Your highest-performing employees may also be your most expensive workaround.

The observation

In many operations the process only functions because two or three people know how to get things unstuck. They are praised for it, which makes the underlying gap look like a strength.

Why it happens

Capable people close gaps instinctively, so the gap never produces a visible failure.

Leaders see the outcome rather than the effort behind it, and the workaround becomes the operating model.

What it may be costing

• Key-person risk concentrated in the people you can least afford to lose.
• Senior capability spent on coordination rather than judgment.
• Improvement priorities based on a system that appears to work.

What I would look at

1. 01Identify the people others go to when something stalls, and list what they actually do.
2. 02Separate the parts that require their expertise from the parts that require only their knowledge of who to ask.
3. 03Turn the second category into process, routing or automation.