7 October 2026 · René de Baaij
What Remains When the Role Falls Away
Core insight: the role that starts carrying you
Every leader carries a role, and sooner or later the role starts carrying the leader. It begins innocently. A position offers a foothold, a mandate and a place in the whole. You know what is expected of you, and others know how to relate to you.
Over time, something shifts. The director who always has the overview comes to believe that he is the overview. The executive who solves every issue discovers one day that she can no longer leave a single question alone. The role protects, and that is exactly what makes it hard to set aside.
In 1960 the British psychoanalyst Isabel Menzies Lyth described how organizations arrange their work so that it protects employees against anxiety. Tasks are split up, responsibility is spread, contact is standardized. The system becomes a defence. What she described for organizations also happens within the individual leader: the role becomes a refuge from doubt, vulnerability and the discomfort of not knowing.
Coaching and counselling focus on the person behind the role. On the drives that once brought you here, the blocks you have built up along the way, and the needs that find no place in the role. The aim is calmer, more focused leadership. Whoever knows where the role ends and the person begins makes clearer choices.
Undercurrent and tensions: what the role costs
The first tension is loyalty. You are loyal to what the system asks of you: direction, certainty, decisiveness. At the same time you are loyal to yourself, to what you want to embody and to what you actually think. As long as the two coincide, you barely notice the tension. As soon as they diverge, keeping the role upright costs energy.
The second tension concerns contact. Whoever speaks only from the role receives responses only to the role. Feedback reaches the position, not the person. Colleagues tell you what the director needs to know, rarely what you ought to hear. The familiar loneliness at the top is partly a consequence of that shielding. The role keeps the other person out, even when that is not what you intend.
The third tension is new, and it comes from outside. Artificial intelligence is taking over part of the work from which many leaders derive their professional identity: analysing, formulating, creating overview, having the answer ready. A field experiment with 758 consultants from Boston Consulting Group, published in Organization Science (Dell'Acqua et al., 2026), shows how sharply this cuts. On tasks within the technology's reach, consultants with AI support completed 12.2 per cent more tasks and worked 25.1 per cent faster. On a complex strategic task that fell outside that reach, those using AI reached the correct solution roughly 19 percentage points less often.
For the person behind the role, that second finding is the more important one. Where the technology is strong, the expert part of the role loses its exclusivity. Where it is weak, everything depends on someone who knows where their own knowledge ends. Leaders whose identity rests on having the answer are thrown off balance twice over. What they were good at becomes ordinary. What is now required, judgement at the edge of the known, demands the capacity not to know.
In practice: two recognizable situations
The situations below are composites drawn from practice and described so that they cannot be traced.
A director in the public sector is always the first with the answer in every meeting. Her team values her sharpness and has stopped thinking for itself. She is irritated by the lack of ownership and turns up the pressure. In counselling it emerges that, for her, not knowing amounts to falling short, a conviction that was once functional, early in her career. The intervention is small and confronting: one meeting a week in which she speaks last and decides only after everyone has contributed something. After six weeks the conversation in the team changes. The discomfort changes first in herself.
A CIO in the financial sector watches AI applications take over the analyses his department was proud of for years. He responds with control: every result has to pass through him. His team experiences distrust. In coaching, a different story surfaces. The tooling is not his problem. The loss of a professional identity is: the certainty that he was the best analyst in the room. Only once that loss could be named did room open up for a different question. What role does he want to play now that the analysis itself is less scarce?
Implications for leadership
In these times, a confidential space for the person behind the role is a precondition for good leadership. The system rewards the role. It asks for decisiveness, visibility and certainty, and it seldom punishes doubt openly but often does so tacitly. Whoever has no place to let the person speak will hold on to the role ever more tightly, precisely when circumstances call for agility.
Counselling helps you choose more clearly, because you learn to distinguish what is yours from what belongs to the system. That distinction works in two directions. You see more clearly which pressure you have taken on without testing it. And you see more clearly which part of the pattern is your own contribution, without being able to hide behind circumstances. Together, these two insights widen your room to act.
For action, this means:
- Now: for one week, notice the moments when you speak from the role rather than from what you really think. Write them down without judgement. The pattern becomes visible once you have seen it a few times.
- Later: arrange a regular reflective space outside the hierarchy: a coach, a counsellor or a peer consultation group. Regularity counts for more than intensity here.
- Not: do not wait until a crisis, a conflict or exhaustion forces you. By then it has become repair work, when it could have been development work.
A reflective question
What would you do differently in your next meeting if you did not have to know?