About roles
Human beings have evolved to interact with each other. Our social actions are often organised around our culturally enabled and constrained roles. These roles may work quite well or go to extremes in terms of authority (power), responsibility, identity and pre-defined actions required of the role. Roles tend to result in consistent structures and processes. It is not unusual for roles to constrain the many and enable the few: compliance is frequently an emphasised aspect of roles.
Roles can work very satisfactorily to achieve known purposes in well understood and manageable contexts. In the workplace roles are re-enforced through the use of job descriptions and reward (and punishment) systems
But not all situations provide high levels of certainty and clarity. In our increasingly complex world, role descriptions are proving increasingly inadequate to respond to the challenges involved. Under these circumstances, individual "job descriptions" are also proving difficult to create and inadequate to the situations encountered.
About relationships
People also interact in less formal, less pre-defined ways to address shared needs and purposes, and to better deal with uncertainty and unforseen opportunities. These interactions may be fleeting or develop into long-term or short-term relationships. That is, relationships are emergent. Of course, over time, the patterns of interaction may become socially formalised and the parties may adopt specific roles to enable and/or constrain the processes of interaction.
In periods of rapid change, high levels of uncertainty and where existing structures and processes are inadequate, people may draw on and/or quickly create new relationships in order to address the challenges and opportunities involved. Similarly, even within specific roles, people frequently develop and utilise relationships in order to address aspects of the endeavour that are not covered by their role.
Addressing reality
In summary, formal roles may work well for responding to the known and the anticipated. Informal relationships are our everyday strategy for dealing with the complexity of our experience. It seems most people have a preference for interacting on the basis of relationships rather than roles. In recent times this has become increasingly common. Our responses are often enabled by social media through which people collaborate without the existence of any connections between the many roles they may individually have in their lives.
Nurturing the emergence of relationships
It is time for leaders and managers to acknowledge the two ways of interacting and then lead and manage accordingly. For example, a generic ‘job description’ that gets things done and nurtures the emergence of productive working relationships is as follows:
- Know what is happening
- Work with others to improve what is happening
- Make it easier for the next person to do well
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