What happened to the role
For years, organizations, as with most major systems, have over-indexed on agility, cross-functionality, and culture fit. In the process, what quietly shifted was one of the most stabilizing principles in any system: the clarity of the role.
Roles are not job descriptions. They are containers. When defined and upheld, they create rhythm, establish trust, and prevent overreach. But when the boundaries around them are blurred, collapsed, or stretched to absorb dysfunction, systems begin to unravel.
What we now call “collaboration” often masks this drift. A leader steps outside their lane to compensate for a weaker peer. A team member takes on more than their remit to avoid slowing the project down. A founder blurs professional and personal boundaries to maintain loyalty. It looks helpful. It feels efficient. But underneath, it weakens the very architecture meant to protect coherence.
Without role clarity, behavioral drift accelerates. People start making decisions based on personality, not position. Emotional influence begins to override operational logic. And accountability—once a function of structure—becomes a function of proximity, volume, or politics. The system no longer runs on clear lines. It runs on unspoken rules and silent calculations.
Over time, this creates a hidden tax. The strongest people in the system begin to carry the weight. They fill the gaps, absorb the confusion, and perform stability for everyone else. But that stability is performative, not structural. It relies on individual capacity, not system design. Eventually, even the best performers hit a wall—not from burnout alone, but from operating in an environment where the role no longer protects them.
This erosion didn’t happen all at once. It crept in through language: “flexibility,” “wearing multiple hats,” “being a team player.” These started and continued as useful traits. But without boundaries, over time they became traps. What was intended as agility became an alibi for role abandonment. And in high-trust cultures especially, this collapse often goes undetected. The stronger the relationships, the harder it becomes to see the cost of structural diffusion.
When role clarity disappears, politics rush in to fill the vacuum. What looks like personality conflict is often structural ambiguity—people negotiating power through perception because authority is no longer tethered to function. Without clear behavioral boundaries, trust becomes subjective, influence becomes performative, and decisions are made through emotional proximity instead of role-based responsibility. Politics are not a sign of complexity—they are a system’s way of surviving when structure no longer protects function.
What changed is that we stopped seeing roles as behavioral disciplines. Instead of containers that enforce rhythm, clarity, and consequence, roles became informal suggestions. Optional outlines. Social agreements. This shift has left even elite teams misaligned at the behavioral level, unable to trace the root cause of execution breakdowns, friction, or decision delays.
Restoring role clarity is not about rigidity. It’s about precision. It’s about designing containers strong enough to hold complexity without collapsing into confusion. When roles are clean, people don’t need to perform clarity. They operate within it. Trust rises. Emotional noise drops. Systems move.
We don’t need more collaboration. We need roles that function. Not as titles, but as behavioral anchors.
Because when the role holds, so does the system.
