Why Good People Fail in Poorly Designed Roles

When recruitment outcomes disappoint, schools often assume the issue is the person. This is a natural response because individuals are the most visible part of the system.

Yet organisational research shows that performance, wellbeing, and effectiveness are shaped just as strongly by how roles are designed, clarified, and governed.

In schools, this matters deeply because they are community facing organisations. Role descriptions and job advertisements are not only internal documents. They shape how staff and parents understand responsibility, authority, and access. People build mental maps of the school based on roles: who does what, who decides, and who to approach.

When those signals are unclear or misleading, confusion does not remain internal. It becomes cultural.

Role descriptions in schools are often written once and then left untouched. Not because this reflects best practice, but because few schools are supported with a clear, shared approach to role design. The work is complex, relational, and requires collective thinking. As a result, roles are not intentionally revisited after appointment to align expectations, strengths, boundaries, and team interfaces.

This is where the first opportunity is lost.

When schools do not sit together to shape a role with the person who has been hired, they miss the chance to deliberately tap into that individual’s capability. Most people bring far more experience, judgement, and potential than is captured in a generic role description. Instead of designing the role to benefit from that talent, the system holds the role static and expects the person to adapt around it. Over time, this creates strain.

Schools are dynamic environments and new needs constantly emerge. When roles have not been clearly bounded and collectively agreed, additional responsibilities are absorbed informally. Tasks are added to the person who is capable, available, or willing. This expansion often happens quietly and without explicit acknowledgement.

This is the point at which role drift begins.

Role drift occurs when a role expands beyond its agreed boundaries without formal recognition, renegotiation, or compensation. Crucially, it continues past the point where the workload is reasonable or safe for one person to carry. At this stage, role drift is no longer just a design issue. It becomes a wellbeing risk and an ethical concern.

What makes role drift particularly harmful is that it often remains unnamed. Because the work is being done, the organisation normalises the expansion. The additional labour becomes invisible. Over time, overload, fatigue, and reduced effectiveness are misinterpreted as performance or resilience issues, when the underlying problem is ungoverned role expansion.

At the same time, the school experiences a second loss.

This loss is retention and organisational value. When roles are not intentionally shaped, capable people become worn down rather than developed. Instead of leveraging strengths, expertise, and judgement, the system relies on sustained effort. Talent is consumed rather than utilised.

Preventing this is not the responsibility of one individual.

Role design and role boundaries must be owned collectively. Leadership teams, HR, and key role interfaces need to sit together to agree what belongs within a role, what does not, and what must be resourced differently. Without this shared governance, roles drift by default.

Policies alone will not prevent this.

What protects both people and organisations is a shared capability to design roles collaboratively, communicate them transparently, and notice early when a role is expanding beyond what one person can reasonably carry.

This is why role design, role clarity, and early identification of role drift are core learning areas within Respectful Recruiter. Through the Respectful Recruiter courses, schools build the capability to design truthful roles before recruitment and govern them ethically after appointment.

Clear, governed roles protect wellbeing, strengthen trust, and allow schools to benefit from the talent they employ rather than quietly exhausting it.

If you want to build clearer, more respectful, and more effective recruitment practices in your school, learn more here

www.ethicalemployer.org/respectful-recruiter