There is a strange compliment we give people at work: “We couldn’t do this without you.” It sounds like recognition, and sometimes it is. But when I hear it inside an organisation, part of me also wonders: why couldn’t we?
Some of the most capable people I have worked with become indispensable almost accidentally. They know where everything sits, remember why a decision was made six months ago, know which stakeholder needs a phone call instead of an email, and can rescue a project when it goes off track. When something breaks, everyone knows exactly whom to call.
These people are enormously valuable. But there is a difference between having exceptional people and building a company that depends on exceptional people to function. The first is a competitive advantage. The second is an operational weakness.
As companies grow, this distinction becomes increasingly important. In the early days of a business, dependence on individuals is almost unavoidable. There are too few people and too many things to do. Knowledge lives in heads, processes are mostly conversations, the founder might approve every important decision, and one employee might know the entire history of a product, customer or system. At that stage, people are the infrastructure.
But eventually, the company has to grow out of it, because the very qualities that make your best people exceptional can quietly hide weaknesses in the organisation. A brilliant operator compensates for a bad process. A highly responsible manager compensates for unclear ownership. A long-serving employee compensates for poor documentation. A great relationship-builder compensates for the absence of institutional trust.
And because the work keeps getting done, nobody feels an urgent need to fix what sits underneath it. Until that person goes on leave, resigns, gets promoted, or simply becomes responsible for ten times more than they were responsible for before. Then suddenly the organisation discovers how much of its operating system was actually a human being.
I have increasingly come to believe that one of the responsibilities of a strong leader is to make themselves progressively less operationally necessary. Not less valuable, but less necessary. There is a difference.
Your value should increasingly come from judgement, direction, ideas, standards and the ability to make the organisation better. It should not come from being the only person who knows how something works.
The same principle applies to teams. If a department performs beautifully when its head is present and becomes chaotic when they disappear for two weeks, I would question whether that department is actually high-performing. Perhaps the leader is. The department isn’t. Yet.
The work of scaling is therefore partly the work of converting individual capability into organisational capability. What does this person know that the company should know? What do they repeatedly solve that should no longer require solving? Which decisions come to them that someone else should be able to make? Which relationships belong to the institution and which still belong primarily to the individual? Which recurring problems are being solved through effort instead of design?
This is where processes, documentation, systems, dashboards, decision rights, automation and strong second lines become far more interesting than they sound. They are not administrative work. They are how a company captures excellence and makes it repeatable.
The goal is also not to process every inch of human judgement out of an organisation. That creates a different kind of mediocrity. Great companies still need extraordinary people. They simply use extraordinary people for extraordinary problems, not for remembering where a spreadsheet lives.
And perhaps that is the better compliment to give your best people. Not “We couldn’t do this without you,” but “What you built continues to work without you.”
That is when individual excellence has become institutional strength.