Ep.19 Roles and Relationship

In this episode, Katie Churchman talks with Sandra Cain (Director of Curriculum and Senior Faculty at CRR Global) and Maddie Weinreich (Master coach and Senior Faculty at CRR Global) about the different roles that exist within relationships 

The conversation covers a range of topics including: 

• The geographic strata of relationships and how it can help us to work with the dynamics of relationships that are happening at different levels
• The value in identifying and naming roles for a relationship system
• The difference between outer and inner roles and how to work with the challenges that can show up at these different levels
• The power of putting the role out in front and embracing the RSI principle that holds that roles belong to the system, not to the individuals that inhabit those roles. 

Sandra Cain coaches individuals, pairs and teams around the world. Her background includes 15 years of experience at American Express with a variety of leadership and personal development roles. In addition to leading the CRR Global Core Curriculum, she is also Associate Director of the Certification Program. Her stand for this work is that since we’re already in relationships, we might as well be conscious and intentional about who we are, what we do and how we live.

Maddie Weinreich is a senior Front of the Room Leader for the ORSC Program and ORSC Certification.  Maddie holds the Master Certified Coach (MCC) credential with the International Coaches Federation (ICF) and specializes in strengthening the interpersonal relationships that exist within business environments for the purpose of enhancing team performance and productivity. She coaches leadership teams around the globe to navigate change and to effectively improve organizational cultures within large and small businesses. In addition to coaching and training business teams, Maddie also works with dynamic couples who choose to be the architects of their relationship.


For over 20 years, CRR Global has accompanied leaders, teams, and practitioners on their journey to build stronger relationships by focusing on the relationship itself, not only the individuals occupying it. This leads to a community of changemakers around the world. Supported by a global network of Faculty and Partners, we connect, inspire, and equip change agents to shift systems, one relationship at a time

We believe Relationship Matters, from humanity to nature, to the larger whole.
 

Transcript

Key 

KC – Katie Churchman 

SC – Sandra Cain

MW - Maddie Weinrich

[Intro 00:00 – 00:09] 

KC – Hello and welcome back to the Relationship Matters podcast. We believe Relationship Matters, from humanity, to nature, to the larger whole. My name’s Katie Churchman, and in this episode I’m talking with Sandra Cain and Maddie Weinrich, both of whom are senior faculty members at CRR Global, about roles and relationships. Sandra Cain coaches individuals, pairs and teams around the world. Her background includes 15 years of experience at American Express with a variety of leadership and personal development roles. In addition to leading the CRR Global Core Curriculum, she is also Associate Director of the Certification Program. Her stand for this work is that since we’re already in relationships, we might as well be conscious and intentional about who we are, what we do and how we live. Maddie Weinreich is a senior Front of the Room Leader for the ORSC Program and ORSC Certification.  Maddie holds the Master Certified Coach credential with the International Coaches Federation and specializes in strengthening the interpersonal relationships that exist within business environments for the purpose of enhancing team performance and productivity. She coaches leadership teams around the globe to navigate change and to effectively improve organizational cultures within large and small businesses. In addition to coaching and training business teams, Maddie also works with dynamic couples who choose to be the architects of their relationship. Across this episode on roles and relationships we cover a range of topics including the geographic strata of relationships and how it can help us to work with the dynamics of relationships that can show up at different levels; the value in identifying and naming roles for a relationship system; The difference between outer and inner roles and how to work with the challenges that can show up at these different levels; and the power of putting the role out in front and embracing the RSI principle that holds that roles belong to the system, not to the individuals that inhabit those roles. So without further ado I bring you Sandra Cain and Maddie Weinrich. 

KC – Maddie, Sandra, welcome to the Relationship Matters podcast. I’m so happy to have you both on the show at the same time today! 

SC – Thank you, we’re happy to be here. 

MW – Yeah, Katie, it’s really exciting to be part of another podcast with good information for all of our listeners, so thanks for having us. 

