Roles

Roles are the building blocks of your organization in Rolebase. A role captures a clear area of responsibility: why it exists, what it decides on, and what it is expected to deliver. Rather than fixed job titles, you describe the work itself, then assign one or more people to carry it out.

As your organization grows, roles nest inside one another to form your whole org chart, giving everyone a shared, always up-to-date picture of who does what. This page explains how roles work and the options you can use to shape them.

The Unified Model

In Holacracy or Sociocracy, the organizational structure is typically divided into two distinct concepts: circles (teams) and roles (individual responsibilities). In Rolebase, these two concepts are merged into one: the role.

A role can be a simple individual responsibility, or it can contain other roles. When it does, it acts as what traditional frameworks would call a “circle”. You can therefore use the terms “circle” and “role” interchangeably in Rolebase.

In the org chart below, “Product” is a role that contains the “Design” and “Engineering” roles, so it acts as a circle. Each role can hold members. To represent a role within its parent (what Holacracy calls a “Lead Link”), you add a sub-role with the “Represents its parent role” option enabled.

This unified approach gives you maximum flexibility: any role can become a circle at any time by adding sub-roles to it, without needing to convert or restructure anything.

Role Properties

Every role has the following properties:

Property	Description
Purpose	Why this role exists, its mission or reason for being
Domain	What this role has exclusive authority over
Accountabilities	Ongoing activities the role is expected to perform
Checklist	Recurring items to review (used in meetings)
Indicators	Metrics and key performance indicators to track
Notes	Free-form notes and documentation

These properties are the same whether the role is a simple individual role or a role acting as a circle (containing sub-roles).

Creating a Role

1. Navigate to the parent role where you want to create the new role.
2. Click the Add button and select Role.
3. Give it a name and optionally fill in the purpose, domain, and accountabilities.
4. The new role appears as a sub-role in the org chart.

A role that contains sub-roles is displayed as a circle in the org chart, while a leaf role (with no children) is displayed as a simple role.

Nesting: How Circles Emerge

Since a circle is just a role with sub-roles, the organizational hierarchy is built naturally by nesting roles:

Organization (top-level role)
├── Product (role with sub-roles = circle)
│   ├── Design (leaf role)
│   ├── Engineering (role with sub-roles = circle)
│   │   ├── Frontend (leaf role)
│   │   └── Backend (leaf role)
│   └── QA (leaf role)
├── Marketing (role with sub-roles = circle)
│   ├── Content (leaf role)
│   └── Social Media (leaf role)
└── Operations (leaf role)

Base Roles

A base role is a predefined role you can reuse in several places in the org chart. Base roles are not assigned automatically: they give a shared definition (purpose, domain, accountabilities) and let you quickly create an instance wherever you need it. Editing a base role updates every place where it is used.

This is handy for recurring roles, for example the Holacracy roles (Lead Link, Rep Link, Secretary, Facilitator) or sociocracy roles.

Role Generation with AI

Rolebase can generate role suggestions using AI. Based on the parent role’s purpose and context, the AI proposes sub-roles with pre-filled purpose, domain, and accountabilities. You can review and edit the suggestions before accepting them.

Members

Members are assigned to a role directly. When a role contains sub-roles (acts as a circle), a person who holds any sub-role is also considered a member of the parent role.

Representing a role in its parent

Rolebase has no built-in “leader”. Instead, you enable the “Represents its parent role” option on a role: its members then represent that role within its parent and gain governance authority over it. This is how you model Holacracy’s Lead Link and Rep Link (in French, Premier lien and Second lien), or any representative or coordinator role you need.

Invited roles

You can invite a role into another role to enable cross-functional collaboration between roles that are not in a direct parent-child relationship. A member of the invited role can then take part in the host role’s governance and operations. (This corresponds to a link in Holacracy.)

This is useful for:

• Cross-team coordination.
• Shared services or platform teams.
• Temporary project groups that span multiple roles.

Privacy Settings

Roles can be marked as private. A private role and its contents (sub-roles, meetings, threads, tasks) are only visible to members of that role. This is useful for sensitive topics like HR or finance.

Archiving a Role

When a role is no longer needed, archive it from its actions menu. Archiving preserves the full history rather than erasing anything: the role and everything nested under it (sub-roles, members, invited roles, meetings, recurring meetings, topics, tasks and decisions) are archived together in a single action.

Next Steps

• Add members to your roles and assign them responsibilities.
• Run meetings within your roles.
• Create tasks and threads to coordinate work.