Karen is 35 years old. She works as the Head of Product in a larger company. She has been with the company from the beginning and knows it better than anyone else. The team has taught Karen everything she knows and she feels close to the people.
She begins to take on more responsibility and to move up the ladder. The people in her team trust her. Karen is aware of this and does not want to disappoint them. But she feels that the burden of the new position is just too much for her. She tries to keep herself together and hold her head up high. The stress takes over. The pressure is too great.
Karen decides to tell the team how she feels and asks them to take over the responsibility. The answer is surprising: As much as they would like to help Karen, they cannot do so at the moment — nobody can manage the product as well as Karen. This has nothing to do with the fact that they do not want to help her. Rather, it has to do with the fact that there is no other way to organize oneself at the moment. At most, they could give her a day off to recover. But in Karen’s eyes “one day to recover“ is a synonym for “completing all tasks in four days instead of five”, which makes her even more anxious.
Karen decides to go with it as intended, But as predicted, she collapses at work one day and will need several months to recover. The team is now left without her.
The situation is always the same: more responsibility always comes with a greater fear of failing. We don’t want to make our team colleagues regret their decision to put their trust in us. We work several hours to finish all tasks. Time flies and before everything is done, a little voice in our head whispers that it’s time to go home. The work? It remains undone. Work has become a constant companion in our lives and often it doesn’t stop after leaving the office — it even accompanies us into our bedroom. Deadlines keep us awake and the fear of disappointing our colleagues prevents our brain from falling asleep. We have forgotten how to separate ourselves from work.
Several months pass until Karen returns to work, but what she finds, surprises her: The product was temporarily taken over by a colleague. The company continues as if she had never existed. All the responsibility that weighed on her shoulders now seems to have been distributed and the organization “works” without her — even though she was assured at the time that there was no other way.
No matter how indispensable Karen felt or how important she was to the company at the time she worked there, no one, not even Karen, is irreplaceable.
To find out why, we must first understand the construct of a company. A company is ideally build with a vision, a goal, where it wants to go. In order to reach this fictitious end of the story, several tasks have to be performed on the way to get there. These thousands upon thousands of tasks and work steps can be bundled into roles — like in a theatre play, a role has its own purpose, how it leads the story to the happy end, the vision. The roles are the bundled factual description of the tasks and responsibilities that arise on the way to the vision. By this we mean the tasks, responsibilities and decision-making powers — the fictitious roles that take part in the big play of the organization.
Only after the end of the story (the vision) has been defined and the roles to get there are clear, is when the actors come into play — who fill the roles with life. We are talking about Roles & Souls. Unlike the roles, which have to be considered objectively, we are on a personal level with Souls. They describe us as people. Our character traits, abilities, interests and all levels of our being. The souls are the actors who slip into the roles of the play to bring the story to its destination, to accomplish the company‘s goal.
The clue is: We have to separate the roles from the souls when we want to examine our initial question. In the perspective of the roles, the theatre must go on. When a soul fails, the role is replaced by the next soul or divided among several existing souls. This “re-scheduling” has a completely objective and factual character. The organization is set up in such a way that it has to work so that the play can continue. “The show must go on” — as the saying goes.
This is exactly why the organization will never thank us for the work we have done. That’s exactly why we are all replaceable at work. Even if some roles are harder to fill than others, the organization will always change in order for it to „work“. Not because it wants to harm us or because it is evil — but because it is in its nature to continue to function. If it doesn’t, there is nothing left to organize. The goal is to finish the play, to fulfill the vision. If this requires a reorganization or a redistribution of the Souls to the Roles, the organization will change — regardless of the consequences for the people.
Of course, this process will not be entirely objective, because there are still people running the organization and you can influence how the organization is set up. Nevertheless, the fact that the organization “has to” function means that we are all basically replaceable in the eyes of the organization.
In summary, we are all replaceable on the role-level. For the organization we are only a means to an end to achieve the vision. This is a purely factual aspect. It is in the very nature of an organization to function. If a part of the organization doesn’t work, it will be reorganized accordingly.
For the organization we are only a means to an end to achieve the vision. This is a purely factual aspect. It is in the very nature of an organization to function. If a part of the organization doesn’t work, it will be reorganized accordingly.
On the soul-level, however, we see that the people within the organization can be very grateful to us. The people in Karens team will never forget her efforts and will want to work with her again beyond the boundaries of the organization (in another company). With the Souls we find all the bonds and relationships we forge with other people in these constructs. These bonds create trust and closeness. They are persistent beyond the boundaries of the organization — we are difficult to replace on the soul-level, unlike on the role-level.
Basically, for Karen this means that her company has reorganized itself in her absence so that it can continue to function. This has nothing to do with the people in the team or with Karen as a person. It is in the nature of the company that it must continue. On the soul-level, however, the team members will always have Karen firmly in their minds and hearts. We are all replaceable in the context of the play — another soul can take over our role. But in contrast, no one will ever be able to replace our soul. No one can take over the relationships we build and maintain with other people. No one will be able to take over and replace our character traits and the true core of ourselves.
This is exactly why our souls cannot be replaced while the roles we play, can.
