The frustrated salesperson must not say to the customer “Look here, either you like these shoes or you don’t. Make up your mind and stop wasting my time.” 

The waiter should not say to the diner “Stop complaining to me. It’s not my fault that the dish is greasy and over-cooked.” 

The receptionist who says “Just wait a minute! Can’t you see that I’m on the phone” as she chats away to her boyfriend is rejecting her work role.

I am sure that you have come across this type of behavior. We find it personally irritating, inconvenient and a considerable discredit to the employer. In previous articles I have stressed the importance of the ‘work role.’ The employee, at every level, must ‘play’ the role required by the job. 

I am surprised to have received many indignant phonecalls and e-mails, and even a letter, containing several expressions of concern about ‘boss of self.’ It seems that some of us strongly resist the recommended ‘role play’ as they see it as the surrender of the ‘self’ to unreasonable requirements of the job, or the toleration of an unacceptable level of humility, or an infringement of the ‘inner person.’ This dilemma is so important that I return to it here.

Accept, or Resign
If you feel that your job constantly requires you to behave in ways which are so deviant from your ‘real self’ that you do not want to play the role then you should resign and declare, as an actor in a play might say “I do not want to play this part.” In this case the actor should compare the self-indulgence of rejecting the part with the possibly greater inconvenience of getting the sack! So must we all!

How to Adjust to Your Role
Fortunately, there are some remedies which we can consider applying in preference to resigning or being fired.

1. Try to accept that you are playing a role and that this does not diminish you as a person, just as the actor playing the evil Iago in ‘Othello’ should be able to distinguish his own personality from that of Iago in the part he is required to perform.
2. Try to anticipate the role plays that will become necessary in your job. In the play or film the actor’s role is clearly specified for him/her at every stage. However, in our jobs there often a number of options which we might adopt. If we can be ‘pre-coded’ with the best options then our tasks will be much less distressing than in cases were we need to choose very quickly between a number of possible actions or decisions. As a general principle, to which they are undoubtedly exceptions, the higher one rises in an organization the greater are the number of options to consider when decisions need to be made. Here again, if you become a manager and find that you don’t like the ambiguity of the circumstances of your managerial role, then you should choose work with a better-defined role. But a considerable reduction in remuneration might be involved! 

Role Play Training
Some trainers attempt to prepare employees for their jobs by ‘listing’ the requirements. Unfortunately, for many jobs, the list of all possible situations and suitable role plays for each of them might involve as much as a hundred pages of detailed notes, which few trainees could be expected to absorb successfully. To cope with this problem I have borrowed a useful cliché from the managerial lexicon “professionalism.”

I recommend exposing the trainee to several examples of professional versus non-professional behavior. In this way the trainee “picks up” the meta-concept of professionalism. The success of this type of training can then be assessed by presenting cases of professional versus non-professional options and asking the trainee “which is the professional thing to do?”

In most cases it is gratifyingly surprising when it becomes clear to the trainer that “professionalism” has been absorbed without the need for tedious and ineffective “listing” of desirable behaviours. The meta-concept has done the work! The newly equipped employee’s subsequent professionalism should be noted and rewarded, when it occurs, and non-professional behavior should be appropriately discouraged, through performance appraisal.