted is relevant and timely. Returns quotient is changing with time. Its not the quantity of headcounts being managed by the Big Guy or the heavy hitter that matters moving forward but sustainable return on human capital. ROHC
Anthony,
You are right… but ROHC is a complex concept. Till HR / Ops folks come up with a more readily visible measure, headcount may – unfortunately – continue to be a yardstick. The fact is the vast majority of companies do not even know how to measure ROHC, much less actually practice it!
In the operations jobs department of a company, there are various job opportunities for the fresh as well as experienced candidates.