De-silo roles
Goal: Never restrict people to one role.
MJN categorizes types of roles to enable consistent definition across projects, but your role is never your identity. Anyone can propose an idea for a project, lead innovation around its development, and expect that collective members will step in to follow them, stretching to take on tasks that help their vision become real. In this way, we avoid hierarchical organizing that allocates certain tasks to certain “levels” or “types” of experience.
Decoupling roles from individuals improves understanding of hours for each task; builds empathy across our team about what it takes to get something done; and enables multifaceted identities and joys to emerge and grow. For example:
One individual can hold multiple roles in the same project.
An individual may lead one project and support another.
Multiple individuals can share a role, as a team. Depending on capacity, a team within a role may collectively manage their own budget.
Embodying Characteristics
Why
Building static roles in which people work up a hierarchy oversimplifies and masks leadership. We have all been in situations in which true leadership is not accompanied by a title, people with titles are imbued with power not reflective of the lived wisdom needed to organize the work, and people show leadership in one type of work and best follow in another.
Over simplified structures stifles diverse forms of leadership, and we believe it's possible to design structures that enable the diversity to show.
Tensions
Capacity limits the roles we can take. For example, if a project you propose gains traction, you may have less time to work on other people's projects. Similarly, if you're supporting someone else, you may have less time to think about what you might want to lead.
Skills & interests affect what roles we want to take. We believe all can learn most things, but there are some tasks that simply don’t spark joy.
How We Handle Tensions
First, we're grateful for having team members with multiple skills and recognize this affects our structure in interesting ways. We also recognize that the team’s ability to shift and prioritize across tasks is tied to where we receive funding. For example, an individual may have to develop an idea and find early traction among funders on their own before other team members are able to allocate independent time to it. In a world in which sources of income must drive our priorities, broader systems affect our own.
In the meantime, we treat all our meetings as spaces of mutual support, general advice, excitement, hopefulness.
