Unsung Team Roles
Emergence of Soft Roles
Google’s early success is partly attributed to the use of commodity hardware instead of purpose built “super” computers as was the custom at the time. Rather than demanding perfection from complex systems it is far more effective to accept the imperfections and design with it [1].
Team roles are neither comprehensive nor precise; because nobody understands human roles so perfectly. In any given team structure, people are expected to adapt to a broad range of situations that are unpredictable, and frankly unknown. Some (most?) of those situations are directly due to other team members.
As teams mature, the actual role each person takes on will gradually anneal around individual strengths and weaknesses. So in reality, what is intended to be a neat and well circumscribed role profile becomes irregular, undefined, and dynamic.
Following the spirit of designing with imperfections, team organization must always account for this fluidity of roles.
In short:
- Roles in a team will rarely be circumscribed by the corresponding job description. You will wind up doing work outside your scope.
- Roles will overlap in ways that will run counter to the intents of the official role allocations. You will do other people’s work occasionally and vice versa.
- Roles will emerge that are not mentioned in anyone’s job description.. Sometimes called soft roles.
Incentivizing Soft Roles
Leaders must set in place the right set of incentives for people to fill these soft roles when necessary. If people ridigly perform just their roles and let things fail around them (“it’s not my job”) that’s a sign of a bad incentive structure.
The right incentives can only be put in place by leadership that is aware of their own limitations and acknowledge their own imperfections. That’s because those incentives need to leave enough room for others to compensate. In other words, the only system that can reasonably create the right incentives is one where the at least some authority of deciding compensation is laid in the hands of those who observe work directly.
See Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation: An Anecdote for an example of what happens when people try to force this process purely by creating extrinsic incentives and assigned roles.
No Heros
Any organization whose success depends on their employees working against their own self interests will eventually fail.
Unfortunately incentives are seldom constructed by people who understand what organizational cross beams are necessary to keep the “official” role hierarchy from collapsing. Leadership rarely hear you work till 2am, but they will hear the failure of their leadership eventually … and until then they will neither understand nor act.
See Why Heroism Is Bad in the Google SRE site.
Soft Roles as Organizational Cross Beams
Beyond the obvious team scoped function of soft roles, they also perform important functions at the organizational level. Of these two common types are:
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Glue-people who are necessary to tie teams together, build cohesion, connect the dots between silos that are not effectively communicating with each other, and establish an unofficial foundation of trust that prevent teams from collapsing when the trust between leadership and workers inevitably crumbles.
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Immune Systems are the people necessary to stop the company from shooting themselves in their corporate feet. These are the people who internally oppose measures that would cause widespread collapse of user-trust, violate privacy policies, open up the organization to litigation, irreversibly misuse customer data, unnecessarily jeopardize the operational stability or security of critical systems, or commit war crimes and human rights violations.
Each of these categories deserve its own post. Stay tuned!
Last modified: August 2, 2025