Your Job and Your Identity Are Two Different Things

Author: Tim O’Brien

Jake is three and he is tired. He wants to be picked up and held. “It’s OK, sweetie,” his mom, Kate, sings as she reaches down to pick him up. Midway through the lift Jake writhes, throws his head back, and knees her in the stomach. Kate knows she should not take this breakdown personally. Most days she knows that mom gets kicked sometimes; it is part of the job.

But when Kate takes a kick at work—when her report is criticized in a meeting, for example—she does take it personally. It is harder for her to remember the difference between “Kate” and the role she fills as a “senior analyst.” And when you take professional kicks personally, you compromise your ability to recover and see the bigger picture. You fail to read the kicks as symptoms of a bigger organizational dynamic or challenge.

Your formal organizational role is an important anchor: It grounds you in your task and helps you know how to relate to others and to the organization. But when you bring most of yourself to your job—your experience, training, abilities, knowledge, effort, quirks, and passions—you feel as though you are more than just your role. This is especially true when you are always on and never quite leave work behind. You can quickly forget you are filling a role in order to accomplish a task on behalf of an organization’s or a group’s purpose. You cannot reflect dispassionately on organizational challenges, seeing your work and role as one piece of a larger puzzle. Instead of maintaining a bird’s-eye view of the system you are in, you place yourself at the center of what looks like “your” problem in a workplace drama. This weakens your judgment and makes it even more likely that you’ll take criticisms and decisions personally. The pattern worsens when you conflate your role with self-worth, thinking you are only as valuable and useful as the position you formally fill. (Unsure if your identity is overly tied to work? See the section, “Are You Too Emotionally Invested in Your Job?”)

It is critical that we learn to distinguish and differentiate our roles from our selves. We get into trouble when we lose ourselves in our jobs instead of thinking in a detached way about how the jobs are viewed by others. It can be very rewarding to throw all our education, training, talent, and passion into our work, but we forget that others in our organizations are reacting to the role we represent in their work lives, not necessarily the interesting and thoughtful people we think we are. Here I will share some of the insights I’ve gathered in my courses at Harvard Kennedy School, where I try to help students disentangle themselves from their roles so that they can be better leaders and make the differences they want to make.

The role you fill belongs to your organization, institution, group, or family. Other role-holders have expectations of you in that role, and those expectations may be reasonable (that you perform your tasks well) or unreasonable (that you speak on behalf of all women, represent your minority group, or always be the person who takes meeting minutes). Meeting those formal expectations and managing the informal ones is essential to retaining your job. Your job may also come with conflicting expectations from different authorizers, such as your boss or clients—never mind the multiple roles you fill at any given time, each with their own set of authorizers. Balancing all this is a dynamic process that must be actively managed. Chances are, when you lose your perspective on your different roles, you’re misreading the organizational dynamics.

Kate, a composite of people I’ve counseled, shared two instances when she lost sight of the difference between her role and her self—lapses that left her feeling bruised. The problem was that Kate overidentified with her role, and when others had trouble dealing with her in her formal role, she took their responses too personally.

Consider: As an analyst, Kate worked hard to organize complex sales data in a way that her colleagues could quickly understand. To do the job right, analysts must sometimes share unpleasant information; disappointing colleagues is inevitable. When Kate’s colleagues didn’t like her findings, they often pushed back and questioned her methodology. Their resistance left Kate feeling angry and insecure.

She needed to remind herself that her colleagues’ rejection had everything to do with her role and nothing to do with her personally. When teams were confronted with their poor results, they felt embarrassed, got defensive, and scapegoated the analyst and her work. Their feedback to Kate said more about them than it did about Kate. But that was hard for her to see when she couldn’t distinguish herself from her role.

When Kate was promoted to director and her peers became her direct reports, her social interactions at work changed dramatically. She was left off an invite for a team happy hour, and colleagues who used to be friendly became guarded. These changing dynamics are a reminder that people relate to you through the role you have in their lives. When Kate’s position changed, the role she played in her colleagues’ work lives also changed and they struggled with how to relate to Kate the director. Kate herself struggled as she took these shifting relationships personally, resenting her colleagues for primarily reacting to her role and not maintaining their warm and candid relationships.

Kate did not know how to be a boss and a friend at the same time. At first, she doubled down on the friend role, insisting to her colleagues that nothing had changed. But as she developed a new appreciation for the challenges of management, it was harder for her to sit by as her team complained about their bosses. As much as she wanted to be part of the group, the relationship was different. Her role as director meant the team needed her to guide them. Again, Kate felt kicked and bruised as she and her colleagues wrestled with how to relate to each other.

Once Kate embraced the responsibilities of the role and the inevitable authority dynamics that come with it, she was able (through much reflection) to draw the line between that role and her self. Identifying less with her role allowed her to live into the role more fully and happily. She was able to achieve a level of resilience that enabled her to perform well at work while maintaining a healthy sense of self.