KC – Yes, and today we’re talking about inner and outer roles and how this is useful for us particularly as team coaches, systems coaches. So I wonder if we start by talking about roles in general, this concept of roles. 

SC – I guess it’s the idea that from a systemic point view, people enormously fall into roles, well they don’t always fall in but they take on rolls, they occupy roles, they fall into them sometimes. And that’s one way that systems play things out with each other, right, and it’s helpful to know that because what’s really common is we start to take things really personally and we hold somebody else, you know, whatever they’re saying is personal. And there’s something very useful about realizing that it’s not just that person that they’re holding the role for the system. 

MW – It’s how the system functions is by the roles, and just like you said Sandra, sometimes people think they are that role and we get caught up in it, and our identity, one’s identity can be caught up in the role and the role is bigger than the person and the person is bigger than the role. So the role will exist whether, that person could come and go, but also that person is more than occupying that role, and that’s some of the work that we do as systems coaches is to help educate people to understand that they’re not the role, but the role is needed in the system in order for it to work. 

KC – So what do you both find so useful about this structure then? Having this concept of roles and then having these structures, and we’re gonna talk more about the inner and outer role, but why is this useful practically speaking? 

SC – I think it’s useful for, I mean for all the same reasons that anyone who’s taken an ORSC coach has those aha moments when they hear things, it’s like oh, that happens, oh that explains it. There’s a normalizing quality to it and also it gives people a little bit more space, I think. We talk, we used to talk about putting people in a box, you know, that person always does this or they always do that, I think it was the Arbinger Institute that wrote about that way back then, putting people in a box, and it’s hard for people to get out of that, to shake that, you know, and maybe I’m the devil’s advocate in one conversation with a team that I’m on but I don’t wanna be put in that box, like I’m always the one that’s, suddenly I’m the one that’s maybe the trouble maker, or I’m the one that pushes against everything, instead of seeing it as not so personal and then that I’m holding a role for the system or for the team. I think it’s very helpful to not pigeonhole people. 

MW - And I wanna just piggyback on that Sandra, in terms of this space. I think it helps people create a little bit of space between them and the task that they’re doing or the job that they’re holding or the way they’re doing something because people can take things personally and this gives them just a little bit more space to be able to navigate things a little bit more consciously and intentionally. 

SC – Right, as opposed to going to those default places where we, we sometimes fall into, we fall into a role. And it’s good for the person who’s falling into the role to be aware of that, but it’s also good for the whole team to know ok, let’s give it a little space here and recognize that person’s just expressing something for the benefit of all of us. To learn from. It doesn’t mean they’re right or they’re wrong but they’re holding an important role for the team. 

MW – I think it also creates options because, see that that’s a role and how that role is occupied, there’s lots of different ways to occupy the role and people don’t always think of that. They think oh I have to do this a certain way, but the role exists for the system, it’s needed, and how it gets occupied, there’s lots of range in that. 

SC – Yeah. It makes me think, Maddie, that there’s a lot of stereotypes as well, that are kind of established in the workplace. Maybe the finance, someone who’s running finance is really tight with money or is holding it in a certain way that’s very rigid, or that the leader, the role of the leader could be not very favorable, maybe they’re not, they just wanna do their own thing and, you know, any of those kind of typical stereotype things, I know that’s not true in a lot of cases, but those live, they do live in our cultures, right? And how do we, how do we bust some of those by seeing people occupy those roles in different ways? 

KC – It feels quite freeing in the way you present it, so for the person they can expand and step into other roles, but also the role itself can stretch into something different. 

MW – Something else that’s useful about roles and talking about them is some of the things that happen with roles. So when you’re talking to folks that come in for team coaching and they say well I’m so sick of doing this particular task and so we may, as the coach say oh, it sounds like you might have role nausea and they’ll go like yes! That’s what it is. And the naming of some of these issues that happen with roles help the system to feel seen and known and understood. So being able to have this vocabulary that we have for working with our roles, maybe they might be talking about some situation and we might say as the coach, well it looks like you might need some new roles, and again they feel like yes, you get us, or it sounds like maybe some of those roles aren’t being occupied so skillfully, and then it’s not so much about the person, it’s more about how that role is being occupied. So I think part of what it does is it helps the system feel seen and known and understood and like we said, it creates that space as well. 

