Roles make cooperation easier until they begin replacing curiosity about the people inside them.

Roles are a shortcut that mostly works. Knowing someone is the nurse, the treasurer, the neighbour who deals with the bins lets you act without negotiating everything from scratch, and that efficiency is genuinely useful. The cost appears slowly, when the shortcut becomes the whole picture and you stop wondering what the person thinks, wants or is going through. Cooperation continues and acquaintance quietly stops.

Choose one person you deal with only through their function and ask them something unrelated to it this week. One question is usually enough to remind both of you that there is somebody in there.