Katie Churchman (0:06):Hello and welcome to the Relationship Matters podcast. From the boardroom to the living room, we believe relationship matters. Hello. I’m your host Katie Churchman. And in this episode, Marita Fridchon is deep diving into principle three of RSI – relationship systems rely on roles for their organization and execution of functions. Roles belong to the system, not to the individuals that inhabit that system. This principle requires the biggest mental shift in teaming and leadership focus, as it asserts that every team member has the responsibility to hold a leadership role on behalf of the system. Every relationship system has its own functional and emotional needs that must be fulfilled through roles. Without assigned roles, the system can’t function. These roles may be outer roles, like CEO, manager, or intern, or inner roles like peacekeeper or visionary. The outer roles fulfill structural functions needed for the relationship system’s survival, while inner roles satisfy its emotional needs. These roles belong to the relationship system, not necessarily to the individuals that inhabit them. How one person embodies a role can be very different from how another person embodies that same role. So here’s Marita Fridjhon talking about roles.

Katie Churchman (1:37):So Marita, today I believe we’re going to tackle roles, which is a rather big topic. We’ll see how we go.

Marita Fridjhon (1:44):I know, yeah. So you’re talking about that principle where we say that systems rely on roles for executing its functions. So roles are inherent to the system itself. Without that, that’s sort of its occupy fingers, if you will, with which it is doing, through which it’s doing things. So, yep, that one.

Katie Churchman (2:05):And what I love about this one is it’s not just the surface level roles that we might immediately think of, it’s also the internal roles. And I think that’s when it gets really interesting and complicated.

Marita Fridjhon (2:17):Yes, I think that the outer role piece, we talked about outer roles and inner roles, and then there are more hidden roles, which are sort of the places that I may not even be aware of, or it’s more disavowed in myself. So roles, there’s a complexity to roles as well. But yeah, those are the things.

Katie Churchman (2:39):So would you say that roles sort of give you a sense of the geography of a system?

Marita Fridjhon (2:43):I think so. I mean, if you typically, while we’re talking about that, systems are, every system is unique with its own third entity, in the sense that you can, if you look at the scaffolding or the structure of whether you’re looking at an organization or whether you’re looking at a family, there are what we think of as outer roles, the role of parent, mother or father. You can feel how there are different, depending on cultures, how different tasks are associated with that role. When you think of organizations, the corporate structure, you can see how the system itself needs those roles in order to execute. So those are the outer roles. When we’re talking about inner roles, that’s more like the nurturer. And the nurturer often lives somewhere with a mother or a father figure. But it also, if you think about families and kids, there are some kids that are actually very good at nurturing as well. So the inner role of nurturing often is passed around in different generations, the same thing in organizations. What is interesting is recently, during the pandemic, one of the things that has become a topic is how the role of CEO, for example, chief executive officer, that is sort of this strategic head. But the conversations about how that outer role of CEO in this time very often has become not the chief executive officer, but the chief caring or nurturing officer. Because it’s the place where so often everybody offload their challenges. Yes, it’s HR, but there’s also that place in that seat that now is forced to carry more of an empathetic stance in space as well as part of leadership.

Katie Churchman (4:43):So that’s interesting there. When you said forced to take that on, how much do you feel we have control over the roles that we inhabit in our lives? Do we have much control? Or is it society sort of pushing us into these positions?

Marita Fridjhon (4:56):I think that there are roles that, you know, we walk into, we apply for them, if you know what I mean. But then there are places and it has a certain quote unquote job description. But then I do think circumstance heavily impacts that outer role, whether it’s that of parent or that of corporate officer. There’s a role that’s a job description that’s more or less generically accepted. How that role is populated depends so much on the profile or the personality of the person that steps into it. So if you are by nature a more empathetic person, more likely that you’ll take the inner role of nurturer either at home or in the office. If you are somebody that is not conflict averse, but that are looking for the next piece, you may become the disturber, regardless of what the outer role is that you inhabit. So you can see how a thing that we talk about in systems thinking, that interdependence, and that’s also part, I think of why we get this unique entity that is the system itself. Because the roles may be standardized, but how they interact through inner roles, that’s where the magic or the complexity or the mystery comes in.

Katie Churchman (6:26):Yeah, I wanted to circle back to your example of mother, because that’s both an outer role and an inner role. And I guess there’s a lot of assumption and expectation about what mother means. And so, you know, how much choice do we have if we’re in that role to decide on, I guess, what shows up for us?

Marita Fridjhon (6:49):It’s so, you know, the question that you just asked earlier when you said, you asked the question, something around, does society or our circumstances impact or force us into a role? If you just take that role, the role of mother, and you then begin to look at some of the statistics around what’s happening in during COVID At the moment, you know, it’ll be different than different cultures. But in the US, it’s a very high statistic, for example, that women take the biggest chunk of when they work from home. There’s also a bigger chunk of what needs to happen at home in terms of homeschooling, in terms of all of these things. So that maternal piece begins to show up very differently. Again, this societal pressure will impact these roles heavily, and we are focusing on the feminine one at the moment. It is equally true in all other roles. But if you think about things like how parenting are shifting and changing, and in the example that I used just now, when it gets to a pandemic like Covid, it tends to revert a little bit back more in the older direction where it’s mom’s job to be home and cook. I’m saying it respectfully, and I’m not trying to woe anybody. So circumstances really does participate in this and shape it.