KC – Would you say it’s a more objective stance then when working with systems? 

MW – Yeah. I think that’s a good way to put it, yeah. 

SC – Yeah, we’re objective, more neutral. You know, because it, I’m thinking about your examples Maddie and if I’m on that team how different it is to hear oh, there must be some role fatigue, role nausea, rather than you stink at your job or you’re holding everybody back or, you know. All the gossip that’s maybe happening around the edges of that client team were just really frustrated with that person and that person’s over there going I didn’t even want this role but nobody else knew how to do it and sometimes we just, somebody has to do it or you get chosen, you kind of say I guess that’s my job. And hey, sometimes that works, great. But a lot of times it’s a little clunky. And to have other language for it other than you stink at your job, you’re not doing a good job or other people are getting frustrated and irritated, like, language alone, as Maddie said, can be so helpful. To do just have a way to talk about it that isn’t so punitive. 

KC – And so we have some structures that break down the different levels of roles and I wonder if we can walk through, I know we’re going to focus on sort of the upper levels of the strata but for those people who might not be familiar I wonder if you can walk us through the strata of roles. 

MW – So it starts with outer roles and outer roles are about the executive function of the system, it’s what it would say on your pay check or the job description. 

SC – Yeah, your business card, right? 

MW – It’s your job, it’s what you do. CEO, it’s the secretary, it’s the bookkeeper. 

SC – Project manager, like all of that, the things that we’re kind of used to calling people’s jobs. 

MW – And often a system will come to coaching because there are some things going on in the outer roles, that’s often where it starts, like we don’t know who’s doing what so there’s some role confusion on a team, or we’ve just had a merger and we don’t, you know, it’s all, they’ve left confusion in there, different kinds of things like that, so that’s often how they come. And then there’s the next layer which is inner roles and inner roles are about the emotional functioning of the relationship, and by that we mean the dynamic. How people interact together in a system. And when people start to realize that the inner roles actually belong to the system rather than the person there’s a lot of freedom that starts to come in when you start to name that. So it might be that one person is the question asker, you know, the provocateur, and the other one is maybe more serious and gets to the point. So there might be friction between how those roles are occupied in a system. That’s often when people come and say we have communication problems on our team, often it has to do with inner roles and how those are being occupied. 

SC – From there we would say that the next one would be secret roles. So, those are maybe secret aspects of people that come in. 

MW – Yeah, well, they’re like aspects of self, they’re parts of us like we have a system within us that has lots of different aspects, parts or selves we call them. Some of them are secret, some of them are not so secret. Some of them are positive, some of them are negative. Some of them we are kind of shy and we could invite them over and some of them are unskilful and they take over. So we do kind of a deep exploration in the geography course we go into this in great depth about all of these, but we spend half a day on the positive ones and half a day on the negative ones in geography. 

SC – And that’s really about getting into relationship with them, with the secret selves or secret roles, like how do we, how does our adult self get into relationship with those other parts that, you know, they’re called secret for a reason. They kind of hide out in the shadows, they’re a little shy or they’re a little nasty sometimes. But they tend to come with some surprise or a little bit of vulnerability depending on what kind of secret roles they are. But yeah, how do you bring them in, how do you start to have dialogue actually and get to know them? And hear them, hear what’s going on for them. So that with a team that’s a different kind of looking, right? That may be more of a personal work, that may be a, you may take a team through an exercise together with one person you might do individual work or with a partnership you might, you know, you can pivot that in different ways and have one person witness the other but that’s, inner and outer are much more accessible for people. Secret roles are a little bit more, they can be a little more tender. Can be really fun, by the way, too. They may bring a secret part of you that’s, you know, the great hostess that doesn’t come out very often, that could be a whole different thing, but they can be a little tender. 

