At some point in your working life, you’ve probably heard, or even said yourself, “That’s not my job.” Perhaps you’ve encountered or deployed the more polished and weaponized version: “That’s not really in my job description.”
In conventional workplaces, these phrases sound reasonable on the surface. People have responsibilities outlined in their job descriptions, and those generate a set of expectations that the person takes as direction. The intent of job descriptions also includes informing others of what to expect of the person and, perhaps less explicitly, the boundaries assumed by the box a job description outlines.
In practice, however, “that’s not my job” is often the sound of potential energy going nowhere: good ideas shelved, problems left unsolved, and talented people shrinking themselves to fit the edges of a set of lines someone else drew around them.
What if we built workplaces where that phrase simply didn’t apply?
The Job Description Problem
Job descriptions made sense in a world where work was stable and predictable enough to be fully specified in advance. We’d write down the tasks, assign them, and evaluate performance against them. In the big scheme of things, this was a clean, logical, and tidy approach to organizing work for desired outputs.
Most of us are now working in a very different world, in which needs are constantly shifting, opportunities emerge, and uncertainty maintains a seat at the table. The thing that matters most this quarter might not have existed as a category last quarter, and yet we keep handing people static documents that define their contribution in the past tense, based on what someone imagined the role would require before the person doing it ever showed up.
The result is a mismatch between what organizations need (adaptability, initiative, creative problem-solving) and what job descriptions signal (stay in your lane, do your assigned tasks, wait to be told if something changes).
Cue Roles and Agreements
In my book Organizing for Impact, I propose a different way to think about this. Instead of job descriptions that list responsibilities for a function, imagine role definitions that outline responsibilities for a specific purpose, and that grant the authority to make decisions about things related to their responsibilities, without needing prior approval.
That’s a fundamentally different relationship between a person and their work, and it is an empowering paradigm that encourages ownership while inviting deeper engagement.
Now pair those roles with agreements — explicit, collaborative understandings about how people will work together, what they’ll take on, and what they’ll let go of — and you start to build something much more dynamic than a traditional org chart can hold. Roles can evolve. Agreements can be renegotiated. People can step into areas where they have energy and expertise, not just those they were pre-assigned to. They can align their energy with real purpose and value generation.
Overall, roles are more fluid than job descriptions, more precise in their commitments, more aligned with the necessary skills and capabilities a person needs for a given set of tasks, and most importantly, set up for collaboration and peer accountability through agreements.
This is the architecture of self-organizing teams, and it works not because it eliminates structure, but because it replaces rigid structure with living structure that can actually keep pace and flex with the uncertainty that real work tends to surface.
Making Space for People to Do Anything
When you design work this way, something interesting happens. People start to bring more of themselves. They spot a gap and fill it, not because they were told to, but because nothing is stopping them, and the purpose is clear enough that they know it matters. They develop skills in areas they care about. They take ownership in a way that feels genuine rather than mandated.
This isn’t about eliminating accountability but about placing it in the right place — with the person closest to the work and most invested in doing it well, rather than with whoever approved the job posting two years ago.
The boundary transcends the job description to become purpose, need, and what actually makes sense for the organization at this moment.
Where to Start
If you’re a leader who wants to move in this direction, there are a few natural places to begin:
- Look at your current role descriptions and ask: do these grant authority, or do they just list tasks? Rewriting even one or two with an authority lens can shift how people experience their work.
- Experiment with role clarity conversations. Sit down with someone and ask them what they want to take on, where they want to grow, and what they’d rather hand off. You might be surprised by what you learn.
- Try introducing team agreements alongside role definitions. What do we expect of each other? How will we make decisions together? What does it look like when someone steps up or steps back?
In my book, you can find much more in-depth information about defining roles, including role templates and supporting team agreements. If you want a software platform that’s actually built to support this kind of structure, CoActOS is designed precisely for this — role-based work, distributed decision-making, and agreements that live alongside the work rather than in a drawer somewhere.
Moving from job descriptions to roles is certainly not a simple switch you can throw by just reorganizing sets of responsibilities and distributing some decision-making authority. People, especially those in managerial positions, may bridle against such a move because they fear the change will dilute their authority or create a lack of clarity around who is doing what. In my experience, these types of fears are likely already present in an organization and will surface under any change initiative in one form or another. So, I would also recommend bringing in a third-party consultant who can shepherd the change in a compassionate, supportive way by facilitating process shifts in a co-creative manner and providing coaching for leaders and teams along the way.
At the end of the day, “that’s not my job” is a symptom that shows up in organizations where people have learned that staying in their lane is safer than crossing into someone else’s territory, where initiative gets punished or ignored, and where the structure signals that your contribution has a ceiling.
You can build workplaces where people feel genuinely free to do good work, wherever it needs to happen, in whatever form it takes, and the result is a culture that is more humane, adaptive, and resilient.
And honestly, they’re a lot more interesting to show up to every day.If this is the kind of workplace you want to build, I’d love to help you figure out where to start. That’s the work Transformetic exists to do.
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