Most managers worry about their lowest performers becoming a drag on the team. But some of the biggest productivity bottlenecks start at the other end of the spectrum.
High performers naturally attract work. Everyone knows they’re good at their job, so they’re trusted to make decisions and answer questions. Every time they help, however, they make the team a little more dependent on them. Eventually, everyone else’s progress depends on access to a single person.
Let’s be clear here: this isn’t a character flaw. There’s nothing wrong with employees who are generous with their time or willing to step in when others need help. The problem is a bigger, structural issue across the entire organization. Instead of establishing systems that make information and decisions accessible, the company has started routing them through the same handful of people.
You don’t need to stop your best employees from helping. You need to create a setup where they don’t need to do it all the time. When knowledge is shared and easily accessible, everyone is clear who owns what task, and work can continue without constantly waiting on a single person, your top performers can finally focus on the work that only they can do.
The myth of the indispensable employee
Companies tend to celebrate indispensable employees, but resilient businesses learn not to depend on them.
Sure, you need experts. Every team benefits from people with deep institutional knowledge or specialized skills. The problem comes from depending so heavily on that expertise that you can’t get work done without it.
Researchers refer to this as knowledge concentration, and it’s when critical information is held by too few people. Software teams have a more colorful way of describing the concept: the “bus factor,” or “the minimal number of engineers that have to be hit by a bus for a project to be stalled.”
Different terms, but the same idea. If losing one employee, even temporarily, would significantly disrupt your day-to-day operations, your company is too dependent on individual knowledge instead of shared systems.
But depending on a few key people doesn’t just impact the timeline of certain projects, it also affects your daily productivity.
According to McKinsey, knowledge workers spend almost half their workday collaborating with colleagues, customers, and partners rather than working independently. Every time an interaction requires waiting on the same person to answer a question or approve a decision, the delay ripples across the rest of the team. Work stops flowing between teammates and starts waiting in one person’s inbox.
The irony is that the more indispensable someone becomes, the less time they have to focus on the work that requires their expertise. Instead of strategic thinking, your best employees spend their days answering routine questions and reviewing other people’s work, simply because they have become the company’s source of truth.
Four signs you’ve created a human bottleneck
Your strongest employees don’t want to be the cause of a bottleneck. They’re simply experiencing the downside of being a dependable, knowledgeable coworker.
They’re responsive. They know where everything is. They catch mistakes before anything goes client-facing. Over time, more work starts going through them, because it’s almost always a guarantee of high quality.
Here are a few signs this is already happening on your team.
1. They’re invited to almost every meeting.
Take a look at your team’s calendar. Is there one person who seems to be at almost every planning meeting, kickoff, client call, and project check-in?
It definitely depends on your circumstances and team size, but most of the time, a certain individual doesn’t need to be at every meeting their colleagues attend.
2. They’re the person everyone asks first.
Every team has that person who gets messages like, “Where’s the latest version?” and “Can you take a quick look before I submit this?”
All of the requests seem innocuous enough, but they’re the work equivalent of watching your kid stand in front of the closed fridge and ask if you have any milk. The answer already exists, they just know it’s faster to ask you than look for themselves.
Those constant interruptions are a sign that your team has stopped looking for answers on their own. Either they’ve gotten too dependent on your strongest employee, or the answers they need aren’t accessible enough. On top of that, they make it hard for your strongest employee to experience any long stretches of focused work.
3. Work piles up while they’re on vacation.
Some slowdown is inevitable when experienced employees are away, especially for the projects they’re involved in. But if work comes to a standstill because a single person is out, your workflow relies too heavily on them.
4. They become the default editor for every pitch deck
Plus every proposal. Every blog post. Every marketing email.
Unless we’re talking about an actual editor in the office, no one person should be expected to guarantee perfection. Your team is shifting accountability instead of taking it upon themselves and adding unnecessary steps to their work.
How to break the cycle
Most high performers (your go-to problem-solvers and subject matter experts)won’t ask for help until they’re already overwhelmed. By that point, everyone around them has already adjusted their own workflows to depend on that person’s availability. It can be hard to break the cycle and reroute everyone’s questions, but it’s necessary if you want to keep your strongest employees and create an independent, motivated team.
Changing things up requires you to restructure how work is organized so that information, decisions, and processes don’t depend on a single person’s memory or availability. Here’s what this looks like in practice.
Start documenting answers the first time they’re offered
Too many disruptions stem from questions that have already been answered before. The average person at work is interrupted once every 2 minutes, which means you need to do all you can to limit interruptions and promote more focus time within your team.
Stop the madness by treating recurring questions as a sign that something needs to be documented. Design a space where answers can live for the whole team to access. You can have your web developer whip up a searchable knowledge base, but it also doesn’t have to be anything fancy. A Google Docs folder or Slack channel works just as well. The best format will always be the one your team defaults to.
This step doesn’t end with documentation. You may need to train your employees to seek out the information on their own instead of asking for help. If they’ve learned to default to your team expert instead of independently problem-solving, it’ll take a little time and reminding to learn new habits.
Define who owns everything
Sometimes bottlenecks are caused by uncertainty. If an employee doesn’t know who has the authority to approve a budget or make a product decision, they naturally escalate the work to the most experienced person available. In turn, that person has to make the decision, or spend their time finding out who should be involved in the process.
Clear ownership saves your high achievers from playing middleman. Before projects begin, define who is responsible for making decisions, who should be consulted, and which situations genuinely require executive approval. When it’s in writing and clearly communicated, employees are less likely to create informal approval chains that slow everyone down.
Distribute critical knowledge among several employees
We’ve all heard the stories of an entire ecosystem dependent on one key employee. An internal system coded by one engineer. A critical machine that a single facilities manager knows how to fix. A payroll specialist who understands a complicated reporting process.
It’s someone else’s funny anecdote until it becomes your unfortunate reality, and you realize an entire team depends on the knowledge of a single individual. When critical knowledge lives in one brain, every vacation, sick day, or resignation can slow you down or completely halt your progress.
To reduce that risk, you need to identify the processes that would experience the most disruption if one employee became unavailable, and start creating backup capability. Cross-train workers, rotate responsibilities, document complex workflows, and occasionally have a couple other people perform the task just to be sure they completely understand how it’s done.
Protect deep work
This wouldn’t be a RescueTime article without at least mentioning the power of deep work.
Your highest performers often do the most cognitively demanding work, but they’re also interrupted the most. These two realities don’t work well together.
Encourage your entire team to block off chunks of time where they’re unavailable for routine questions, meetings, and messages. More importantly, normalize respecting those boundaries. If someone is in a focus block, their teammates should wait until they’re available to make contact.
Protecting deep work benefits everyone, but it’s especially important for your strongest employees. The more time they spend reacting to interruptions, the less time they have for the complex, high-value work that made them your top performers in the first place.
Build a team, not a bottleneck
Most of us are all too familiar with the cliché dynamics of a high school group project: one high-achieving student naturally takes the reins, answers everyone’s questions, catches mistakes, and makes sure the final project gets turned in.
Unfortunately, it’s common for this pattern to follow us well into adulthood and the workforce. Your strongest employees still end up carrying the rest of the team, and they can quickly become overwhelmed and burnt out from the weight of the pressure.
The difference is that managers have the ability to change the system. By clarifying ownership and making knowledge accessible, you create a team that keeps moving forward without depending heavily on a single person. That’s the difference between a high-performing employee and a high-performing organization.