KC – So that’s the system of me, for listeners who heard Cynthia Loy Darst’s podcast she referred to that as the inside team, so there’s all those roles there as well. 

SC – All those different aspects of self. And then there’s ghosts, you know, ghost roles. Ghost roles show up in a few different ways too. There could be someone who was part of the team who’s not there anymore but they’re still kind of having an influence. It doesn’t mean that they, you know, passed on but they maybe changed jobs or got a job in a different department but their influence is still felt and presence within the client team. 

MW – And that can be a positive or a negative, either way. Could be no one’s gonna be as good as that person was, that they’ll never live up to that. Or it could be that there was a very unskillful director that was there last time and that leaves a residue, people afraid to speak up because they don’t feel safe because of what happened from a past director. 

SC – And like a new leader, a new director comes in and is wondering what’s, there’s an interesting emotional field, what’s going on here, what’s the, the energy on the team feels a little strange, you know, or hesitant or shy. And it might be that there’s a ghost there, they kind of haunt the system. I love the language of ghost, I think about them as just kind of hanging out, you know, they’re not always negative as we said but they do have a lingering affect even though the person isn’t there anymore. 

KC – So why do we often say that we should start with the roles closest to the surfaces, why not just go right in at the deep end and deal with the ghost that you might think are there at the system? 

SC – Well the truth is you might, to be frank. With the ghost, you know, you can work with the ghost of a team pretty straightforward, you know, just to name it, acknowledge it, what needs to be said, to be honored. So that one in the order of things, in how we teach it, is later. But ghosts are a little different that way. It’s an accessible concept, I would say, it’s a pretty accessible… don’t you think Maddie? In your practice, your teams get it? 

MW – Yeah, if somebody’s talking about a ghost it’s obvious. The way it used to be or it’s not like that anymore or that’s not how we do things around here, those are the hints that have you think oh, I wonder if there’s a ghost of how things were done in the past. 

SC – Or the good old days, it was better when… that’s another one, you can tell there’s ghosts that are still kind of lingering to be, that need to be honored. This isn’t about having a séance and banishing them, you gotta let them inside, but how do you honor that and see how the team can shift from kind of being immersed in it to stepping aside and seeing who they are with it not in-between them. 

MW – I was working with, you know this applies to teams but I was working with a couple recently and there was this, one partner wanted the other one to dress better and that was really important, and the other one was like well I’m not gonna be like your brother, and so I got curios about that and found out that this woman’s brother had been a clothes salesperson who owned a clothing store for me and dressed to the nines, as did his father and so she was expecting that of her partner. And he, no matter what he did it just didn’t come up good enough because there was this ghost, so we started to unravel that ghost of appearance and things like that and then all of a sudden that, the fellow said actually there’s a ghost from my family too because we were farmers and my dad hung out in cut-off jeans and that was how our family lived. So this whole thing got revealed where is was one complaining about the other was actually, there’s this historical influence on the relationship that once we started to put it out front and talk about it they started to see each other very differently and so it wasn’t about the clothing or the appearance, it was like oh my gosh, the weight of our history is really weighing on our relationship. 

SC – Yes.

MW – So, I thought that was, just a recent example, yeah. 

SC – It’s a great example because I bet it felt really personal, you know, to be criticized for how you dress or don’t dress can be really triggering, really hurtful. But to hear that there’s legacy and history behind this, I bet that was fascinating for them to realize it was really a ghost clash. 

MW – A ghost clash, yeah, and a wonder. 

SC – Copywrite Sandra Cain – ghost clash. I just made that up! 

KC – Love that. And Maddie was ghost busting. 

