Joe DownsCEO & Co-Founder, Belrose Storage Group. Founder, Storage Moguls.

Why You Need to Define Roles, Not Personalities

20 Jul 2026 · 1 min

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Organizations should design roles around the work that needs doing, not around the people they happen to have. Most companies do it backwards, naming positions after individuals and fitting responsibilities to their skills instead of defining the job first and finding the right person for it.

You're not defining roles for your current team and personalities. When you do your org chart, you are calling it an acquisition manager, a CFO, a broker, a marketing expert. You're not calling it Joe, Tim, you know, et cetera, right? You're not building roles. A lot of people, including ourselves, built roles for what we already had, and then we were fitting roles into our— what we're skill sets, if that makes sense. Like, we did it reverse.