Do you need to transcend your role in order to do your job?
We've seen it this year more than ever before - how demoralizing it can be to be hired to do a job and then punished for doing it, and to be "consistently thwarted in your ability to enact the values that brought you into your profession."
This has always been the case, but for some, the circumstances of the pandemic have exacerbated the challenges and obstacles of systems and roles that were never in alignment with the mission and values they were purportedly in support of.
As a result, staff often find themselves having to transcend their role in order to do their job. More often, they find themselves unable to create the impact that is supposed to be their directive because of how their role is defined.
Systems and institutions perpetuate themselves through people, who are given specific roles and parts to play in upholding those systems and institutions.
What many of us find is that it is hard to transcend our organizational role. We become confused and frustrated because the way we are perceived by others doesn’t match who we know ourselves to be.
We are thinking of ourselves as a person - most of us do - while others are seeing us in our organizational role.
Harm often occurs when one person is speaking or experiencing the situation from their identity and personhood but the other person or people are experiencing and responding to them in their role. BIPOC especially are often the ones who don’t get to be seen as individuals but are seen only for their role, whether as restaurant worker or CEO.
In fact, when our role carries some privilege and power, we are more at risk of causing harm when we don't recognize that that is what people might be responding to, precisely because we have the organizational power and ability to do so.
This can happen, for example, with staff who are only just starting to take on managerial or leadership roles. They may not realize the new weight their role carries within the hierarchy, or how socialized staff are to respond to that hierarchy even just for the purposes of safety and survival.
Wanting to flatten that hierarchy doesn't mean the hierarchy is automatically flattened. It takes active and intentional action, and the people who do succeed in transcending their roles within a system often risk a lot to do so, and get punished as a result, because it's not how the system was designed.
If transcending a role is the best way for the organization’s mission to be accomplished, perhaps the question should be, how can the system be redesigned? And how can that role within the system be redefined, structurally, culturally and behaviorally? What if the role were to be reconceived, rewritten and communicated transparently across the organization? What if processes that support the role were to be adjusted? What if new behaviors were to be articulated, role modeled and reinforced?
What if we were each given the chance to be in roles in alignment with our talents, interests and values as well as our organization’s mission?
What if we had what we needed to do our jobs?
Banner photo by Iswanto Arif on Unsplash.
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