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Opening Salvo
Your strongest people are usually the ones being spent, and being spent tends to feel like a compliment on the way through. The best person on your team has been doing the work of two people for long enough that you've stopped thinking of it as a gap to close and started thinking of it as how they work, and the development conversation that would have changed their trajectory keeps getting displaced by the next thing they're needed for.
You know who they are without having to think about it. What you haven't calculated is that their development has been the flexible item in every quarter for three years, because development means pulling them off something and there has never been a quarter where you could afford that. Candidly, it's the most expensive compliment your organization pays anyone.
When they go, the replacement inherits the same portfolio and the same absence of a plan. The capability that walks out isn't the thing to reckon with. You have no mechanism for building it again, and the last one built itself.
Practical Personas (with a tinge of hyperbole)
The Coverage Holder: She has one person who absorbs whatever the quarter produces. Stretch assignments get routed to people with room in their week, and her best person has no room in their week because that person is the reason her forecast holds. A development plan exists for them, and it has carried forward unchanged through six review cycles, and nothing in her operating rhythm requires her to close it.
The Deferrer: Development is on his agenda every cycle, in a fifteen-minute conversation that ends with a timeline, and the timeline moves whenever the business does. The conversation costs him nothing and buys another two quarters of the same person in the same seat, which is the return it has been producing all along. His best person now tracks it as a recurring calendar event.
The Promoter: She moved her top performer into a higher band, and the portfolio moved with them, because nothing in it could be handed to anyone else. The org counts that as development and so does she. The person is now doing the work of two people one level up, which is the arrangement that made the promotion affordable in the first place. Development gets funded when it costs the developer nothing.
Ask Yourself
Which of your leaders have built an org where the person you'd hate to lose is the same person nobody could be pulled off of, and what have you done about it besides note the risk?
If you funded development the way you fund coverage, what would you have to stop delivering next quarter, and who would you have to tell?
The plan you have isn't a development plan, it's a retention hope. Decide this quarter what you're willing to take a hit on to make it real.
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"When I think of revenue, I think of Attio." - Shreman Shrestha, Head of Business at Granola
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Talent Management 101 (TM101)
Firm-Specific Skill: The Indispensability Ceiling
The best person on your team is expensive to move, which is exactly why they haven't moved. Their portfolio has been built out of everything the organization couldn't route anywhere else, and every addition made the next addition easier to justify. Human capital theory draws a line between general skills, which transfer anywhere, and firm-specific skills, which only pay off inside your walls. Your top performer has been accumulating the second kind for years, because the work you kept handing them was the work only they understood. That accumulation reads as indispensability, and indispensability is a ceiling that nobody has to enforce.
Why It Happens
Development competes with delivery for the same person, and delivery has a due date.
The cost of pulling a high performer off their portfolio is immediate and visible, while the cost of not developing them arrives two years later and gets attributed to the market.
Coverage risk concentrates in the person who absorbs the most, so the organization protects the arrangement it should be dismantling.
Nobody in the review cycle owns the development plan, so it carries forward as a document instead of a decision.
The Question Organizations Avoid
What the research keeps showing is that leaders behave rationally here. The system rewards the leader who keeps their strongest person in place and penalizes the one who takes the two-quarter hit to grow them, so the development conversation stays sincere and stays unfunded.
What would have to be true in your organization for a leader to be measured on the capability they built instead of the delivery they protected?
The Plug
This newsletter is brought to you by AstutEdge, a performance improvement consultancy. We help organizations close the gap between what leadership intends and what actually gets executed by fixing the misalignment in people, systems, and structure that stalls results.
We work through consulting engagements and coaching. If your organization is producing effort without outcomes, let's talk.
Visit astutedge.com or share this with a leader who feels the drag.