I also think that there are role stereotypes that because systems are changing constantly, it pushes on the stereotype. Whether you’re thinking about, you know, what we have now is Black Lives Matter is the role that white has taken on against black that became very stereotypical but massively impactful. And there’s a push to redefine and to find different ways to working with it. So there’s a role nausea that can develop in certain roles. There’s a role nausea maybe for the inner role of caretaker or peacemaker or whatever it is. So there’s a lot of complexity. A lot of the system’s complexity actually lives within the execution of roles and the profiles of personalities that impact or populate those.

Katie Churchman (9:24):That’s interesting. When you said about how we stereotype certain roles, I wondered whether, as well, we stereotype ourselves into certain roles and then we sort of limit our potential because, you know, I probably have a comfort role, a comfort zone where I feel sort of more naturally able. And then there’ll be roles that are probably a bit of a stretch, I think.

Marita Fridjhon (9:46):So. I do think there’s a natural propensity and we dream ourselves into it and other people will dream us into it as well. So when we work, whether it’s with families or whether it is in teams and enterprises, we all need to be equally able to populate different role functions. So very often and particularly around inner roles, that’s a important piece of work that we can do in our families, an important piece of work that we can do with teams that is okay, kids, for a while we want you to come and sit in mom’s role and then we’re going to sit in dad’s role and we got to sit in kids role. And let’s just have a con—Just that trying on loosens up and provides us with new information. And it’s skill building in different directions. It builds different empathy, it builds different understanding, and the same thing in organizations. Come and sit a little bit in the role of CEO and what’s it like here? And then let me go and sit in the role of supervisee and what’s it like there. So that is part of what creates the fluidity, the agility systemically. And I think we desperately need that. We really do. I think it’s one of the places that so much of our work needs to be paying attention to.

Katie Churchman (11:10):I just realized then how it sort of takes it away from the personal, which I know quite often we want to put heart into our work, but it makes you sort of able to sort of separate the person from the thing, the function that they’re in because.

Marita Fridjhon (11:24):We dream people up into those roles consistently. There was, I will never forget years back, Fundamentals course. And in all our courses, people get homework to go and coach at home and then come back for feedback on the next morning. So we came back the next morning and it was after our geography course, and there was a woman who came in and she was giggling. I mean, she clearly was, you know, there was something there. So we finally said, look, I know we’re going to debrief homework, but before we go there, just tell us what happened, what’s going on? Because she literally, she couldn’t contain herself and she talked about how she did what we call lands work, visiting the land of the role, visiting the land of momentous, visiting the land of the kid. So she did that. And what they did was they used different places in the house. So when they visited mom’s land. They were in the living room and the mom was talking about, you know, all that happens there, what she needs to do there. And when they visited the kids room, they went to the kid’s bedroom and the kid was explaining what was happening there, how it is, and then they switched roles. So. And this is where the fun thing happened. When they got to the kid’s room, the kid now was mom, and mom was the kid in the kid’s room. And the kid was saying things like, the kid now in the role of mom was saying things like, you really need to tidy your room, you got to put things away. Just look at what all is happening here. There’s things that are not folded, there’s things that’s not put away. And the mom looked at the kid and go, that’s usually what I say. And he said, mom, I am you at the moment. I am in your role. And she just was a huge fun thing. But you could begin to see how when we make these things available, it actually is part of an evolutionary function.

Katie Churchman (13:34):Wow, that’s a brilliant story. What a great way of doing lands work.

Marita Fridjhon (13:38):That’s fantastic. I know, and I love that they went to the different stations, if you will, because the mom was, her domain was in that living room where the meetings happened and where they were doing things, and his domain was in the bedroom where everything was chaos. And when they switched, he could absolutely see what was going on in his mom’s mind and be that and the other way around. So she came back very happy, delighted and smiling, laughing, and we all had fun with it. But I think that’s the piece. If we can play around with roles like that, it really is an evolution of humanity and it’s actually a fun way to develop ourselves, that vertical development as well.

Katie Churchman (14:22):So would a simple way to inject this into, say, a team meeting be to ask a question like, what would you do in my shoes? Would that be a. A simple way of creating a sense of this?

Marita Fridjhon (14:32):Well, I think that one of the places that we often look is if you have a team, we know which team member plays the different roles. I can tell you, on our team, who’s usually the one. I can tell you who the ones. There are roles that are most frequently occupied by certain people. So one of the best ways to work with is to begin to do just a little bit of education that, yes, your job is accountant or whatever it is, but what you often bring is pausing and some nurturing as well. So if you begin to educate that there’s the outer role that is accounting, and then there’s an inner role that feels very different from the outer row. You begin to get that into the culture. It then begins to be possible that when the disturber, for example, do their disturbing thing or holding that voice of disturbance, that you can go and go, okay, great. You are so great at holding that for us. Could you come and sit over here in the peacemaker role that Mary always holds? And Mary, can you go over there? And how would you bring us that disturbance? Because that disturbance frequently is the next thing that we need to be able to do and act on. But because everybody react to the person that usually play that role, we can’t get access to it because of the way they phrase it and frame it, whatever. But if we can have somebody else begin to go there and speak from there and then go anybody else, what would you say from that place? Now, we have enhanced our entire team functioning simply by having different people go to roles that they don’t normally occupy. It’s powerful, easy, simple. It’s not rocket science. It really isn’t.

