Every business has one. They’re not the boss or the manager, but they’re the one who gets it. You know the one—you hand them a problem, and it disappears. You don’t feel like you ever need to double-check their work because they’ve earned your trust a hundred times over.
Before you know it, you’re leaning on them and routing more and more of the business through them.
On one hand, you feel you're identifying talent and giving it room to flourish. And I’ll never say that’s a bad thing.
It can, however, be dangerous. Because leaning on a handful of exceptional people isn’t the same thing as cultivating a strong team.
Hey now, you’re an all-star?
A star employee makes you faster. You can offload complexity onto them, hand them responsibility as a reward for competence, and make smart use of your time.
All-stars are awesome. I love having them on my team, if only because they feel like real partners. People you don’t have to check up on, people you can delegate to. I totally get why people lean on those few shining team members. Why wouldn’t you?
Why Relying on All-Stars Puts Your Business at Risk
Leaning on a few exceptional people is great until it isn’t. Let’s look at how it can (and does) go wrong.
You’ve baked a vulnerability into your business model. One person's competence can become the weakest point in the whole operation. What happens when that person leaves? Gets sick? Maybe they just head out on vacation, and you very quickly see how much of your business was living with them.
You lose the ability to step back. I want to make it clear that the “all-star” could be you. And if it is, how long has it been since you took a real vacation? How seriously would you ever consider exiting the business?
If so much value and success rests on one person’s judgment (including yourself), you’re going to run into trouble eventually. It’s better for the business to run on carefully crafted systems that can succeed with whoever is on the team, no matter how it changes over the years.
You cap everyone else’s potential. When you have a go-to point person for everything, when will someone else get the opportunity to shine? There are people on your team who have potential, but you might be squandering it because you already offload the bulk of your trust to someone else. You hired your team for a reason. They deserve the chance to prove you right.
You burn out the people you depend on. Carrying so much of a business without extra support or reward is exhausting. Your star employees might hide it well, but oftentimes, the people you can least afford to lose are the ones closest to walking away. They need room to breathe, too.
So…what if you’re doing this, too?
I’ve been in this spot. You might be there, too. And once you’re in this place where you’re putting so much stock in a few individuals, how do you fix it?
This is where I start.
First, we sit down and talk about their judgment calls. Tasks are easy to hand off, but executing them isn’t as simple. Here, I want to capture the reasoning driving the judgment calls. The goal is to get the thought process, the reasoning, into a shared document rather than living solely in someone’s head.
Next, I turn that documentation into a playbook. The goal is to make their thinking visible enough that someone else could follow through without a hitch.
Then I build redundancies. Cross-training is as important in business as it is in fitness. Sit in on the process, train a second person, and eliminate the need to depend solely on any one individual.
Finally, I reward the team, not just the individual. If your incentive structure only ever celebrates Superman and never the Justice League, you’ll inevitably create more situations that depend on heroics. Recognize the team effort, the individual skill sets, and don’t let one person—no matter how great—eclipse others.
The star employees you have matter. I’m not suggesting you take anything away from them. What business leaders and owners need to do, though, is build systems that don’t rely totally on these exceptional team members.
In the end, it means less stress and burnout, and a more sustainable business model.
How are you building useful redundancies into your team? Tell me about it in the comments.