You know the person, or maybe you are the person.
The one everyone turns to when something falls through the cracks. The one who “just figures it out.” The one whose name shows up in every project plan because no one else has capacity.
Until they burn out, give notice, or simply can't carry the load. Then suddenly, the organization realizes that it was never just a role. It was an entire system being held together by one person’s effort.
In one organization of nearly 1,000 employees, Edgility Talent Partners met an HR director who fit this exact pattern. On paper, her job looked like a standard leadership role. In practice, she was doing the job duties of six people. Eventually, the strain became unsustainable, and she resigned. Only then did the organization confront the deeper problem: they weren’t replacing one employee; they were trying to replace an entire, improvised HR infrastructure that should never have rested on a single person.
This isn’t just a story about workload. It’s a story about how roles are designed and how, over time, many organizations quietly and unintentionally build jobs around people rather than around the organizational goals the mission truly requires.
table of contents
1. What Happens When Job Roles Grow Around People?
2. Shift the Question From: “What can this person do?” to “What will we need?”
3. Try a "Blank Page" Organizational Design Exercise
4. Make Expectations and Decision Rights Explicit
5. Talk to Staff With Honesty and Respect
6. Future-Proofing Roles is an Equity Investment
7. A Practical Next Step for the Next 90 Days
What Happens When Job Roles Grow Around People?
In mission-driven organizations, it’s common for job responsibilities to expand around whoever has the skill, the institutional knowledge, or the willingness to say yes. A talented staff member steps in to fill gaps. A manager takes on critical work no one else has time to own. A role stretches and stretches until the job description bears little resemblance to what the person actually does.
That can feel efficient in the moment. But underneath, a few things start to happen that are easy to miss:
- Expectations become person-specific instead of role-specific.
- Invisible labor accumulates, often in the roles held by women, people of color, or those with strong relational ties to leadership.
- Employee performance conversations become murky, and role ambiguity grows, because the bar has never been clearly reset as the organization changes.
Eventually, the organization outgrows the role as it was originally defined, but the person in the role has never been given a structured path to grow with it. This is where leaders experience a performance gap and the employee experiences a sense of whiplash: “I’ve been doing a good job for years; how is it suddenly not enough?”
What sometimes appears to be a performance problem is often a design problem. The role was never recalibrated to match the organization’s future. The person was never supported to grow into that future in a clear, intentional way.
Shift the Question From: “What can this person do?” to “What will we need?”
Progress starts when organizations stop focusing on who can stretch further and instead focus on the direction and design the work requires.
Instead of asking:
- “What else can we give this person?”
- “How much more can they take on?”
Leaders begin asking:
- “Where are we trying to go over the next three to five years?”
- “What capabilities will we need when we get there?”
- “What job titles, structures, and KPIs will make that work sustainable?”
This shift may appear incremental, but the impact on how you structure expectations, roles, and responsibilities is significant for building high-performing teams.
Try a “Blank Page” Organizational Design Exercise
One practical way to reset roles is to imagine the organization was being built from scratch today, with the next three to five years in mind.
In a working session with your leadership team, ask:
- If we were designing this organization for the future, what work would need to be done to deliver on our mission?
- What roles would we create to make that work sustainable and clear?
- Where would decision-making authority live? Who owns which calls?
- How many roles would sit at each level of leadership, and where would management responsibilities reasonably fall?
Start with the work, not the people. Capture an organization chart and high-level position descriptions that reflect the future you’re building toward, not the patchwork of today.
Then, map your current team into that future:
- Where do you already have strong alignment between people and roles?
- Who could realistically grow into a future role with intentional support over the next one to two years?
- Where do you see true gaps—places where no amount of “stretching” will create a sustainable fit?
This process creates a different kind of conversation with staff. Instead of quietly letting roles sprawl until burnout forces change, you can engage people in honest dialogue about where the organization is headed and how their roles might evolve.
Make Expectations and Decision Rights Explicit
Redesigning roles on paper is only half the story; the other half is about day-to-day clarity, starting from the initial onboarding process.
Without role clarity and defined expectations, employees spend significant energy trying to infer what matters, what success looks like, and which decisions they are actually empowered to make. That guesswork is exhausting, particularly for staff who are already working at the edge of their capacity.
To make roles truly sustainable, each person needs:
- A clear statement of the role’s purpose
- Three to five outcomes the role is accountable for
- A shared understanding of what success looks like, including collaborative goal-setting, and how performance standards will be evaluated
- Explicit decision rights: which decisions they own with full autonomy, where they provide input, and what needs to be escalated
You’re not only making the system run better—you’re also making it fairer.
When expectations and decision rights are transparent, staff are less dependent on informal networks or unwritten rules to be successful. Managers have a more consistent framework for coaching, performance management, and conducting objective performance reviews. Leaders can see where roles are overloaded or under-scoped before problems escalate.
Talk to Staff With Honesty and Respect
Any conversation about redesigning roles will surface nerves. Staff may worry about job security, status, or whether long-standing contributions are being discounted.
That’s why the “how” matters as much as the “what.”
Leaders can frame this work not as a critique of individuals, but as a commitment to:
- Align roles with the organization’s evolving mission and strategy
- Make expectations transparent and fair
- Design jobs that are sustainable over time, not dependent on heroics
When leaders acknowledge the ways roles have become unrealistic and take responsibility for redesigning them, it builds trust. It shows that the organization is willing to address structural issues, not just ask individuals to work harder or “be more resilient.”
Future-Proofing Roles is an Equity Investment
For many mission-driven organizations, the instinct when resources are tight is to delay structural work and rely on “good people” to carry the load a little longer. But the cost of that approach is high: lower motivation, burnout, turnover, inequity, and disruption when indispensable staff inevitably leave.
Future-proofing roles—by designing them around strategy, clarifying expectations, and making decision rights visible—is one of the most powerful equity investments an organization can make. It creates:
- More predictable workloads
- Clearer growth paths
- Fairer performance conversations
- Improved employee engagement, higher job satisfaction, and better staff retention
- Less chaos when the organization grows or changes
It also signals to staff that their success should not depend on guesswork or overextension. It depends on systems that have been thoughtfully designed to make their work doable and meaningful.
A Practical Next Step for the Next 90 Days
If redesigning every role feels overwhelming, start small.
Over the next 90 days:
- Choose one team or function where you know roles have stretched.
- Run a “blank page” exercise just for that area.
- Redraft role descriptions, expectations, and decision rights.
- Pilot those changes and gather staff feedback on what feels clearer or more sustainable.
You do not need more people to start this work. You need the discipline to stop designing jobs around whoever happens to be in the seat and instead design roles around the mission you are trying to achieve.
If you shared this article with your leadership team tomorrow, which role—or which “indispensable person”—would you talk about first?
Redesigning roles is one part of building a culture where people can thrive. For a deeper look at how clarity, accountability, and shared purpose come together, read High Performance, Shared Purpose: A Leader’s Guide to Building the Culture Your Mission-Driven Organization Needs.
