At the bottom of every email you send, there is a line saying who you are and what you do: a name, a title, a department. It is the official version of your role, the one the company decided on, the one human resources recorded. Perhaps you agreed it with them; it is certainly the one that appears on the organisation chart.
Then there is another version of you, which emerges from the way other people in the company relate to you.
There are people everyone asks for an opinion before an important meeting, even though they do not have the word “manager” in their signature. There are others no one asks anything, even though they do. The difference lies in what each person communicates every day, through their behaviour, to the system they work within, and in this idea the word system is fundamental.
Two phrases, two worlds
In every organisation there are two patterns of thought that surface almost daily.
Case one: “That’s not my responsibility.”
Case two: “They trust me.”
At first glance, they seem to describe different situations: someone being asked to do something outside their duties, and someone whose authority is being acknowledged. In fact, they describe the same moment, seen from two opposing cognitive angles.
When someone asks you for something that does not formally fall within your role, your brain has at least two ways of interpreting the stimulus. The first is to perceive it as a boundary violation: they are asking for something that is not my responsibility, they are encroaching on my territory or, worse, on someone else’s. The second is to perceive it as a sign of trust: they turn to me because they think I can help, because they recognise in me a competence or reliability that goes beyond my role on paper.
The situation is identical, even if the interpretations are polar opposites. The interpretation determines how we choose to behave, and this, in turn, will determine what the system (our colleagues, our team, our organisation) perceives about us.
Robert Dilts, in his model of logical levels based on the work of Gregory Bateson, places identity and role at a much higher level than behaviour and skills. This means that the way you define who you are in a given context (“I am in charge of X” or “I am a reliable person this team can count on”) has a cascading influence on the behaviours you adopt and even the values or beliefs you may take on, as well as the skills you develop and even how you shape the environment you work in (Dilts, 1990). The perceived role is not a consequence of the formal role; it can even be its precursor.
The formal role is a label; the real role is a sum of behaviours.
Organisations need organisation charts: they serve to define responsibilities, chains of decision-making and operational boundaries. But organisation charts describe the static structure of a system, not its dynamics. Besides being, for some people, beautiful diagrams to hang on the wall, they can even inspire a certain pride in those looking at them.
The dynamics of an organisation consist of interactions: who talks to whom, who seeks whom out, who trusts whom, who avoids whom. These interactions leap over the organisation chart and cut across it, skirt around it and redefine it every day. Research into the emergence of informal leadership confirms this mechanism: leaders emerge in groups not because someone appoints them, but because their behaviour prompts others to perceive them as reliable and competent, a perception that reinforces itself over time (C. Ashley Fulmer, 2016).
A study of 496 employee–supervisor pairs in China showed that the emergence of individual leadership is mediated by two factors: empowered role identity, meaning the way a person sees themselves as capable of exerting influence, and enacted leader identity, meaning that the person behaves consistently with that self-image (Lyu, L., Ji, S., Chen, J., Jiang, G., & Zhang, H., 2023). In other words: first you see yourself in a role, then you enact it, then others recognise you in it.
The most common mistake in organisations is to wait for formal recognition to precede behaviour: “When they give me the title of manager, then I’ll behave like a manager.” The actual mechanism works the other way round: when you start behaving like a manager, the system around you reorganises itself and the title, if it is going to come, comes as the formalisation of a reality that already exists.
The mechanism also works in reverse
If the real role emerges from behaviour, it can also dissolve through it, at any level of the organisation chart.
Consider the opposite of the case described so far: someone with a senior title, such as a manager, director or coordinator, who behaves “like a cog”. They carry things out but make no decisions, report but do not interpret, apply the process without asking whether that process still makes sense; when a problem falls into the grey area between two departments, they pass it on; when a team member brings them an issue, they redirect it rather than deal with it.
The title in the signature says “manager”, while the system reads “paper-pusher”.
And as an organism, the system is almost never wrong. The human brain does not assess people on the basis of their hierarchical position but on what it observes: behaviours, decisions made and decisions avoided, consistency between the stated role and the enacted role. When there is a discrepancy between title and behaviour, behaviour always prevails (just as, when there is a discrepancy between a verbal and a non-verbal message, the brain prefers to trust the non-verbal one). A title creates expectations; behaviour creates reputation. When the two diverge, disappointed expectations turn into a form of distrust more corrosive than that reserved for someone without a title, because it carries the weight of disappointment.
