Navigating Your Roles

“How do I get better at handling my different roles?” This question comes up again and again in my work with people. There’s the executive who’s supposed to make clear decisions but learned as a daughter to be cautious and hold back. Or the son who wants to be independent as an adult but can’t shake the patterns from his role as a son, and ends up choosing partners who let him keep living that role.

What’s behind our roles?

Sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf closely linked the social role to a person’s social position: a place within a field of social relationships. Every individual can hold several positions at once, say father, scientist, German citizen, and each position within a social system comes with a specific role. This connects well with the systemic idea that behavior depends on context and can vary depending on it.

It’s worth distinguishing between two kinds of roles: developmental roles and performance or functional roles.

Developmental roles: the ones we live through

Developmental roles are the ones we go through privately over the course of our lives: child, teenager, adult, in all sorts of different forms, long past the classic mother-father-child model. What does it mean for my role as a parent when my child stops crawling and starts pulling itself up? How does the parent role affect my role as a partner, as a daughter? Every developmental stage places demands on the whole system, which then has to find its footing again.

Performance and functional roles: the ones we take on

Alongside developmental roles, there are performance and functional roles, roles we more or less choose and grow into by acquiring knowledge, like the role of a teacher. While developmental roles shape how we form relationships, performance and functional roles mainly define task relationships. Anyone leading people can keep in mind, with goodwill, that they’re also a mother, father, or partner, and that this shapes their role on the team.