Let me invite you to consider three things to start this letter. Three things you know of if you listen from within your leadership capacity.

1.Roles restrict as much as they create certainty and clarity – enabling agreement and aiding relationships to function, yet binding us to agreements and ways of experiencing ourselves.

2. Systems are things we create that organise us, our thinking, ways of being, efforts, resourcefulness, resources and results. They don’t exist, yet we abide in them like homes.

Lastly. Not all relationships serve systems. There is a paradox here. Relationships are, in themselves, systems and some relationships form because of function. Others move and exist and live outside of role and system and function and can step into that containment when need be.

Let’s meander together into our knowing, I’ll share mine.

Assume with me that these things hold true. They impact on how organisations are led and how leaders resource themselves.

We are not the roles we embody or perform. We are not the relationships that define value exchange. And there comes a time in every leaders journey where I see the constraints of role and relationship as function, face an inevitable rebellion from the power within the person – wanting freedom to move, to reshape itself again, to feel itself again.

I compare this to when I’ve sat for too long in one position and my body aches for movement and release. Function, role and and the systems we abide in can bring that ache.

We often assume that identity is role. Identity mirrored back to us through the need of belonging to relationships of consequence in a function we fulfill as identity. What happens when we unstitch these overlaps?

Similarly team identity in an organisation is often consumed and created by the concept of what the team believes the system needs from it. Its function and form – over identity and belonging. A utilitarian way of constructing meaning and identity. What becomes possible in what our teams create when we unstitch identity from utility.

Your leadership often colours outside of these lines if you’re aware enough to sense it happening. Those moments when the ache shows up but you’re too scared to show that you need to move.

There is mischief here. I often see that systems and relationships conspire with our aching. Relationships often lead individuals behind the edifice of the function and role to a secret parlance – an exchange outside of the constraint of its identity. The journey of being alive often makes small movements to try and still the ache of constraint – the moment that you realise you’re more than how people expect you to be because of your career family and religion or your age education and gender.

These are all signals that eventually become louder and louder leading to somewhere. Sometimes it becomes a battle cry that drives into the dark wood of midlife. Sometimes it invites us back to who we were before the constraints.

Sometimes to illness, suffering, strife and collapse; other times to loss and grief and renewal and other times to emergence and learning and rearrangement – and for accuracy sake – feel free ignore the prose of my groupings because they are not actual categories.

Please take a moment to feel the aches and pains of the identity you embody. Put on the role when you must and find ways to take off that shoe and walk barefoot thereafter. Get out of the car of your career and stretch your lower back again.

How can you put down your role at will?

I suspect that our crises in the world, our communities and organisations, our teams and families – and inside the community that is our inner life – are contributed to by these roles, identities and functions. They are shaped by how we stop listening to what wants to move when things start to ache.

Well, it’s aching.

Perhaps subtle enough to ignore.

Perhaps loud and angry.

How does leadership lead through this signal? Can you answer yourself that question, yet?