A theme in my practice is the vital importance of a sufficient degree of role clarity--a shared understanding among colleagues that allows them to answer a set of questions that are rarely made explicit and yet are ever-present in organizational life:
- Who are we to each other?
- What are our relative positions in this environment?
- In what ways are our roles similar? In what ways do they differ?
- And how might any of this change over time, or in certain settings?
Sufficient role clarity is necessary in all professional relationships, but it's particularly important in the rapidly growing and dynamic organizations where most of my clients are senior leaders. In the absence of sufficient role clarity--when we're unable to answer the questions above, or when our respective answers are mutually incompatible--we experience role confusion. And a challenge faced by most of my clients is that their organizations inevitably generate role confusion as a consequence of growth and change. What are the typical causes of role confusion, and how can leaders establish (or re-establish) sufficient role clarity when necessary?
Overlapping Relationships
A major challenge to role clarity occurs when two people simultaneously occupy different roles with respect to one another: The grad school classmates who became co-founders. The spouses who are also colleagues. The former co-workers, still friends, who are now in a reporting relationship. These situations are by no means insurmountable problems, but they tend to pose problems nonetheless, which is why they come up so often in my practice. One option, of course, is to avoid such situations in the first place, or deconstruct them when they occur by prioritizing one set of roles over the other. For example, it's not uncommon for friends to grow distant after becoming colleagues, particularly if there's a status difference between their professional roles. But choosing one set of roles over the other may be undesirable or even impossible--so what else can be done?
The first step is recognizing the overlap in these relationships and bringing a heightened degree of conscious awareness to interactions. In some cases this simply means setting some boundaries so that the working relationship doesn't overwhelm the personal one. (Occasionally the personal relationship gets in the way of the work, but that's unusual among my clients.) Friends who became co-founders and spouses who are also colleagues will undoubtedly spend a lot of time talking about the business--and they also need to spend time together while not talking about the business and interacting with each other in their respective personal capacities.
In other cases this entails identifying the roles being occupied in a given moment and being mindful of the norms that are appropriate to the relationship at that time. One way of distinguishing personal relationships from professional ones is that in the former we expect to be less emotionally regulated--that's what makes them personal--while in the latter we expect the opposite. [1] This has substantial implications for the norms governing our behavior in each setting, and if we're unclear about the roles we're occupying we may show up in a way that generates confusion for ourselves and others by acting too formally or informally, too rigid or too loose.
Relative Status
A second source of role confusion results from changing perceptions of status, an issue of tremendous importance in human psychology that we often discount in contemporary organizational life. One of humanity's signal advantages as a species is our ability to co-exist in relatively large groups compared to other primates who were our distant ancestors' competitors. [2] The downside of this capability is the intensive nature of intra-group competition, which we regulate by cultivating strong relationships and attending closely to social status. [3] We feel better when our status increases, and the converse is equally true--encountering someone who we perceive as higher status makes us more likely to feel threatened. [4] It's essential to recognize that attention to (and competition for) relative status is a fundamental aspect of our psychology--it's not something we can "turn off," even as we strive to regulate it, [5] and this evolutionary inheritance has significant implications for role clarity and confusion.
One of the most significant ways we establish role clarity in organizations is through formal hierarchies and reporting relationships, which often allow us to answer the questions above quite readily, even as they remain implicit. But even as these tools create greater role clarity, they set in motion a process that eventually generates role confusion. The key issue is the steady upward pressure experienced within a hierarchy to maintain and increase one's relative status. A common form this takes in my practice is what we might call "title inflation"--the instant a CEO awards the organization's first C-level title, almost every other person who reports to the CEO wants one, too. (At times this isn't possible, which is why SVPs and EVPs exist.)
A closely related dynamic is the tension that exists between the need to keep the senior executive team small with a clearly defined and fixed membership, and the intense desire on the part of everyone just outside that circle to be included as a member. These forms of upward pressure undermine role clarity as the organization evolves, and, left unchecked, result in role confusion as people of different status find themselves occupying similar ranks in the hierarchy. The essential task for the leader is to recognize the importance of status when making and modifying these arrangements. It's easy to assume that they're empty symbols, but in my experience leaders who think titles are free are inevitably surprised when their hidden costs are suddenly revealed.
