Your best people might be hiding the fractures in your processes

There is a particular stage of growth where a business can look considerably healthier from the outside than it feels to the people operating within it.

I've seen versions of this most frequently in sales-led businesses with headcounts of 50 to 150 people. Revenue is growing, the company is hiring and there are some genuinely excellent people producing excellent results. Viewed at the senior leadership-team level, there is no obvious crisis to solve. Spend a little more time with the people actually responsible for delivering those results, though, and the experience can sound rather different. New hires take longer than expected to become genuinely productive. Managers complain (often to peers rather than anyone who could take action) that they don't have enough time to manage because they're constantly answering questions or getting pulled into deals. The same handful of experienced people appear whenever something difficult needs fixing, in some cases the founder or Sales Director is still involved in decisions they thought they had delegated two years ago.

I recently worked with one business where a senior leader described the experience as feeling like they were “constantly rescuing the number”. The interesting thing was that the number didn't particularly look as though it needed rescuing. That was precisely the point. The business was performing because several very capable people had become extremely good at compensating for the things around them that didn't work quite as well as they should.

The initial conversation was about onboarding. New people weren't getting up to speed quickly enough, so the instinctive answer was to improve the training they received when they joined. There was certainly work to do there, but it became apparent fairly quickly that onboarding was only where the problem was most visible. What the business actually had was an enormous amount of knowledge, judgement and good practice concentrated in a relatively small number of people, with no particularly reliable way of transferring it to everybody else.

That's a very different problem.

When the good things your people do make your underdeveloped systems appear to be operating well

None of this is an argument against having exceptional people. Quite the opposite. O'Boyle and Aguinis (2012), in research covering 633,263 performers across a range of fields, found that individual performance was much more heavily concentrated among exceptional performers than a conventional bell curve would suggest.1 A relatively small number of people really can account for a disproportionate amount of the performance we see.

Anyone who has run a sales team is unlikely to find this basic idea shocking, although we should be careful about pretending that research across sport, entertainment, academia and politics automatically tells us how a particular B2B sales team will behave. What it gives us is a useful starting point: averages can hide just how important exceptional individual performance really is.

The difficulty is distinguishing between two situations that can look remarkably similar in the numbers. In one business, the best people are performing exceptionally well within a system that helps everyone perform. In another, the best people are performing exceptionally well partly because they have learned how to work around the system.

That second group often does far more than appears in their job description. They know which parts of the official process matter and which parts everybody quietly ignores. They know who to call when something needs to happen quickly, which client signal should be taken seriously, when an opportunity needs senior intervention and when a new starter is about to make a mistake they haven't yet learned to recognise. They answer questions, check work, rescue conversations and provide the context that isn't written down anywhere because, after several years in the business, it all feels completely obvious to them.

This is one of the problems with expertise; eventually for the expert quite a lot of how their time is spent ceases to feel like they are the expert. Instead they feel as an asset milked dry, and still with a queue of thirsty folks clamouring for their teat.

Hadjimichael and Tsoukas (2019), reviewing the literature on tacit knowledge in organisations, describe knowledge that people draw upon in practice but can find difficult to bring into conscious awareness or express in language.2 An experienced salesperson doesn't necessarily walk around consciously processing the hundreds of small judgements they've learned to make. They notice something about an opportunity, a client or a conversation because experience has taught them what to notice.

That makes expertise extraordinarily useful, but also surprisingly difficult to transfer. A process document can tell somebody what to do. It is considerably harder to document the judgement that tells an experienced person when the normal process doesn't quite apply.

At at headcount of 30, somebody asks across the office and gets an answer. At 60, they message the person who knows. At 100, that person has a queue.

Eventually, expertise becomes a bottleneck.

What happens when the person who ‘just knows’ isn't there?

A useful way of exposing this is to think about the people whose absence changes how the business operates.

Take one of your genuinely exceptional performers and imagine they're unavailable for four weeks. Properly unavailable, rather than the current version of a holiday where they're lying beside a swimming pool in Spain replying to Teams messages because apparently we've decided that's normal.

What happens to everybody else?

I'm less interested in the fact that their own output disappears. Of course it does. The more revealing question is what happens around them. Which decisions suddenly take longer? Which deals need escalating somewhere else? Who loses the person they informally check things with? Which part of the documented process turns out to have an undocumented second half that only three people understand?

There is an interesting example of this dynamic in Chen and Garg's (2018) research into NBA teams. They examined temporary absences of star players and found that, under certain conditions, the disruption encouraged teams to search for alternative ways of coordinating their work, with benefits that could persist after the star returned.3 A professional basketball team is obviously operates very differently to a B2B sales organisation, but the mechanism is useful to think about: when a system has gradually organised itself around an exceptional individual, temporarily removing that individual can expose dependencies that were previously difficult to see.

I've seen something similar, in a much more mundane form, inside growing businesses. A manager takes leave and suddenly it becomes apparent that they were personally checking almost every significant piece of work before it reached a client. A top salesperson moves on and the team doesn't simply lose their revenue; several less experienced people lose the person they had been using as an unofficial coach. An experienced operator gets promoted and the business discovers that a process everyone believed was documented fully actually relied on them knowing when not to follow it.