SC – That’s right. Trying to out-haunt each other with their ghosts you know. And so for them to realize that that’s what it is, you can see how that starts to depersonalize it where that was probably a bit of a perpetual problem for them, that kind of harping on each other about that or at least the one direction, it’s to start with. And with, you know, in the organizational context it can be the same thing it’s like well, gosh, she never used to do it like that. I don’t know who this new person is but suddenly there’s gossip that happens and suddenly those things that take people out of relationship or into a different kinda relationship, you know gossip is bad, but the way that ghosts can linger and haunt. And we don’t have good language for that in organizations, so that’s what I think is really helpful about a lot of ORSC. To bring some new language to what’s happening can be very normalizing, there can be a relief in just naming it, and with that, it’s not even a lot of work usually but it’s really just bringing that conversation forward and saying well what do you need to say to honor the former leader? Because they’re still, you know, their presence is still here, I can tell that there’s still some kind of connection to that person or that experience, how it was. So in a way there’s a little myth change that might sneak in there too, it’s honoring the way it was and now what’s here and what can you bring from that that’s actually useful? Or how can you have a conversation with a new leader that’s gonna be hopefully open to oh, ok, I didn’t realize how much of an impact that had so let’s talk about how we can do this better and differently. 

MW – It makes me think of an example someone told me, there was, they were in an office before the pandemic and there was someone who left the organization and somebody else who came and sat in that person’s desk, and the new person sitting at the desk couldn’t understand why everybody was coming up to them and telling them about their weekend, sharing personal stories, and what had happened was the person who used to sit in that desk was the person who listened to all the stories regularly. It was funny when we pulled it out because the person, the new person was bewildered about why are all these people telling me all their personal stories and families and showing me pictures of their kids and their grandchildren? And it was really like the ghost of the person that sat in that seat. 

SC – That’s a really interesting example. 

KC – It’s really interesting. 

SC – So they were like what is happening? Why are you all showing me this stuff? 

MW – They must all really like me or what is it. 

SC – Yeah, ghosts are powerful. They’re very powerful. 

KC – You make me realize it’s quite hard to separate these out because they’re all so interconnected and actually the ghosts and the time spirits at play in a system will impact then all of the other roles too. 

SC – And ghosts are, ghosts tend to be more localized. Your neighborhood ghost is most more local, it’s more personal. Time spirits affect the whole community, a whole culture, much bigger than a leader changing within your team or you know, a new admin coming in, that’s not a time spirit, it’s a change. There may be a ghost of the past person, I think that’s how I think about it Maddie, like ghosts are connected to people more than, and there may be events but if they are it’s not the big global events, it might be a ghost of an affair in a couple for example. 

MW – Ghost of a firing. 

KC – Ghost of the cancer diagnosis. 

SC – Yes. 

MW – Exactly. 

KC – So if a ghost or a time spirit pops up you address that in a session as it show up. I’m guessing with other role challenges we don’t go straight to secret roles unless we have to? 

MW – It kind of depends on what’s showing up in front of you and what the system is bringing, but oftentimes what I pick up on is the inner role challenges because it’s about the dynamic of how people are being together. And they might be very upset, one might be very upset with the other about something and when we start to name it as roles it changes it a little bit. So I can give you an example of two people that worked together and they came for coaching, you know their boss sent them to get some coaching as a pair, and I started to ventilate using alignment coaching, I said we use a form of alignment coaching to work with all of these roles. SO I started with alignment coaching and as they were ventilating and sharing what was going on from them I started to hear what each one was ventilating about and one was ventilating about I say hello to her every morning and she never says hello to me, and then the other one said all she does is put notes on my desk of things for me to do, so I realized these were actually inner roles so I pulled them out a little bit more and it was apparently one was very important about socializing and saying hello and being connected and the other was about getting the job done, like just have to, I’m not gonna say hello to you because we just gotta get the work done. And when I name those as hey, your relationship needs some socializing and your relationship needs to get the work done they started to, it started to make more sense to them. So when we started to work with it, it clicked a little bit for them, so I had them each talk about why it was important to socialize and why’s it important to get the job done, and then we had them take those inner roles off and put them out in front and talk about the other role so that they started too, oh, I can see why it’s important to get the job done and then the person, the bookkeeper who was that one really felt seen and known, like ok, you’re talking about me. And then when they had the bookkeeper talking about why socializing is important, well, that just helped the socializer feel very seen and known. And then when they realized it was the roles and they could occupy them differently everything changed in their relationship, it really made a difference. It took a little while for them to cool off but once they realized it wasn’t the other person that was the problem, it was just the way that those roles were being occupied and not acknowledged by the other. So that’s often uncovering that happens with inner roles, it’s about the dynamic of how people interact together, whether it’s a pair, a work pair or a team or a couple, it comes up so often. 