A further complicating factor is the sense of status derived from our various social identities. As I've written before,
In some cases our status relative to the other party...is a clear and mutually understood function of our respective positions in a hierarchy. But because contemporary culture often seeks to diminish hierarchical distinctions--despite the fact that human beings continue to rely on hierarchy as a fundamental organizing principle--our relative status may be unclear...
A form this can take in organizational life is when one person is perceived as higher status because of their role or title, and the other is perceived as higher status because of some aspect of their social identity: age, gender, ethnicity, nationality, physical characteristics, etc. Although our perceptions of status deriving from these dimensions of difference continue to evolve, the ability to pretend that they no longer have an impact on our perceptions is itself a privilege of high status. [6]
The key here is being able to acknowledge and discuss social identity as a source of status--which, of course, is profoundly difficult and often fraught. That said, ignoring such complexity doesn't make it go away--it merely increases the likelihood of role confusion--and the more practice we get in holding such conversations, the easier they become over time.
Decision Rights
A final source of role confusion relates not to the vertical dimension of hierarchy in organizational life, but to the horizontal dimension of responsibilities and scope. What tasks are yours, and what tasks are mine? Where does your job end and mine begin? And in the absence of mutual understanding, who makes the decisions needed to answer these questions? In the early stages of an organization's development such questions may be superfluous and even counter-productive. They signify a distinction between an individual's personal preferences and what's best for the business, and early-stage employees should be focused on the latter (and properly incentivized to do so). The last thing an early-stage leader wants to hear is, "That's not my job."
But I often see organizations that allow this lack of structure to persist well past the point of diminishing returns, resulting not only in heightened role confusion, but also an increased number of disputes that the leader must resolve, as people clash over their respective responsibilities and seek ad hoc resolutions in the absence of decision-making systems. To be clear, I'm not suggesting that early-stage companies rush to delineate perfectly clear lanes for all employees--that will yield greater role clarity, but it may also create gaps where tasks get dropped. Instead, I often talk with clients about "the judicious imposition of structure," ensuring that the evolution of the organization itself is keeping pace with the complexity of the work being undertaken. As I've noted elsewhere,
Growing organizations require increasing routinization of work. Tasks are transformed into processes, which are then combined into systems. This trend can be counterproductive, and I’m not suggesting that organizations should rush to embrace bureaucracy. But the fluidity and ambiguity that foster creative problem-solving in an early stage startup will feel like chaotic dysfunction at a later point in the company’s development.
At times a sufficient degree of role confusion stemming from unclear decision rights can only be resolved through changes in organizational hierarchy and reporting relationships, with the attendant challenges discussed above. But in many cases a provisional accommodation can be made simply by clarifying the process by which a given decision will be made, which is much easier than rewriting job descriptions or rearranging the org chart in order to restore role clarity. In this context I find the framework developed by management thinker Jurgen Appelo immensely valuable--it's written from the perspective of a leader determining how to involve others in a decision, but it can be used to add role clarity in any working relationship:
- TELL: The leader decides, and there's no discussion.
- SELL: The leader decides and seeks to convince the other person.
- CONSULT: The leader seeks the other's input and then decides.
- AGREE: The leader and the other person decide together.
- ADVISE: The leader suggests, and the other person decides.
- INQUIRE: The other person decides and then informs the leader.
- DELEGATE: The other person decides, and there's no need for discussion. [8]
Footnotes
[2] Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates (Robin Dunbar, Journal of Human Evolution, 1992)
[3] Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect, pages 33-34 (Matthew Lieberman, 2013)
[4] Neuroscience, Leadership and David Rock's SCARF Model
[5] The Myths of Happiness: What Should Make You Happy, but Doesn't, What Shouldn't Make You Happy, but Does, pages 131-132 (Sonja Lyubomirsky, 2014)
[6] Resolving a Protracted Conflict
[7] How to Scale: Do Less, Lead More
[8] Leadership, Decision-Making and Emotion Management
Photo via PXhere.
