Same People, Different Roles

I serve on the board of Father’s Uplift, a nonprofit that helps fathers reconnect with their kids, usually after disruptions due to incarceration, mental health challenges, or substance use issues—and sometimes all three. Last week, we started the board meeting by hearing from a father we’ve served and sharing our own stories about fatherhood. The stories were varied. Happy and sad. Great relationships and challenging ones. Relationships that were good and turned bad, and vice versa. It was a reminder of how complicated people are.

The conversation stuck with me and made me think more about my own relationship with the idea of fatherhood.

Whenever I tell anyone that my son is named Charles, I always have the instinct to add, “he’s named after his great-grandfather.” The main reason I do so is that it feels a bit egocentric to name someone after yourself. But I also do it because I have always preferred the idea of being named after my grandfather rather than my father. 

I realized later that view was due to the natural conflicts inherent in the father-son relationship. Owning the parent role’s responsibility to shape a healthy human being implies a certain amount of conflict, and the line between “reliable enforcer of standards” and “mean” is both thin and a matter of perspective. That, and sharing the same space for eighteen years, meant that I was fully aware of all my father’s shortcomings. 

But that perspective was more about the roles my father and grandfather played than who they were as humans. In fact, my grandfather was legendarily strict—my father, uncle, and their cousins often spoke of a healthy fear of him. But because he was completely different as a grandfather, all of my memories were of him bouncing me on his knee or indulging most of my requests. I could look up to him without complications, blissfully unaware of whatever human shortcomings he had.

I got a glimpse of how much the parent role shaped my father’s behavior while visiting him at work in high school and watching him joke around with his colleagues. It was the first time I realized that people liked him! Then, as soon as I left for college, he completely stopped playing the role of father, and we just became friends. When he called, it was never to check on me, but to share something he’d watched or read (he was a history teacher at the start of his career) and that he thought I’d find interesting. 

My father and grandfather weren't choosing between being themselves and playing a role—they were just choosing which role was appropriate for the task at hand. All of those reflections made me think about how leaders reconcile the roles they must play and notions of authenticity. 

For example, I once worked with the CEO of a large nonprofit who’s often the life of the party. However, it was a rude awakening when she realized that, at the organization’s holiday party, she was actually an inhibitor of fun. Because no one would let loose until the boss departed, she couldn’t be the life of the party. She needed to leave early. Similarly, she displays all the polish of a CEO when speaking to staff or giving interviews, but in private, curses like a sailor (which is part of why she’s fun). All of those behaviors are authentic parts of her, even though they’re expressed differently in different contexts.

A few weeks ago, I talked with an educator who also displayed that kind of flexible behavior. Because our conversation occurred right by the school’s front door, there was an interruption every 30 seconds. Thus, she completely changed her tone every thirty seconds—from talking with a colleague, to talking to a kid, to talking to a parent. Each voice was different. In schools, that kind of code switching is completely natural. People have a teacher persona or a leader persona that is different from who they normally are, and they use them as tools. It’s not seen as inauthentic to apply different tools for different jobs. 

In contrast, when I work with leaders as an executive coach, the need to code-switch—to adopt a slightly different persona as a leader or the public face of a team—is often experienced as emotionally difficult or treated as a question of authenticity. But it’s the same tool-switching my father and grandfather did without a second thought. They just never had to defend it to anyone.