Untangle your value from your rank + role.
Most of us currently operate within cultures that use hierarchy to signal authority, rank, and expertise.
Bosses, C-suite, and experts are seen as more valuable than those who fall lower on the totem pole.
Rank is equated to power, high value, leadership, and dominance.
But we’ve mixed up our PERSONAL value with FUNCTIONAL value of roles and rank within hierarchy.
Someone higher up may (or not) have more functional value than someone else.
But no one is more inherently valuable as a human being than others. Our value has nothing to do with our jobs. To be a humanful leader—one who is collaborative, co-creative, and inclusive—this is crucial to understand.
The function of our role, however, becomes more or less valuable depending on the circumstances. We just don’t have systems that reflect that, by and large—we have fixed systems, not fluid ones.
When hierarchy + identity become entangled, things go wonky.
Hierarchies are useful: triage, emergencies, situations requiring quick, coordinated execution and pre-planned strategies and protocols. In these cases, functions meet context, and a fixed hierarchy is efficient and effective. Makes sense.
But as rigid models used to signal rank + dominance—which in our culture have also come to signal personal value—hierarchies become a tool for disconnection. When every action is ranked, each action becomes a judgment of better than/less than—every action becomes a transaction.
When relationships become transactional, we lose the possibilities that come from collaborating, co-creating, and mutual respect; we end up relying more on people-pleasing or politicking to receive accolades—and our salaries.
We run the risk of losing ourselves, because our identities are not found in rank, roles, or value judgments about them (even if someone tells you they are); identity can only be found within.
This is one reason why many leaders end up feeling “alone at the top,” or disconnected from the reality of their organization. The farther apart the roles in a hierarchy, the more disconnection and distrust exists between them.
Others can feel less-than, like imposters, or needing to pacify those at higher levels.
This inhibits healthy competition, which arises from going all in with others who are willing to do the same.
It also hinders the institution from operating effectively as an organism. We all saw during COVID that the value of a role is largely contextual: front-line healthcare workers became the most valuable roles on the planet, but their rank within hierarchy didn’t necessarily reflect that.
Creativity, collaboration, and innovation rely on mutual connection, respect, safety. Rank and hierarchy hinder this—unless proactive steps are taken to make sure that they don’t.
This is a loss at a personal level: managing egos is far less interesting than evolving our expertise.
It’s also a systemic loss: rank hinders feedback that flows up, and feedback is intelligence about the organism’s health. Why might feedback be withheld? Because it might be received as an affront to rank by the ego—and if that person is the one who evaluates us, and our evaluations are what ensure we get to pay our bills… well, that’s some dynamic tension right there. Let’s talk about it.
When we untangle personal identity from role/rank within hierarchy—when organizations can focus more on functional aspects of hierarchy and less on egoic—that creates an ecosystem that fosters healthy human collaboration, competition, and creativity.
That is an open, innovative system. That is growth mindset. That is evolution.
What could healing hierarchy look like?
Untangle value judgments from roles within hierarchy.
View it as a multi-faceted, contextual organism in service of a mission rather than a tool for wielding dominance.
What if we revalued hierarchies?
What if the current way of overvaluing the top and undervaluing the bottom of the triangle is flawed? Not because hierarchies are bad, but because fixed hierarchies have been used for signaling dominance, which is arbitrary, which erodes connection, which erodes trust between individuals and of institutions, which erodes community, which erodes human prosperity, which erodes generosity and compassion and joy?
What if we used hierarchies as a fluid tool that could flatten and reassemble based on context and necessity?
Where affluence flowed to the most valuable based on circumstance—not fixed, arbitrary judgments of who has more “social capital” or “power” than whom?
What if the hierarchy understood that the top of the triangle only exists because the entire rest of it exists? That it is a reciprocal, interdependent system that can only operate as a unit? That every role is only as valuable as the circumstances it responds to, which will shift because life does?
What if hierarchy knew how to get itself into flow state?
What if the structures and systems we build evolve as quickly as we do?
This is part of my series “Healing Hierarchy: How to shift from domination to collaboration in the workplace.” More to come.