SC – That’s a great example of how we often say roles become people. She’s always trying to socialize with me and I don’t, I just want to get the work done, right. Like it’s her fault of its his fault or, we put them in that role and we lock them there and throw away the key, and it’s very hard for people to break that once they’ve been put into that role, and that’s what’s helpful about having a third party help to navigate that. It’s like a great example Maddie, how are both of these important? Both these roles are important. You may not like how each other is occupying them, it may be irritating or annoying or whatever, but if, can you see that there’s value in it? And that, it’s changing the relationship with the role as well as the person and that alone, like that changes so much. And you also said it takes a little while and I think that’s fair to say because we get pretty embedded in our beliefs about I’m right, you’re wrong. You’re annoying and I’m not! You know, whatever it is. 

MW – You’re the problem! 

SC – You’re the problem! If only you would go away everything would be great. 

MW – Exactly. 

SC – Urm, no. How often does that happen when somebody else comes in and ok they hold the role but maybe they do it a little different. So maybe if somebody else came into that job and was the social one maybe they would do it a little differently and everyone would be like well that’s more reasonable to me, right? So that’s the power of separating the role from the people. 

MW – Exactly. And, sometimes people think if I don’t do this role nobody will. Nobody could do it as well as I can. 

SC – Oh my hand is raised at that one! 

MW – Like I’m the only one who can pay the bills, I’m the only one who can run the budget or I’m the only one who can cook the meals because if I don’t do it, no one can do it, but I hate doing it and I’m sick of it, like that’s often what will happen. And so just like you said Sandra, somebody might occupy that role differently but it’s still a role that belongs to them still, that the system needs. And by separating them out, like you said, you start to have choices. How do we want to occupy that role? Do we want to occupy that role? Do we want to get someone else to occupy that role? So it opens up possibility when we work within the way we do. 

KC – Well there’s that great example that lives within our faculty system around the couple who are getting coaching because of the cleaning situation, and after a couple of sessions the coach says well you’re spending all this money on coaching, how about getting a cleaner? And that solved it. So I see sometimes they can be quite simple, not always! 

SC – Sometimes you can outsource the role. 

MW – Outsource the role, yes, exactly. 

KC – One thing that often comes up for me and also, you know when I’m leading sessions, is the sort of what are the key differences between inner and outer roles? Because sometimes mother can be an outer role but it can also be an inner role, and so what do you kind of see around the differences between the two and really defining them and separating them, or is it necessary to separate at all? 

SC – That’s a good question. You know, mother’s an interesting example, I mean mother can very much be an outer role, but like I’m not a mother, I don’t have children but I can take on that inner role so that’s pretty clean here. But I think it’s, where it sends me is I do think it’s helpful to know, I do think it’s helpful to make the distinctions because the outer roles really are like job descriptions. There is a job that comes with being mother. There are tasks that come with that, there are roles, duties that come with being mother. And even if it doesn’t actually fit from the outer role it can still have the energy of that, right, like a child could have a very maternal aspect that shows up, someone would, or a man who’s never going to be a mother could have a very maternal aspect that shows up. So I think it matters to a point because how you work with it is a little bit different. 

MW – Well, I think, it could be mother, could be nurturer, kind of look at the inner role if that’s the part of the mother, you know, that you’re looking at. 

SC – Actually, a really good point because mother looks a lot of different ways. You poll ten people and they’re going to have a different definition of what the outer role of mother is like. 

