This week’s episode is about the person your organisation can’t afford to lose, and why that can be either your greatest strength or your most expensive fragility. If you’ve watched or listened, you have the story and the argument. I won’t repeat them here.
This issue does two things the episode doesn’t. It takes on the best objection to the argument. And it gives you an audit you can run this week to find your own single points of failure, without waiting for anyone to resign.
The objection
The fair challenge goes like this. Some capability can’t be moved out of a person. Judgement. Relationships. The feel for when a number looks wrong. You can’t write that into a process, and if you try to turn your best person into a manual, you’ll probably lose them.
I agree with most of that. Judgement doesn’t transfer through documents. Nobody learns to make a hard call by reading how someone else made one. A handover file is useful, but it’s the least important part of the handover.
Judgement transfers through reps. Other people making the call, getting some of them wrong, and having those calls reviewed by someone who knows what good looks like. That’s how your best person learnt it in the first place. Nobody handed them a manual either.
That’s the part organisations skip. Not the writing down. The handing over of real decisions while the expert is still in the building to check them. It feels slower, because for a while it is. The expert would have made the call faster and better. But every decision they make themselves is a rep someone else didn’t get.
Wait until they leave and you still need the reps. You just pay full price for them, with nobody left to review.
So the useful question isn’t whether your star’s judgement can be written down. It’s how many of their decisions someone else made last month.
The audit: where are you renting?
Take the five capabilities your results depend on most. Not job titles. Things the organisation has to be able to do. For example: pricing the big deals, keeping the key regulator onside, or fixing the system when it breaks at month end.
For each one, write down every person who has made that call themselves in the last three months. Not watched it. Not prepared the slides for it. Made it.
Then look for four signs that the real number is lower than you think.
The leave test. The last time that person was away for two weeks, which decisions waited for them to come back? Nobody calls that a dependency. It gets called a busy fortnight.
The escalation thread. Whose name is copied on every difficult email about it, even when they aren’t the one deciding?
The private asset. The model only one person updates. The relationship where only one person has the number. The checklist that lives in one notebook.
The one-way review. Other people do the work, but it always goes back to the same person to approve, and never the other way round.
Now score each capability by the names left standing.
Two or more: you own it.
One: you’re renting it, through a person.
Zero: it has already gone, and nobody has noticed yet.
Then start with the capability that scores lowest and matters most. Pick one decision the expert makes this month and give it to someone else, with the expert reviewing. Not a shadowing arrangement. The other person makes the call, and the expert checks it afterwards.
Do that once a month and the score moves. Leave it, and the score only moves the day someone hands in their notice.
The line to remember
If a capability lives in one person, you don’t own it. You’re renting it, until the day they leave.
Watch or listen
The full episode is at the top of this post. It opens with a question about the person you can’t afford to lose, and it’s the one I find hardest to tell, because I’m the one who left the working part alone.
You can also listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or watch on YouTube.
If you run the audit, reply and tell me how many of your five scored one or lower.
Built to Absorb. One problem, one fix, every week.
