When High Performance Suffocates a Career
The Peter Principle aside, leaders and team members don’t advance in organizations unless they are highly competent and produce quality work.
Everyone knows that organizations reward the highest performers with more responsibility and more positional authority.
This is especially true early in a career when competence and expertise clearly differentiate who can be counted upon to deliver great work.
But sometimes leaders and team members develop a strong, but narrow, expertise and become too good at what they do. They become indispensable in doing the job or playing the role.
They prove every day that they are better than anyone else in their area of expertise. No one else could fill their shoes.
In an odd irony, their competence and high performance make them more valuable to the organization right where they are. Which is exactly the problem.
As a result, some high performers are kept where they are most useful for long periods of time rather than moved to where they can learn and grow.
Over time, they do the job so well that they become invisible in the promotion process.
Because there is no one else who can add the value they do in the role they are in, they remain stuck. Their high performance stifles their career rather than advancing it.
To escape this trap, these high performers must coach and mentor others to do what they do and at the same level, thus replacing themselves by design. They become less indispensable.
The first steps in this process are to begin documenting exactly how they do their work and then delegating portions of the process.
Once a “backfill” candidate exists or is in process, the high performer’s next move is to seek assignments and projects that help them develop new competencies and skills.
Letting others know they have a strong appetite for new challenges is also critical. Even small assignments allow people to showcase their diverse talents.
As a last resort, high performers trapped in place by their own competence should explore opportunities outside the team or organization.
They have more leverage than they typically think.
Pursuing a move has a way of clarifying their value to decision-makers in need of a wake-up nudge.
Organizations can’t afford to have high performers leave simply because they are stuck in a role. When a team member is too valuable to move up, they are also too valuable to move on.
High performers must remind everyone that their skills should open doors, not lock them.
A great article for discussion!
I'm rewriting this comment, because I needed to get to my students and couldn't finish my initial thoughts. I posed the question in the field note to my students. Of the ten in the class, half agreed that we should train our replacement. The rest were divided into no way or no real opinion.
The main thoughts of the students were, we "should" train them, but only the two specifically said they would train their potential replacement. I thought their input interesting.
I personally believe in the philosophy of, "Develop your people to the point they no longer need you." I also understand human behavior is human behavior. Self preservation above all.
This is why emphasize making it the leader's responsibility to make sure the organization has great bench strength. Our approach is to praise the high performer for their work and their value to the organization, but at some point they will be on vacation, or away and the work still has to be done, so we need bench strength.
To the point of having them write out what they do or how they do it. In the Marine Corps we called those documents Desk Top Procedures and Turnover Folders. They are important documents for all organizations, but very few have any. My "EXCUSE" for not having them for my job is I don't have the time. Writing them out and keeping them updated is time consuming, but important. It is still a goal I have, but not one I can't invest time in due to mission needs.
Love the thoughts and discussions and feedback.
Be safe.
The Peter Principle book is a must, although a bit old fashion, but once you past that is as relevant as ever.
It shows up in what leaders choose to leave alone. That is the most precise diagnosis I have read of why AI transformation stalls.
The extraction path is not just pragmatism or short-term pressure. It is identity preservation. The authority structures that need redesigning are the same ones that told these leaders they were competent, worthy of their position, and safe. Redesign Mode asks them to question the very architecture that validated them.
That is not a governance problem or an incentive problem, though it shows up as both. It is a leadership identity problem. And it is why the most important question in any AI transformation is not "where can we redesign?" but "who in this organisation has built their sense of self on the structure we are asking them to give up?"
Until that question is on the table, the fork stays hidden.