MW – Exactly, so that might be worth asking a little bit more about so what do you mean by mother or what’s the part that’s important about that or how is that showing up in this relationship to make that clarification. And we were talking about this actually before the call because I was thinking, I worked with a business partnership and one of them was into beauty and order and having things be beautiful and they did some presentations or trainings that they did, and the other was more about getting the seats filled and taking care of the administration part. So those are outer roles but they were, we worked with them like inner roles because actually we put them out in front, so we work with them in a similar way. So it is important to make the distinction and at the same time it can be a little bit of a grey area and I think that’s ok. With inner roles we put them out front and then we look at the other one and how is it valuable. With outer roles we put them out in front and just say how do we want to work with it. The inner roles, because of that dynamic piece, we look at well what’s it like in that role and what’s it like in that role, what’s important about that. With the outer roles we put them out in front, kind of name them and how would we do it more skillfully? 

 SC – Or in some cases with outer roles I could see also saying why’s it important or how’s it useful, just, you know, just to soften some of the edges around that. Because people do, we fall into these roles unconsciously. 

MW – Yes. 

SC – Most of the time. We just do. And most, you know a lot of the time it works fine but when it doesn’t we, this is why we have these tools and these concepts, to help people really understand what’s going on. And really, we’ve said it before but just as you were describing that Maddie is how it depersonalizes it and says how is it useful in your relationship or on your team – wow, so different, such a different… nobody’s thinking like that. You know? We’re not thinking about how it’s useful, we’re just thinking I don’t like this, I don’t like you, I don’t like how you do your job or, you know, I hope people aren’t saying it like that but that’s sometimes what we think, or here we go again. There’s that. The leader, Maddie and I worked with a leader years ago who would not stop talking, oh my gosh. She just would go on. She would lose the room in the first three minutes… 

MW – First seven minutes. 

SC – She just, on and on, so that’s one version of how a leader, how she thought leaders should show up. We didn’t work with her around outer roles explicitly but, you know, we noticed it, we paid attention and I think we gave her some feedback and some talking points like I often do with leaders because they do like to talk! But I think that’s what people think a leader is supposed to do and that’s where we get influenced by a culture, by all kinds of experiences, like this is what mothers should be or shouldn’t be, this is what leaders should be or shouldn’t be, you know. Start to make things up. Sometimes it works great and sometimes not so much. 

KC – So even from an education standpoint and this is really useful for teams and families and organizations, I notice I use this quite a bit with my husband, I’ll be having role nausea about having to take the bins out, that’s quite different from saying why am I always the one that has to do this! It’s suddenly a very different… and have you noticed this language show up in the teams that you’ve worked with and changes the way that then they interact around maybe some difficult things. 

MW – That’s such a good example is I’m tired of being the one that takes the bins out, as you say, or as why do I have to be…! So, that’s what a lot of our things that we do in ORSC do, we help give language for things and concepts for things so, you know, I don’t wanna be the one that keeps taking the bins out, let’s have a conversation about that is very different to why don’t you ever do that, right? Which has a blame quality to it. I think it really is very helpful. 

SC – I could think of a parallel there as maybe somebody who takes notes during a meeting. You know, they’re always the note taker. And maybe they’re really good at it and maybe it’s a good fit in a lot of outer role ways. And maybe there are some times where they’re just like I am tired, I don’t feel like doing this. I don’t wanna do it, I feel like nobody appreciates me, like often that comes with some of the role nausea, nobody’s appreciating it, you know, and I’m fatigued from that or I’m irritated. So there are ways you can bring that into the workplace as well for sure. So just pay attention to how people talk about what’s going on, and even from the lens of perpetual problems, that’s an interesting place to listen through. It’s like what are the perpetual issues that maybe aren’t your biggest challenges as a team but they kind of get in the way, they disrupt or they’re frustrating for people. And you might hear some of that, some role stuff in that conversation. Somebody’s always late or people aren’t feeling appreciated or I never, always, those kind of things are what I’m listening for. That could be an indicator of role nausea, role fatigue. 

