The Suitcase Problem

Think of the one person in your organisation you genuinely couldn't afford to lose. Now the harder question. Why is that true? There are two very different answers, and from the outside they look identical. One is real strength: a person who's made everyone around them better. The other is the most expensive kind of fragility there is, and almost nobody sees it until the person has gone. WHAT YOU'LL TAKE AWAY The line: If a capability lives in one person, you don't own it. You're renting it, until the day they leave. The tell: When your best person leaves, does the capability stay, or does it walk out with them? The question: If your three best people left this quarter, what would still be standing on Monday? Name it, or admit you were renting it. Years ago I joined a business and did the sensible thing. I put my attention where the numbers were red, and left alone the one part that was working. What I didn't weigh was whose results those were. They were his, run out of his own head, never once built into the team around him. Then he left, and the whole function fell off a cliff. The capability I'd trusted had his name on it, not the company's. It walked out in his suitcase, because it had never lived anywhere but in him. Nobody decides to become dependent. You wake up one day and a whole function is one person. The single-point-of-failure audit from this episode is in the written version: https://www.builttoabsorb.com/p/the-suitcase-problem New episode every Wednesday. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.builttoabsorb.com