--- title: "Editing a role or a circle" description: "Edit a role or a circle from its page in Structure. One dialog holds the name, purpose, domains and accountabilities, and the change travels as a governance proposal instead of landing on the chart straight away." category: structure-governance section: chart-and-circles type: Tutorial lastUpdated: 2026-08-05 locale: en canonical: https://support.talkspirit.com/en/structure-governance/how-to-edit-a-role-or-a-circle --- # Editing a role or a circle ## Editing a role or a circle You edit a role or a circle from its own page in **Structure**, where one dialog holds its name, purpose, domains and accountabilities. The change does not land on the chart when you save it. It travels as a governance proposal, and the chart only changes once that proposal is adopted. ## Who can edit In the interface, the **Edit** action appears when you are a **decision maker** of the circle concerned: - To edit a **role**, you need to be a decision maker of the circle that holds it. - To edit a **circle**, you need to be a decision maker of its **parent** circle. Being an organisation administrator is not enough on its own. An administrator who holds no decision-maker assignment in that circle sees no **Edit** action there. That gate is wider than it sounds. Every member assigned to a circle counts as a decision maker of it until someone sets them as a non-decision maker, so most circle members can already edit the roles around them. One case is out of reach: an **(invited)** role belongs to the circle that owns it. Open it from the circle it was invited into and there is no **Edit** action, because it is edited where it lives. ## Edit a role or a circle 1. Open the role or circle page from the chart, from the directory, or from a search result. 2. Click the three-dot **More actions** button in the page header, then **Edit**. ![The More actions menu open on a role page called Product Manager. Below Copy URL, Add member and Add stakeholder sits a group of four items: Edit, Mark as hiring, Move role and Extend role to a circle, with Delete last.](/images/structure-governance/how-to-edit-a-role-or-a-circle/01-role-more-actions-edit.png) 3. Change the **Name**, **Purpose**, **Domains** and **Accountabilities**. Name is a single line and Purpose is a rich-text field. Domains and accountabilities are lists: use the **Add** control under each one to create an entry, so every domain and every accountability stands on its own. 4. Optionally, fill in the reason field at the bottom, labelled **Reason** on a circle and **Why do you want to edit this role?** on a role. It is carried on the proposal for circle members to read. 5. Choose how the change travels, using the buttons at the bottom of the dialog. ![The Edit role dialog for the Product Manager role in the Product Development circle. It holds a required Name field, a Purpose field, a Domains list with one entry, an Accountabilities list with four entries, and an optional reason field. The footer offers Cancel, a Save as proposal button with a chevron beside it, and Submit for review.](/images/structure-governance/how-to-edit-a-role-or-a-circle/02-edit-role-dialog.png) You can also start from the field itself. On the **General** tab, hover **Purpose**, **Domains** or **Accountabilities** and click **Propose changes**. The same dialog opens: on a circle it scrolls to the section you clicked, on a role it opens at the top. > **Note:** An administrator can rename or hide **Purpose**, **Domains** and **Accountabilities** for the whole organisation, so your dialog may use other words or show fewer fields. ## How the change travels The dialog offers three ways out: - **Submit for review** creates the proposal and submits it to the circle in one step. The button reads **Validate** instead in a circle that sets its own auto-validation delay, but it does the same thing. - **Save as proposal** keeps it as a draft. Use this when the reorganisation needs more than one change: you land on the proposal page and can add further changes before submitting. A draft is the only place the change itself can still be reworked, so check the wording before you submit: see [Submitting and tracking a proposal](/structure-governance/how-to-submit-and-track-a-proposal). - **Add to a proposal**, in the arrow beside **Save as proposal**, attaches the change to one of your existing drafts for the same circle. All three take you to the proposal, never to a changed chart. What happens next depends on your organisation's **Proposal adoption** setting: proposals are adopted manually by someone in the circle, immediately on submission, or through a review period that closes with no objection. Administrators set this in **Structure settings** > **General** > **Decision settings**, and a circle can override it in its own settings. On the review-period setting, a circle with only one decision maker skips the wait, because there is nobody left to object. Two cases apply the change the moment you press the button, and one only looks as though it does: - **The top-level circle**, the one with no circle above it, has no parent circle to propose to. Editing it is direct, and its dialog ends in **Save**: see [Editing the top-level circle](/structure-governance/edit-the-top-level-circle). - A circle whose governance change mode is set to **Direct modification** still records a proposal, but adopts it on submission, so the chart changes at once. - **Architect mode**, which administrators switch on from **Explore organisation** to edit the structure directly, is paused on the full role and circle pages. The proposal route still applies there. ## What this dialog does not cover - **Custom fields and governance fields** have their own rules: see [Managing Custom Fields for Roles and Circles](/structure-governance/manage-custom-fields-for-roles-and-circles) and [Editing governance fields for roles and circles](/structure-governance/how-to-edit-core-and-custom-governance-fields-for-roles-and-circles). - **Attachments** are added on the **Attachments** tab and take effect at once: see [Adding attachments to roles and circles](/structure-governance/adding-attachments-to-roles-and-circles). - **Members** are managed on the **Members** tab, not here. - **Policies** are documents rather than fields: see [Adding or editing a policy](/structure-governance/how-to-add-or-edit-a-policy). - **Moving** a role or circle, and **turning** a role into a circle, are separate actions in the same **More actions** menu (**Move role** and **Extend role to a circle**). - **Role templates** are edited from **Structure settings**, not from a role. Pushing a template's wording onto the roles it created is an administrator action: see [Role Templates Overview](/structure-governance/role-templates-overview). - **Editing during a meeting** goes through a proposal on the agenda item: see [Restructuring a sub-circle in a governance meeting](/structure-governance/how-to-restructure-a-circle-in-governance-meetings). ## What's Next? - [Moving a role or circle to another circle](/structure-governance/how-to-move-a-role-or-circle-from-one-circle-to-another) - [Transforming a role into a circle, or a circle back into a role](/structure-governance/how-to-transform-a-role-into-a-circle-and-back) - [Creating a proposal](/structure-governance/how-to-create-a-proposal) - [Deleting a role or a circle](/structure-governance/how-to-delete-a-role-or-a-circle)