Through the Founder’s Lens: The Competent Person Trap

Most workplaces have at least one person who seems to know how everything actually works.

They know which process to follow, but more importantly, they know what to do when the process doesn’t work. They know who to call, where the information is hidden, which system talks to which system and the workaround for that strange little problem that seems to happen every third Tuesday of the month.

They are experienced, capable and resourceful, and over time they become the person people naturally turn to when something needs to be sorted out.

There is nothing particularly unusual about that. Experience creates knowledge, and good people become trusted for a reason. But there is another side to competence that we don’t talk about quite as often.

Competent people can make dysfunctional systems look functional.

When the workaround starts working too well

We tend to think a broken process will look broken. Something will stop, a deadline will be missed, someone will complain and eventually the problem will become visible enough that we have to do something about it.

Except workplaces don’t always work like that.

A process can be poorly designed, responsibilities can be unclear, information can be scattered and systems can be unnecessarily complicated, yet the work continues to get done. Not because the system is particularly good, but because someone within it has become exceptionally good at navigating its flaws.

They remember the step that isn’t written down. They know the person who needs to be copied into the email even though nobody really knows why. They notice when something has been missed and quietly fix it before it becomes a problem. When two processes don’t quite connect, they become the bridge between them.

Eventually, the workaround becomes so effective that nobody sees it as a workaround anymore.

From the outside, everything appears to be functioning exactly as it should. The report arrives, the customer gets an answer, the deadline is met and the problem is solved.

There is very little reason to question a process that appears to be producing the right outcome.

The question is whether the process is actually producing the outcome at all. The person may be.

When competence becomes part of the infrastructure

This is where I think the competent person trap becomes much more interesting than simply giving capable people too much work.

Over time, organisations can unknowingly build processes around the capability of particular individuals. Knowledge that should exist within a team lives inside someone’s head. Gaps that should have been addressed become manageable because someone knows how to compensate for them. Responsibilities that were never particularly clear remain unclear because everyone knows who will eventually pick them up.

Nobody deliberately designed it that way. In fact, it often happens because everyone involved is trying to be helpful.

The capable person sees a problem and solves it. Their manager trusts them to handle it. Their colleagues learn that if they get stuck, this person will know what to do. The organisation sees the work continuing to flow and reasonably assumes the process is working.

Each individual decision makes sense. Collectively, however, they can create a surprisingly fragile system.

The organisation hasn’t built capability. It has built dependency and mistaken the two for the same thing.

The annual leave test

Annual leave has an amusing way of exposing this.

Someone who has been quietly holding together a particular process disappears for two weeks and suddenly the questions begin.

Who normally does this? Where does that information come from? Who has access to that system? Why do we send this report to Finance? Has anyone heard back from the supplier? And eventually, the sentence that should probably make every leader slightly uncomfortable: “Does anyone know how Sarah does this?”

Meanwhile, Sarah is hopefully somewhere near a pool with a cocktail, completely unaware that three people are currently attempting to reverse-engineer her job.

It is easy to look at that situation as evidence of how valuable Sarah is, and of course she is valuable. But it also tells us something about the organisation around her.

If ordinary work becomes unexpectedly difficult because one person isn’t available, their absence has exposed something their presence was allowing us to overlook. What looked like organisational capability was, at least in part, individual dependency.

What are your capable people compensating for?

We talk a lot about retaining good people, sharing knowledge and succession planning, and all of those things matter. There are other questions worth asking while those people are still sitting comfortably at their desks.

What are they compensating for? Where are they repeatedly stepping in because something else isn’t working particularly well? What knowledge exists only because they remember it? What processes rely on their judgement, relationships or workarounds to function? And if they stopped quietly filling those gaps tomorrow, what would suddenly become visible?

This isn’t about documenting every human thought into a procedure or making people interchangeable. Organisations need experience, judgement and people who know their craft. There will always be individuals whose knowledge makes things work better.

The difference is whether their competence strengthens the system or quietly substitutes for one.

Because sometimes the greatest risk isn’t that your most capable people will leave. It’s discovering how much of the organisation was quietly being held together by them when they do.

Capable people should strengthen systems. They shouldn’t have to become the system.

Warmest,

KL