Those aren't necessarily purely succession problems; they're also clues about where organisational capability really lives.

This is why I think the question “What would happen if Sarah left?” is often asked too narrowly. It tends to lead immediately to conversations about retention, succession or finding another Sarah. All of those may matter, but there is a more useful question to ask first: how much of the value Sarah creates belongs uniquely to Sarah, and how much should the business have learned from her by now?

You don't need another Sarah

The obvious temptation is to study the best performers, document what they do and tell everybody else to copy it. That sounds sensible until you look closely at what expertise actually consists of.

Your best salesperson may have fifteen years of accumulated market knowledge, an unusually good memory for people, established client relationships and the sort of judgement that comes from having got things wrong hundreds of times without the business collapsing. Your best manager may be naturally good at reading a conversation, know when somebody needs challenge rather than reassurance and have enough credibility with the team to say things that would land very differently coming from somebody else.

We aren't going to turn a new hire into either of them with a twelve-module learning pathway and a knowledge library. But that doesn't mean there is nothing to transfer. The useful work is separating what is genuinely individual from what the organisation could reasonably make easier for other people to learn.

Perhaps your best salesperson qualifies opportunities differently, in which case that can be surfaced and practised during onboarding. Perhaps experienced managers are all asking similar questions when they coach, in which case those questions can become part of a more consistent coaching rhythm. Perhaps people repeatedly interrupt the same senior colleague for the same information, in which case the answer may be better performance support at the point of need. Maybe a critical process contains several judgement calls that can't sensibly be reduced to a checklist, in which case people need exposure, practice and feedback rather than yet another document telling them what the process is.

Technology can help with some of this. So can an LMS or LXP. So can better onboarding, manager development, coaching, process design and, increasingly, AI. None of those things is the answer in isolation, because the interesting question comes before the solution: what capability are we actually trying to make more transferable?

That distinction matters. Buying a learning platform because knowledge is scattered across the business is a technology purchase. Understanding what people need to know, when they need it, how they use it and which parts of expertise require practice rather than access to information is capability design. The platform may eventually be part of the answer, but it shouldn't be where the thinking starts.

The same applies to onboarding. If new starters are struggling because they can't access the judgement currently sitting inside experienced colleagues, making the induction programme more polished may improve the experience without materially shortening the route to competence. If managers spend their lives rescuing people rather than developing them, another coaching workshop won't necessarily alter what happens on Monday morning unless the way coaching fits into the work changes too.

The intervention follows the diagnosis, not the other way round.

Growth has a habit of exposing the difference

Small businesses can run on informal capability transfer remarkably effectively. People are close enough to one another that questions get answered quickly, founders remain connected to the work, experienced people notice when somebody is struggling and good managers compensate for processes that aren't quite there yet. In many cases, that informality is part of what makes a growing company fast and enjoyable to work in.

The problem isn't informality itself. It's failing to notice when you've outgrown it.

The manager who could informally coach four people cannot necessarily do the same for twelve. The founder who could join every important pitch becomes a constraint once there are twenty happening at the same time. The experienced person everyone learns from eventually gets promoted, leaves, becomes overloaded or simply reaches the point where answering everybody else's questions prevents them from doing their own job.

This is often the moment when leadership teams conclude that the quality of the people has fallen. Sometimes they're right. Growing quickly inevitably means making more hiring decisions and some will be poor ones. But before deciding that “people just aren't as good as they used to be”, I'd look at what the earlier generation of employees had access to that the newer one doesn't.

They may have spent considerably more time with the founder. They may have learned by sitting next to the best person in the team. They likely have seen processes evolve and so understand their DNA. Their manager may once have had enough space to coach them properly. They may have joined when everybody knew the whole business rather than one increasingly specialised part of it.

What looks like a decline in talent can sometimes be the disappearance of the conditions that allowed talent to develop.

Before the next hiring round, I'd take the three people your business would find hardest to operate without and spend an hour looking at what would genuinely disappear with them. Not their job descriptions or the tasks everybody already knows they perform, but the judgement, shortcuts, interventions, relationships and informal coaching that other people rely upon.

Then separate what is genuinely theirs from what the organisation should have learned how to reproduce.

You may discover an onboarding problem. You may find that managers need a much more consistent way of coaching. You may have knowledge that needs capturing, processes that need redesigning or information that should be available at the point of need rather than stored in somebody's head. You may discover that technology could remove a surprising amount of friction. You will almost certainly find some things that cannot and should not be systematised at all.

The point isn't only to reduce your dependence on excellent people. Great people should create disproportionate value, and businesses should work very hard to attract, develop and retain them.

But exceptional people should give a growing business an advantage, but not quietly become the infrastructure holding it together.

The more interesting test of organisational capability is not simply how well your best people perform. It is how much of what makes them effective eventually becomes easier for everybody else to learn, practise and repeat.

Because growth has a habit of increasing the distance between the person who knows what to do and the person who needs to know it. Sooner or later, you won't have somebody exceptional standing close enough to fix everything.

RB