The concept: To expand your experience and value as an employee, job redefinition is a strategic variation on changing jobs that can help with surviving layoffs. It also is a route to increased job satisfaction while staying in place.
The rationale: Broadening your experience across job functions will enhance your worth. This is particularly true in Wall Street firms, where relatively thin staffing in Support functions places a premium on the ability to multitask across disciplines.
How to: You must demonstrate to your superior(s) that your proposed changes to your responsibilities and priorities will render a net benefit to the firm, their organization and themselves. An especially ripe situation for such job redefinition is a "matrix reporting" arrangement, one in which you have more than one boss. For example, you are a divisional controller who has a "solid line" (primary) reporting relationship to the corporate controller and a "dotted line" (secondary) reporting relationship was to a divisional president. Odds are that the divisional president would like to see you concentrate on a different set of priorities than the divisional controller. If such a shift in focus is appealing, you need to enlist the former as an ally and advocate for the change, while assuring the latter that the influence of his own organization will expand as a result.
Caveats: Serving two masters, as in a matrix reporting situation, is always a difficult balancing act. In bureaucratic, rule-bound companies, deviating from your formal job responsibilities based on purely verbal assurances can be risky for you politically, especially if anything goes wrong.
