“Don’t lean back in your chair!”

In high school, I heard this everywhere. At home and at school. But I leaned back anyway. Sometimes I got creative and lifted three legs off the floor, balancing only on one.

I felt balanced.

But given enough time, I’d eventually fall over.

Because I was a knucklehead and had a high tolerance for dumb, I thought it was funny. And I’d do it all over again.

There’s a business version of balancing on one leg of your chair.

But you aren’t a knucklehead like me

When things feel steady at work, it is easy to assume everything is stable and solid. In fact, many teams and organizations are built balancing on a single leg, a single point of failure.

How can a strong performer set you up for a fall?

Everyone is looking for “A” players. They are hard to find. And when you do find them, it’s easy to ask a lot from them. It is easy to start giving them more and more responsibility.

Especially if they seem open to it.

The problem is this: The leader, then the system, can become dependent on that one employee:

• The engineer that is the magic behind your R&D department
• The doctor that draws all the patients
• The salesperson who is responsible for 80% of your sales
• The financial wizard who builds the proprietary system for doing your accounting

I think you get my point.

When you find that person, they are unlikely to try to set you up to fail. But the conditions for failure are built, little by little, over time. Trust me, I’ve seen this happen many times.

It can happen like this:

• Critical work tends to be delegated to that one person.
• Other people aren’t allowed to practice, gain experience, or grow.
• Normal SOPs or processes aren’t developed because your wunderkind has their own way of making the magic happen.
• The employee is incentivized to carry an unsustainable or nontransferable amount of responsibility.

This person may be entirely trustworthy, reliable, and do great work. It’s that too much knowledge, skill, or performance is concentrated in one person instead of the organization.

Too many relationships may be tied to one person. There may be an overreliance on one person for their judgment or decision-making. Or a dependency on one person to actually deliver for your customers.

These are all signs of a single point of failure.

And, while less common, some high performers do ‘hijack’ your trust or dependency. With clients, this has looked like:

• A controller who had built a proprietary accounting system. No one could understand or access the financials without talking to them.
• A salesperson who generated 80% of the sales and owned the client relationships.
• A very competent executive manager who had built a loyal team but threatened to leave with that team if confronted.
• A technical wizard who threatened to take both the team and clients.

Why does this happen?

• Urgency: Leaders experience urgency as stress and look to alleviate immediate pressure. This leads to a preference for reliable, fast solutions rather than slower ones that build organizational capacity.
• Short-term focus: This is manufactured urgency. Incentives or institutional habits focus on short time frames that require quick, reliable solutions.
• Unclear roles & responsibilities: No one really knows whom to go to for solutions or answers, so they default to the one person who seems to understand ‘how things really work around here.’
• Low psychological safety: Team members don’t feel it is safe to make independent decisions, to be innovative, or to make suggestions. So they tend to default to the one ‘expert’ who is comfortable.
• Thin staffing: There aren’t enough people to cross-train or build redundancies within the organization.
• Highly independent work: Due to the nature of their work, some high performers work very autonomously. As a result, others can’t easily learn from them.

It’s great to have high performers

It is good to have good people on your team. Attract them. Recruit them. Retain them.

But don’t be a knucklehead like me. Don’t balance everything on one of them. You don’t want to tip over.

Instead, consider what might go wrong if that person didn’t come back to work. Start building the capacities you need so that strength and ability are shared across your organization.

That builds the stability you are really looking for.

Take good care,

Christian

P.S. Did someone on your team come to mind as you read this? If so, it may be worth looking at how dependent the business is on that person.