A reliable person usually takes over work that has fallen between poorly defined roles. The company then appears to function and management has little reason to repair the process. Individual performance can thus become a substitute for systemic management. A warning sign is not only overtime but also the number of informal exceptions that depend on a single employee.
A high-performing employee resolves unclear responsibility, fills in missing controls and takes over a task that nobody else can manage. In the short term, this protects the result. At the same time, however, management stops seeing that the work depends on improvisation rather than a functioning process.
The more often an employee rescues the system, the more additional tasks they receive. The organization begins to interpret exceptional effort as normal capacity. The result is operational dependence on a few people, difficult substitution and a high risk of burnout.
An audit should therefore not look only at who meets targets. For key outcomes, the company should determine how many manual interventions, reminders and informal agreements were required to achieve them. Equally important is the question of what would happen if the most reliable employee were absent for a month.
Incentives can also be problematic. A company cannot credibly talk about healthy performance if its rewards mainly celebrate constant availability and a willingness not to take vacation. Management also needs to value knowledge transfer, elimination of recurring errors and the creation of backup capacity.
KEY TERMS
- Organizational debt: Unresolved weaknesses in processes and roles that the company works around through manual effort.
- Key-person dependency: A situation in which an important outcome depends on a single person.
- Invisible work: Fixes, coordination and interventions that are not captured in the official process.
- Substitutability: The ability to continue the work without a particular employee.