The consequences are systemic: a leader who operates like a cog does not remain neutral within the system, but actively damages it. Whitmore has documented how leaders’ behaviour influences up to 30% of an organisation’s culture and level of performance (Whitmore, 2009). A leader who does not exercise their role creates a vacuum that the system fills in one of two ways: either someone else informally takes up that space, which is the positive case we described in the previous paragraph; or no one fills it, and that part of the organisation stops functioning as it should.
In systems theory, this phenomenon has a precise name: an element that does not perform its function is not merely inert; it alters its interconnections with all the other elements. An inactive node in a network is not a node that does not exist: it is a node that blocks the flow, the flow that, in an organisation, consists of information, decisions and trust.
The company is a system, and you are an element of that system.
General systems theory, formulated by Ludwig von Bertalanffy in the 1950s, proposes a principle that seems obvious but has profound implications: a system is an organised whole in which the parts interact in such a way as to generate a functionality greater than the sum of the individual elements (Bertalanffy, 1968).
The most important characteristic of a system is that a change in a single element produces effects throughout the system, effects that are neither linear nor proportional, nor even always predictable.
Peter Senge brought this principle into organisations through the concept of systems thinking: the ability to see the interdependencies between the parts of an organisation, rather than treating each problem in isolation (Senge, 1990). In an organisation viewed as a system, changing the behaviour of a single individual is not a local event; it is a disturbance that propagates through the interconnections and changes the responses of all the other elements.
This is the key point: if you change the way you behave within your team, the team cannot stay the same even if it tries. It is not a matter of will; it is a structural property of systems. The people around you respond to your behaviour as stimuli; the human brain is designed to react to what it perceives, not to what is written in a document: it assesses the reliability of the person before it on the basis of observed behaviour, not their stated title.
If you start responding to requests more willingly, the system registers that you are a resource. If you start proposing solutions rather than pointing out problems, the system registers that you are someone to turn to. If you start listening before judging, the system registers that you are a safe space. None of these things requires a change of title, only a change of behaviour.
The most underestimated leverage point
Donella Meadows classified the leverage points in systems, those places where a small intervention produces the greatest effect. At the top of her list are not quantitative parameters (budgets, numbers, resources), but paradigms: the mental models through which the system operates (Meadows, 1999).
Applied to the context of an organisation, the most powerful leverage point is not changing a process or reassigning a task; the pivotal intervention becomes changing the way a person sees their role.
When someone moves from “I do what falls within my responsibilities” to “I do what is needed”, they have not changed their duties; they have changed their paradigm (making a quantum leap). The surrounding system responds, because systems always respond to changes in their own elements.
John Whitmore, in his work on coaching in organisations, documented a specific cultural shift that separates high-performing organisations from mediocre ones: the move from blame to honest learning, from external motivation to self-motivation, from pleasing the boss to satisfying the customer (Whitmore, 2009). These shifts do not start at the top; they start with the individual who decides to operate within a different paradigm and, in doing so, forces the system to recalibrate.
The courage to go first
There is a cost to all this, as there is to everything: behaving beyond your formal role leaves you exposed. It means risking the judgement of those who think you are overstepping, it means doing more without any guarantee of recognition, and it means, in certain environments, being seen as a threat rather than a resource.
But there is also a cost to not doing it: staying within the boundaries of your formal role is safe in the short term and limiting in the long term. Those who define themselves exclusively through the title in their signature build a fragile professional identity, one that depends on other people’s decisions: if that title changes tomorrow, their identity falters. Those who instead define themselves through their behaviour (“I’m the one who helps”, “I’m the one who solves things”, “I’m the one who listens”) build an identity that does not depend on the organisation chart, nor too closely on their duties.
Bateson had intuited this in his levels of learning: the deepest and most lasting change does not occur at the level of individual behaviour, but at the level of identity, when a person changes the set of alternatives they draw on to respond to the world (Bateson, 1972)." It is not so much about learning a new behaviour as becoming a person who naturally behaves differently.
People respond to you, not to your signature
The final message is simple to state and demanding to put into practice: you do not have to wait for someone to assign you a different role before you start embodying it. The people around you do not read your signature before deciding whether to trust you, ask you for help or follow your example. They respond to what you express, to your behaviour, to your willingness to help, to the consistency between what you say and what you do.
In a system, every element that changes forces the system to reorganise itself, so be that element. The title, if needed, will come later.
If someone tells you “that’s not your role”, you can reply: you’re right, but if I had the solution, would you want it?