Katie Churchman (16:23):I just had the visual of the theater and how, you know, sometimes when you’re in rehearsal, people end up trying on different characters just to see which ones fit. And it’s like that. But in life, in real life.

Marita Fridjhon (16:35):Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it’s easy. It’s not complex. And I think, again, if we more and more allow these things to become part of how we have our conversations, how we relate to one another, we normalize. And I do think the other piece that happens is it’s a great way to begin to create psychological safety because it helps us out of role nausea. And it begins to build skill where I may not be that skillful in my expression of that inner role.

Katie Churchman (17:09):Right. So just an example, then. Say, if you’re the one who. We’ll use the mum example, the one that keeps the house tidy, would you then, if you were nauseous of that role, would you then open it up to the family, potentially say something like, you know, I would love to share this role with all of you. What would that look like, that bridge?

Marita Fridjhon (17:32):I would probably use different language from. And it’s one of the challenges that we have in our training is we use professional language, if you want to call it that. How do we translate that to the person or the system that I have in front of me? So one of the ways that I have seen and worked with families in this was to have the mom in the situation that you’re talking about communicate something to the kid that says, look, I always say this. Don’t you want to come and sit over here and teach me how to say this differently? Or how would you say this? And I will go and try on what you say back to me. And then we have that conversation. Anything like that. Kids love playing that way, but even just that, it may take time, but even just chat loosens things up in a different way.

Katie Churchman (18:30):Yeah, that’s a really playful way of sharing a role, actually.

Marita Fridjhon (18:33):And again, there’s this wonderful story about one of our graduates who talked, certified graduates who talked about her kid that just didn’t want to eat and how she ended up doing that is going sit in the kids chair and go, okay, I’m going to be you. You go over here and you be me, and you tell me that I should eat and let me see what I say from. So they played with that piece, and it was from that place that the kid criticized the mom sitting in her seat and said, no, that’s not what’s happening there. Mom said, okay, okay, come back and tell me. And for the first time, that kit could then begin to talk about why she didn’t want to eat the stuff that was on the table. So just a little bit of tweaking and playing with that. It’s actually a fairly natural process because we all have inner roles, and it’s just a way of getting to know ourselves better and create more skill.

Katie Churchman (19:27):Yeah, it’s definitely an awareness raising tool. I can already sort of see the zooming out effect.

Marita Fridjhon (19:33):Yeah. And then you can see how that begins to hugely impact other roles as well, because how do you begin to bring the inner role that you see somebody else do so well? And that’s working with the team, whether that’s being the challenger or being the nurturer or whatever it is. If you can begin to do more of that and try to figure out what it looks like on me. When I say that a CEO or when I hold that attitude or role as marketing headers, how would I say it? That begins to give us a whole different way of accessing new information very creatively. It takes us back to the thing that we often talk about. That is the uniqueness of each third entity, the uniqueness of each interview, the uniqueness of each parenting situation, the roles, the outer roles we can categorize. How they interact is the infinity of what we all bring individually to it from their inner.

Katie Churchman (20:47):That’s so cool. That’s amazing, because then you can start to see how different and how unique we all are in every role we play.

Marita Fridjhon (20:55):Yes, yes. And how we don’t want to be stereotyped. Because I think for us, in our evolution as human beings, we want to be more of what we potentially can be. And these are some of the ways it’s not just habits and hobbies. It’s really what is it that I see over there that I deeply admire, and how would I do that?

Katie Churchman (21:21):It made me think about, say, a great role like Macbeth or Hamlet, and how every actor, even though they’ve got the same words and even the same stage directions, is a very different experience watching that person. Yes, thank you as always, Marita. This was great.

Marita Fridjhon (21:36):Thank you so much, Katie. Thank you.

Katie Churchman (21:39):Thanks to Marita for that deep dive into our third principle. Relationship systems rely on roles for their organization and execution of functions. Roles belong to the system, not to the individuals that inhabit the system. My key takeaways are as while leadership is typically a designated outer role on a team, like a manager or director, we hold that leadership is also an inner role that belongs to the whole system. Social pressure will impact roles heavily, for example, how parenting is shifting and changing role nausea occurs when someone becomes tired of playing the same role. If we can understand that roles are functions, not people, then the possibility exists for the roles to be populated more flexibly. Next time, Marita will be deep diving into our fourth principle. Relationship systems are naturally intelligent, generative and creative. In the meantime, make sure you subscribe to the Relationship Matters podcast wherever you get your podcast to make sure you never miss an episode. From the boardroom to the living room, we believe relationship matters.