MW – Sometimes with teams I might tell them a little bit about these inner roles, about the dynamic, and I might say so what are the inner roles that show up on this team? Maybe it’s an inner role that you do or an inner role that you see others do, and we name them. What are those inner roles? And then we might say so which ones are occupied skillfully, which ones are occupied less skillfully, what would you like to do with those, how would you wanna play with those? But then they’ll say oh, I thought that person was the jokester but actually joking is something that belongs to our system so other people might do some jokes or bring some humor or some lightness. Or the one who always asks the questions or pushing back, the one who pushes back, that might be an inner role and if they look at it and say oh that belongs to the system, oh they’re doing push back right now, it’s very different than oh they’re pushing back again, it helps name it a little bit and that gives a little bit of distance and space. 

SC – You know and a real simple way of doing it, I’m trying to remember if you and I have done this Maddie but I know I’ve done it with client teams as a way to start the engagement. You know, what’s a role that you hold on this team that’s not your job description? You know, give them a little bit of context about it and that alone sends them to a new place it’s like oh, what else, ok, yeah, I guess I am a bit of a peacemaker or the candy bringer or, you know, whatever it is, give them some examples to think about it. Because they’re all holding some sort of inner role and they aren’t usually conscious about it. But even that question, maybe there are times, like the one who supplies candy gets a little irritated sometimes, like how come I always have to fill the candy or how come I always have to bring the lightness to the meeting? Or the whatever. And so for, to have that person acknowledge that that’s a role I give and so then I might ask the team so what do you appreciate about that? What’s great about that? Let’s hear from two people, great, who’s next? Have them identify and get back some kind of good buzz for what they contribute. 

KC – I love that, that’s such a fantastic check in question, a really simple way of starting to seed this idea within the team, to know that they’re more than that role. 

SC – I have a really strong stand about these kind of questions, they need to be relevant to the work that we’re doing. I don’t like the what’s your facilitators color or, you know, I mean I do kind of, I can nerd out on that stuff, but I want something that’s more relevant to the content and the topic to get them present but also like oh, ok. This is really different, we’re doing something, we’re having a different conversation already and that’s how I think of ORSC, just how do we help people have different conversations with all these tools? 

KC – Love that, seeding that learning from the start and then taking them on that arc. 

SC – Yeah, exactly. 

KC – Thank you both for the wonderful arc of this conversation today, I’ve learnt a ton and can’t wait to get you both back on the show so we can geek out a little more on something else soon. 

SC – You know it. 

MW – That’s great. Great, thanks so much Katie, Sandra, good to be with you both. 

[Music outro begins 36:25] 

KC – Thanks to Maddie and Sandra for that fascinating discussion around roles and relationship systems. Here are my key takeaways. Roles are how systems function. They belong to the system and they are needed in that system for it to work. But a person is not a role, the role is bigger than that person occupying it and the person is bigger than that role. Educating systems about roles helps them to see the roles more objectively. When they can separate themselves from the roles they can navigate them more consciously and intentionally. Roles offer us options. When we see it as a role and not a person we start to see that there are lots of different ways or options for how that role might be occupied, recognizing and naming roles helps create more space and enables us to separate the person from the role which makes it less personal. Helping people to find and see the value in certain roles changes the relationship with the role, not just the relationship with the person. The geographic strata and roles and relationships systems comes from the geography module. For more information about the geography course and the ORSC coach training series please visit CRRGlobal.com. Thank you for listening to the Relationship Matters podcast. If you enjoyed this episode please share it with your colleagues and friends so that we can continue to spread these ideas across the globe, and if you haven’t already, do subscribe wherever you get your podcasts to make sure you never miss an episode. And for more information on the ORSC courses please visit CRRGlobal.com. For over 20 years, CRR Global has accompanied leaders, teams, and practitioners on their journey to stronger relationships by focusing on the relationship itself, not only the individuals occupying it. This leads to a community of changemakers around the world. Supported by a global network of Faculty and Partners, we connect, inspire, and equip change agents to shift systems, one relationship at a time. We believe Relationship Matters from humanity to nature to the larger whole. 

[Outro 38:51 – end]