#3 — Navigating Split Professional Roles

Most professional roles have clear boundaries: one job, one team, one organization. But some roles are deliberately designed to cross those lines, splitting a person’s time and focus between two distinct groups. That raises immediate logistical questions. How do you manage competing priorities? Is it possible to give your full attention to two different managers, two different missions? Or does this structure create an advantage? Today we hear from two people whose jobs are set up this way. James Shelley works between two departments at Western University, while Lilian Toma divides her time between the university and a partner organization, the McCormick Care Group. They find that insights from one role often solve problems in the other. And that the most effective work occurs in the overlap, where a single effort serves both sides. It’s a different model for collaboration, built into the job description itself. We're exploring what it takes to succeed when navigating split professional roles. I currently work as the AI in Research Facilitator for Western Research at Western University. And at the same time, I also work as a knowledge mobilization specialist in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Western University. And I am Lilian Toma, and I am a Research and Knowledge Mobilization Coordinator in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Western. I have a shared role as well. I spend half my time at Western University, and then half my time at McCormick Care Group, which is a long-term care home that we have an MOU with and support their research program. So James, what do you enjoy the most about having a split role? I think that having a split role is often really valuable because it breaks you out of the maybe not the the monotony, but the cycle of of what's happening in one role. So maybe it's sometimes a you're a little bit a little bit less likely to get stuck doing the same thing over and over and over again, because often the way just by being in nature of two roles, you have kind of more signals that are coming across your radar, and that informs the way you look at both of them and I think that keeps both of them more dynamic. How about you? Yeah, I would agree with I would agree with that, and I think sometimes I think sometimes the things that you're doing in one of the roles can actually help you with the other one. There's been times like that with working at Western where there's like a process or something that I learn about here that I can apply at McCormick, which is great. So it kind of breaks you out of the the box of that one specific role and what has been done before, and you're kind of thinking outside of that and bringing other ideas and processes, which is helpful. But when you're working on two teams at the same time, I you're kind of you're always translating a little bit between them because I mean different teams do things in different ways, and how decisions get made on different teams get made in different ways, and how processes work are different. And so yeah, you're you're never you're never stuck assuming that the way things are about the way a team works is the way all teams work. Because you always see a another example all the way through. Yeah, and I I find the things that I'm often able to move the best on or the fastest on are the things that like they might be divided on paper, but in like the actuality of the real world, they're serving both efforts and and like in the real world and split roles like ours, I think it's sometimes hard to say like this is all about this role and all about that role because in both of our roles like if if each one of our roles were either side of the Venn diagram, like they do have significant overlap in the middle, right? And and that moving something forward for one is inherently or not inherently, directly or indirectly moving something forward for the other one too. I I feel like the most motivating portions of the work is when you when you see the connection with with both organizations and you know that you're helping like both both parts of the role. I definitely agree that things like things can move faster, and you can dedicate your time without overthinking about how much time you're spending on either or because you know that it's beneficial for both of them. I think most days I don't feel like I'm necessarily focusing on one at the exclusion of the other. Um there's very little in either role that if done well, would not support the other unit. So yeah, it's I feel like I could just kind of waste more energy trying to keep them separated than just doing the the things, you know? So the counterintuitive part of a split role is that success doesn't come from keeping the two jobs perfectly separate. According to James Shelley and Lilian Toma, the focus shifts. It's less about dividing your hours and more about finding the common ground where one action can benefit both organizations. That space is where a new process from one team can be transferred to the other, or where a project serves a shared goal. When that happens, the need to track which role is getting which portion of your time can fade, replaced by a focus on the shared objective itself. That's it for today on FHS TestPod.