If you are carrying more than your share, you must make a choice

Speak now or forever hold your peace

The Intentional Manager is for the corporate professional who is tired of surface-level advice — each issue works to understand the why behind strategy, leadership and execution, from first principles.

This piece belongs to the Worth Arguing With series, where I write back to other people’s thinking - because the best compliment you can pay an idea is to take it seriously.

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I don’t know you, but I know that it will take you less than 5 seconds to name the one person who is holding things together by himself.

If this person stops doing his thing, a piece of the machine will simply stop working.

Workplace Rewired calls this “donated competence”. Across three pieces (here, here and here) it describes how the employee feels the load creeping up and the leader sees the work getting done, showing what it looks like when the system is held up by people covering for a poorly designed structure.

The thing is: someone holding things together outside of the formal structure is the system screaming at you that, left alone, it would not produce the performance you are seeing.

Once you see this, it is prime time for a tough choice.

If you are the employee

Option 1: you stay quiet.

You accept that you are overcompensating for somebody else’s failure at design and that you will never be recognized for the competence you are donating.

This makes sense only if you actually enjoy the extra work or you are learning things that will help you transition to your next role.

Warning: if you stay quiet long enough, whatever you do will become “normal” and you will lose your window of opportunity.

Option 2: you make the invisible work visible.

You take it to your manager and have a real conversation: what is my actual role, what am I actually responsible for, where does this go and what is it worth.

This makes sense if you are fed up with the situation and willing to leave if it doesn’t change or if you want to grow in the company and believe the moment is ripe to enjoy the fruit of your extra work.

Warning: if you go into the discussion expecting things, you’ll be picking a fight that will leave you bleeding. Thread carefully!

Choose.

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PS if you choose not to say anything because of [insert random reason here], you are choosing option 1.

If you are the leader

You own the structure, which means the symptom is yours to read and yours to act on.

Option 1: you ignore the problem.

You accept a system whose performance will be sub-par, as it depends on someone’s discretionary effort. It is also fragile, as that person might leave tomorrow.

This makes sense if you plan to leave soon (and to the hell with everything!) or if your company rewards heroic firefighting more than it prizes silent problem-preventing.

Warning: ignore the problem only if you are sure that nobody else sees it well enough to diagnose it, else you’ll look like an overpaid idiot.

Option 2: you re-design the system.

You take the invisible work and give it a name, an owner, a standard and a moment where someone checks it happened, even accepting a decrease in performance in the short term as everyone re-aligns.

This is what you choose if you want to sustainably achieve results.

Warning: once you start the re-design, resist the temptation to keep tweaking your solution. Things take the time they take and you need to wait to see what is actually working.

Choose.

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PS if you choose not to do anything because of [insert random reason here], you are choosing option 1.

Conclusion

Donated competence is the system telling you that it no longer works.

At that moment, the employee and leader need to make a choice.

If both choose to keep quiet and keep carrying, the system has just told you exactly what it will keep producing.

Thanks for reading,

Luca

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