The Size of the Role and the Size of the Self. Status, identity and ambition in later working life
I have always thought of myself as ambitious, and I still do, but as my career has lengthened, I have become more interested in the difference between the work I am capable of doing and the work that would actually suit me best. Capability easily hardens into aspiration, so that because we could occupy a more senior or demanding role we assume that we should, and we seldom notice how much of that assumption rests on a habit of thinking rather more than on our heart’s desire.
By ambition I mean the wish to do work that matters and to have that work recognised, and my argument in what follows is that this wish is healthiest in later working life when it is directed at the scale of contribution that fits a person, rather than at the largest role available.
There is a peculiar danger in ambition, because it can encourage us to confuse the size of the role with the size of the self. A large job title seems to confirm that we still matter, whereas a smaller role can feel like a diminishment even when it offers greater freedom or a more humane way of life. Some roles really do diminish us, while others are simply smaller than the identities we have come to think we should inhabit, and the two are not the same.
The distinction matters most for people who have accumulated seniority over a long working life, moving from post to post up what seemed an ordered ladder. After years spent acquiring expertise, responsibility and professional standing, a smaller role can be hard to read as anything other than a step down. Is considering one evidence that our best work is behind us? Are we underestimating ourselves? Have we become less ambitious, or merely more discriminating about what deserves our ambition? Are we ‘past it’? And can we allow ourselves to become less attached to status, particularly when status has been an important marker of who we are?
Maybe there is wisdom in loosening the grip on endless aspiration, although it would be glib to pretend that doing so is easy, and equally glib to treat the fear of being ‘past it’ as a purely private anxiety. Ageism is a real feature of many professions and labour markets, and the sense that one’s standing is eroding is sometimes an accurate reading of how others behave, so that a person weighing a smaller role is often responding to external pressure as well as to internal doubt.
Professional status is seldom only a matter of titles. It may represent years of work, accumulated responsibility and the recognition of one’s peers. It affects who is listened to, which rooms one can still enter and whether one’s judgement is taken seriously. It can also become entangled with livelihood, belonging and the story a person tells about what their life has amounted to. Livelihood deserves particular emphasis, because the freedom to choose a smaller role is unevenly distributed, depending on pensions, mortgages, dependants and the security of other income. An essay of this kind risks speaking most easily to those who have some room to choose.
Losing status, or choosing a role with less of it, may therefore involve more than wounded pride, it can unsettle identity. The familiar institutional signals disappear: the title changes or vanishes, the diary becomes less crowded, and the invitations less frequent. A person may remain as capable as before while receiving far less public confirmation of that capability. To describe this simply as ego is to misunderstand the social nature of identity, since we come to know ourselves partly through the ways in which others recognise us. The problem begins when recognition becomes the principal means by which we know ourselves at all.
What status has been doing for us
A senior role can conceal several needs beneath a single title. It may provide authority, community, stimulation, income, structure and a sense of consequence. It may also offer protection from a more troubling question, which is ‘who am I when the organisation no longer announces my importance?’ This is one reason why apparently modest career decisions – or decisions thrust upon us – can provoke disproportionate anxiety. The decision is rarely only about the work, and it may carry fears about decline, invisibility and whether stepping away from a demanding role means stepping out of relevance.
There is also a subtler danger. A role may grow so large that it colonises the life around it. Responsibility expands while time for relationships, thought, health and unhurried attention contracts, and the individual continues to occupy a substantial position while feeling increasingly absent from their own life. At that point, status may be standing in for what the role has taken, and its symbolic rewards matter more to the person precisely because they are needed to make the cost seem worthwhile.
The obvious response is to praise smaller roles and simpler lives, but that too can become sentimental. Some roles are small because they are well bounded, and others are small because the organisation has little interest in the person’s experience, judgement or potential. Flexibility can be liberating, or it can be the language through which organisations obtain senior capability without offering proper recognition or security. Humility does not require us to collude with our own underuse.
Smaller or diminished?
A smaller role may involve fewer hours, less formal authority or a narrower remit, and none of these necessarily makes it diminishing. The more important questions concern what the role allows a person to contribute, learn and become. A role may be small and still draw upon the best of someone. As I am learning, a few hours of serious teaching, mentoring or coaching can carry more human significance than a week dominated by meetings, reporting systems and institutional manoeuvring, and a bounded piece of work may create a depth of encounter that a more senior position, dispersed across dozens of demands, no longer permits.
The reverse is also possible. A role can occupy little time while taking up an extraordinary amount of psychological space, since poorly defined responsibilities, weak organisational support and uncertainty about one’s standing can make a fractional position feel strangely consuming. Smallness of contract does not guarantee lightness of burden.
Three questions may help to distinguish a smaller role from a diminishing one. First, does the role use enough of what I can bring? No position will employ every capacity, nor should it, but a healthy role offers some correspondence between what a person has learned and what they are being asked to do, and chronic underuse has an erosive quality because it asks the individual to suppress too much of their judgement, imagination or experience.
Second, does the role offer something worth learning, contributing or belonging to? A role may be worthwhile because of the people it brings us alongside, the organisation whose purposes we value, the craft it allows us to practise or the future possibilities it opens, so that its value may lie partly beyond the job description.
Third, does the role leave room for the life I now want? This is not an argument for ease, since work can be difficult, demanding and deeply worthwhile; the issue is whether its demands remain proportionate to its place within the whole of a life. These questions shift attention from size to fit, and they ask whether a role is sufficiently substantial without requiring it to become total.
