Being the Go-To Person Can Land You in Day Jail

by Jeff Lesher

I once had a boss who told me, while handing over an enormous task with a very short turnaround for which failure was not an option, that he realized he was asking for a “miracle.” But, he sought to reassure me, since I had delivered a number of so-called miracles before; he was confident that I wouldn’t let him down now. What at first was a welcome compliment of my skills had become an albatross that eventually led to my leaving that organization. When I left, my former firm lost not only a “miracle worker,” they lost all the knowledge that I had developed to help myself and others achieve at a high level. When we talk about the human expertise dimension, we really are talking about what certain people know and their ability to apply their knowledge to problems in ways that make them highly valued contributors, or go-to people. The methodologies used to gather this knowledge, and the technologies we use to deliver it to people in ways that increase their effectiveness merely reflect and support what our most effective people are doing on their own. The distribution of critical knowledge and the support of its application is important; the support and growth of the human systems that they emulate is essential.

It’s a very good feeling to be “the man” (or woman) on the job. Having your abilities and special talents recognized by superiors and colleagues also can contribute to career advancement and relative job security. But as with many things in life, there are dangers inherent in being the go-to person. Chief among these dangers is the burn out that can come as the result of being asked to do the same thing over and over. Over-reliance on the same person or small group of people for the majority of an organization’s critical work can lead to underutilized talent, productivity stagnation, boredom, and ultimately that feeling we sometimes have of not wanting to get out of bed, a feeling that also is described as the workplace becoming “day jail.” And like the Eagles’ Hotel California, day jail is a place that is awfully hard to leave – at least if you stay with the same organization.

Fortunately for organization leaders, there’s a very effective way to help your “stars” avoid the day jail trap. Even better, this approach makes today’s stars even more valuable to your organization while helping to develop your stars of the future. Through research begun in the late 1960s by Harvard (and later BYU) professors Gene Dalton and Paul Thompson, we understand that the most valuable contributors in organizations are those who “contribute through others.” The majority of people who perform their work in this way are not managers. Nevertheless, they coach others, they look for new and better ways to get work done, including establishing networks of people they rely on for support and information; and they find new applications for existing knowledge.

Effective managers strengthen their teams in multiple ways by encouraging and enabling their current go-to people to share their knowledge with and through others who have yet to be developed fully as go-to resources, among them:

New go-to people are developed, deepening the talent pool, enhancing productivity now that there are more people to do the critical work, and easing the burden on the few people previously relied on disproportionately
Current go-to people learn to contribute through others which raises their level of value to the organization (by as much as two-fold when compared to the value assigned by managers to individual contributors/technical experts), and they are freer to pursue the development of skills to help the organization in ways other than what they were asked to do over and over
The newer go-to people and their more broadly contributing colleagues are more engaged and satisfied by their work, increasing the level of production and the likelihood that they will stay

A thoughtful and structured approach to developing people across the spectrum of contribution is at the heart of the successful knowledge-sharing, knowledge-growing organization.