You have a role. You are not the role.
There is a distinction that sounds simple but changes everything once it sinks in: you have a role. You are not the role.
The role is an assignment. It comes with a mandate, responsibility and expectations, and it existed before you stepped into it. Someone else carried it before you. Someone else will carry it after you. That goes for the CEO role, the chair role, the coaching role, the manager role. The assignment is on loan. The person remains.
When that distinction is alive, something important can happen: you can make the role’s decisions without them eating away at the person. You can let an employee go on Thursday, because the figures after eighteen months give no other answer, and still answer honestly when your child asks at the dinner table how the day was. “I had to do one of the hardest things that are part of my job today. I am sorry for the person it affected, and I still think it was right.” That is a person describing an assignment – not an assignment that has swallowed a person.
Two things that happen when the line blurs
Without that distinction two things happen, and both happen slowly enough that you do not notice.
The first: criticism of the role hits the person. A questioned decision feels like questioned human worth. The leader starts defending herself when she should be listening, takes offence at what belongs to the assignment, and lies awake over things that the role – not she – owns. It is exhausting in a particular way, because there is no pause: someone who is her role is on duty around the clock.
The second: the position becomes the self-image. Then every threat to the position is a threat to the self. The leader who cannot separate herself from the role cannot let go of it either – cannot really delegate, cannot bring in a successor, cannot go home at five. Because who is she without it?
A simple test: imagine that tomorrow you leave your role, voluntarily, financially secure, without drama. What do you feel first? Relief and curiosity – or emptiness and panic? The latter is not a sign of commitment. It is a sign that the role has taken over as host.
When there are several roles
For many leaders, especially in smaller and owner-led companies, the reality is that the same person carries several roles at once. Owner and board member. Board member and CEO. Owner, manager and parent of the next generation in the company.
Each role has its mandate. The owner decides on ownership and direction at the general meeting. The board decides on strategy and appoints the CEO in the boardroom. The CEO decides on operations day to day. The system presupposes something no one has written down: that the person carrying several roles knows which of them is speaking at any given moment.
A common example: an owner has done everything right on paper, an external board, an external CEO. He himself still works in the business, in the middle of the staff, and there he overrides both the board’s decisions and the CEO’s instructions. Not out of malice – he is only helping out. But in that moment neither the owner, the board member nor any other formal role is speaking. What is speaking is habit, and habit has no mandate at all. The result does not show in the minutes but everywhere else: a CEO whose word carries little weight, and employees who have learnt that there are two decision paths in the company – the formal one and the one that counts.
In the book you follow a father and a son in a painting and decorating firm where the son has been CEO for seven years and the father still comes in at half past six every morning to “help out”. The turning point came through the accountant, of all people, and one sentence about three tables and a kitchen table.
One transition a day
The goal is not distance. A leader who hides behind the role – “it’s nothing personal, I’m just following the rules” – has not solved the problem, only turned it around. The role without the person becomes cold. The person without the role becomes boundless. What we are after is being able to step into the role and out of it, consciously.
Choose a moment in your day to mark that the role is being put down: when you shut the computer, when you get into the car, when you step through the front door. Say it to yourself, silently is enough: now I am leaving the role. It takes three seconds and feels silly for the first few days. Do it anyway, for a week. Most people notice the difference afterwards – at the dinner where their thoughts were actually at the table.
Separating the Role is the third of twelve steps in the book The Leadership Awakening – The Leader You Already Are. The same twelve steps are available as a course on en.orangize.se; the first three are free.