From accumulation to selection
The first half of a career is often shaped by accumulation. We gather experience, qualifications, responsibilities, publications, networks and evidence of esteem, and each addition appears to enlarge the future, so that the movement is broadly upward and outward. Later working life may require a different discipline, in which the task becomes one of selection. Which responsibilities still belong to me? Which forms of work express something I continue to care about? Which identities have become habitual long after they ceased to be life-giving? What deserves the remaining years of attention?
Laura Carstensen’s socioemotional selectivity theory lends empirical support to this shift, suggesting that as people perceive their remaining time to be more limited, they tend to give greater priority to goals that are emotionally meaningful than to those directed towards acquiring knowledge or preparing for future possibilities. Selection of this kind is not necessarily retirement in slow motion. It may involve new work, new institutions and new forms of ambition, with the difference that ambition becomes more discriminating and is less concerned with occupying the largest available role than with finding the right scale of contribution.
Erik Erikson used the term generativity to describe the concern of mature adults with establishing and guiding the next generation, and later work, notably that of Dan McAdams and Ed de St Aubin, has broadened the idea to cover the ways in which adults create, contribute and invest themselves in things that extend beyond the self. Generativity is not measured by organisational rank. It may be exercised through leadership, teaching, scholarship, parenting, mentoring, coaching or the cultivation of organisations or communities or traditions that will outlast us, and a smaller role can sometimes make such work more possible because it removes the administrative architecture that once surrounded it.
This can feel like a loss before it feels like freedom. Institutional life trains us to read expansion as success and contraction as failure, so that choosing less may require a form of inner resistance, and a willingness to believe that concentration can be a form of growth.
Herminia Ibarra’s research on professional transition is helpful here. Her study of people moving into more senior roles in investment banking and consulting suggested that new professional identities are developed experimentally, through what she calls provisional selves. Her later book Working Identity extends the argument to mid-career reinvention. Ibarra’s subjects were mostly moving up, so applying the idea to a deliberate move towards a smaller role is an extension of her thinking, though I suspect a fair one. We may experiment with different activities, relationships and settings, noticing where there is energy, recognition and a credible sense of becoming. A smaller role may function in this way, as a place from which a different configuration of work and life becomes imaginable. It need not represent a final judgement on one’s worth or destination.
Prestige and its disguises
Institutional prestige complicates the picture. A small role in a celebrated organisation may feel larger because of the name attached to it, while substantial work in a less prestigious setting may be undervalued because it carries less symbolic capital. Neither reaction is entirely irrational, since organisations differ in resources, networks, reputation and opportunity, and association with a respected organisation may genuinely create access to people and possibilities that would otherwise remain unavailable. The peril lies in allowing reflected prestige to settle the question. A famous name cannot make tedious work meaningful, repair an unreasonable journey or transform poor conditions into good ones, and the absence of prestige should not lead us to disregard work that is intellectually serious and humanly valuable.
The mature question is what part status is playing in the decision. Is it one source of legitimate value among several, or is it being asked to make up for too much?
This is often where coaching conversations become interesting. Consider a fictional example. A headteacher near the end of a long tenure has been offered a part-time advisory role across a small group of schools. Her first reason for declining the work is her concern about how the role would appear to former colleagues.
When the conversation turns to the work itself, however, she speaks with more energy than she has shown all session. It gradually becomes clear that what she fears most is the prospect of explaining the role at the next gathering of heads, and that the smallness of the role itself troubles her much less.
Beneath the practical calculation lies a more intimate negotiation between recognition and the freedom to express her values through the offered role. She may want a life with greater spaciousness while fearing that others will interpret it as retreat, and she may also fear interpreting it that way herself. The work of coaching is not to persuade her that status does not matter. It is to help her discover how much authority she wishes to grant it.
A role should not have to certify a life
Perhaps the deepest shift in later working life is learning that a role can express the self without being required to prove it. This does not mean becoming indifferent to recognition, since most of us need our work to be seen and valued; nor does it mean accepting whatever diminished opportunity is offered under the banner of flexibility, because experience has worth and organisations should not be permitted to exploit a person’s desire to remain useful. It means allowing the self to become larger than any particular office, title or institutional affiliation.
A person can leave a senior role without leaving behind their seriousness, undertake modest work without becoming modest in capability, and choose bounded responsibility without renouncing ambition. They may even discover that a smaller role permits a larger contribution, because less energy is spent maintaining the machinery of position.
The final test of a new role is whether it enlarges or narrows the life in which it will be held. Work that is simply good, undertaken with attention among people worth working alongside, may ultimately leave the self larger than any title could make it.
References
Carstensen, L. L., Isaacowitz, D. M. and Charles, S. T. (1999). “Taking Time Seriously: A Theory of Socioemotional Selectivity.” American Psychologist, 54(3), 165–181.
Erikson, E. H. (1950, revised 1963). Childhood and Society. New York: W. W. Norton.
Ibarra, H. (1999). “Provisional Selves: Experimenting with Image and Identity in Professional Adaptation.” Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(4), 764–791.
Ibarra, H. (2003). Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
McAdams, D. P. and de St Aubin, E. (1992). “A Theory of Generativity and Its Assessment Through Self-Report, Behavioral Acts, and Narrative Themes in Autobiography.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 62(6), 1003–1015.