Single point of failure

We try to make our businesses fairly resilient. Investments will fluctuate, customers will come and go, disasters will happen.

The smaller you are, the more you’ll feel it. That’s just the way it is.

But I don’t see leaders spending as much attention on critical roles that depend too much on a single person. Especially themselves.

I myself am a one-person business, so its success almost entirely depends on what I’m doing personally. And that works for me, at least for now.

But most businesses of any significant size are intended to outlive any of the individuals who currently work there, including the founder or CEO. So it’s important that we realize that turnover is a natural thing and can even be desirable as peoples’ needs change.

One approach is to attempt to capture everything as a repeatable process. That helps drive consistency and longevity, which are good thing. You have to watch out for when a process is becoming obsolete, though. At some point it can start holding you back.

Another useful tool is to design things around teams more than individuals. In that environment, people will become familiar with each others’ work and help each other in times of stressful workload. It gives you the ability to rotate people around through jobs, which can be attractive so many employees.

By the way, I’ve found that this “team approach” even works well with leadership roles. It’s good for more people to know how top decisions are made and be able to participate in things outside their usual job scope. This also helps you create a succession plan, the “leadership bench” which makes an organization more resilient over the long haul.

The third tool is to create a culture of constant learning. Reward people for learning other jobs and more efficient approaches. Intentionally cross-train. Continue to give people stretch goals and the support to achieve them. But do this in the places which matter most, because people also need a balance of “I know how to do this job” comfort. Not everything can be in constant flux, that’s a recipe for burnout.

And make sure to do this for yourself. You don’t want everything to fall in tatters should something happen.