Every company loves having a go-to person. This is the employee who knows the difficult clients, remembers why an odd process exists, understands how the systems fit together, and can rescue a project when something goes wrong. When nobody else knows the answer, someone says, “Ask them.”
That employee can be incredibly valuable. The problem begins when valuable turns into indispensable.
If one person cannot take a vacation without receiving calls, the company has a problem. If a customer relationship collapses when an account manager leaves, the company has a problem. If only one employee knows how to complete an important process, the company definitely has a problem.
Great employees should make organizations stronger. They should not become single points of failure.
Being Indispensable Is Not the Compliment It Sounds Like
Companies often reward employees for becoming the only person who can handle certain responsibilities. Managers praise them for always being available. Coworkers depend on them whenever something unusual happens. Eventually, their knowledge becomes so concentrated that nobody else can confidently perform the work.
This may look like excellent performance, but it creates operational risk.
SHRM reports that only 21% of HR professionals say their organizations have a formal succession plan, while 56% have no succession plan at all. Succession planning is not only about replacing executives. It also helps organizations identify critical knowledge and develop people who can take responsibility when important employees change roles or leave.
The risk is becoming more important as experienced workers approach retirement. Deloitte estimates that more than 30 million Americans will turn 65 over the next four years and warns that the resulting loss of institutional knowledge could have enormous economic consequences.
Businesses should want experts. They simply need to make sure expertise spreads.
Turn Your Best Employees Into Teachers
One of the smartest things a company can do with a top performer is ask that person to teach someone else.
This changes how organizations define employee value. Instead of rewarding someone because nobody else can do their job, leaders reward them for raising the capability of everyone around them.
The career experience of Otto Bohon offers a useful example. When developing training programs for people with little industry experience, the challenge was not simply explaining what experienced employees did. It was breaking complicated work into steps that another person could understand, practice, and eventually perform independently.
Imagine an experienced employee who can handle a difficult customer conversation almost effortlessly. Telling a new employee to “watch how Sarah does it” is not much of a training strategy. A better approach is to identify what Sarah actually does. What questions does she ask first? What warning signs does she notice? When does she escalate the issue? What language does she avoid?
That turns personal skill into organizational knowledge.
Stop Rewarding Knowledge Hoarding
Knowledge hoarding is not always intentional. Sometimes companies create it themselves.
An employee becomes exceptionally good at a task, so managers keep giving that task to the same person. Because the employee does it quickly, nobody else gets trained. Five years later, the organization has created a role that appears impossibly complicated because one person has accumulated thousands of tiny lessons nobody bothered to capture.
SHRM has reported that 75% of companies consider creating and preserving organizational knowledge important, yet only 9% believe they are prepared to do it effectively.
Leaders can start fixing this by changing what gets recognized. Employees should receive credit for documenting processes, training colleagues, creating useful resources, and developing capable backups.
Managers can make knowledge transfer part of performance conversations as well. A simple question such as, “Who else could perform your three most important responsibilities if you were unavailable?” can reveal vulnerabilities quickly.
If the answer is nobody, there is work to do.
Cross-Training Should Happen Before Someone Resigns
The worst time to transfer five years of knowledge is during someone’s final two weeks.
Unfortunately, that is exactly when many companies attempt it.
An employee resigns, and suddenly the calendar fills with handoff meetings. Coworkers scramble to understand customer histories, vendor relationships, reports, passwords, and procedures. The departing employee tries to explain years of accumulated experience between finishing existing work and preparing to leave.
Knowledge transfer should happen while everyone is still comfortable.
SHRM specifically recommends approaches such as mentoring, cross-training, job shadowing, and structured knowledge-transfer plans as part of succession planning.
Companies can begin with critical responsibilities. Every important recurring process should have at least one trained backup. That person should occasionally perform the work rather than simply read the instructions.
The test matters because documentation can hide gaps. Instructions that seem obvious to an expert may be confusing to someone encountering the process for the first time.
Give Your Best People Somewhere to Grow
There is another reason to stop making top employees indispensable: it can trap them in their current jobs.
If only one person knows how to run a critical process, managers may become reluctant to promote that person. The employee’s competence becomes the reason they cannot move forward.
That is a terrible incentive.
Career development is also closely connected with retention. SHRM reported in 2025 that career-related reasons remained the leading cause of employee turnover in Work Institute’s analysis of exit interviews. Gallup separately found that less than half of U.S. employees participated in education or training to develop skills for their current jobs in 2024.
Companies should build succession into career development. Before someone moves into a larger role, they should help prepare another employee to take over key responsibilities.
This creates a healthier cycle. Employees learn new skills, experienced people gain opportunities to advance, and the company becomes less vulnerable when roles change.
Document the Decisions, Not Just the Steps
Traditional process documentation often explains what buttons to press without capturing why an experienced employee makes certain decisions.
That is where much of the valuable knowledge lives.
Suppose an employee manages vendor relationships. A procedure might explain how to place an order, but it may not explain that one vendor needs extra lead time during certain months or that another is flexible when an urgent request comes in.
Companies need to capture this practical judgment.
Ask experienced employees about exceptions, warning signs, common mistakes, unusual customer situations, and lessons they learned the hard way. SHRM distinguishes this kind of experience-based understanding as tacit knowledge, which is harder to record and transfer than straightforward procedural information.
A short interview with an experienced employee can sometimes reveal more useful information than another giant procedure manual.
Run the Vacation Test
Companies can measure dependency with a simple exercise.
Ask what would happen if a key employee took four weeks off tomorrow and could not answer routine questions.
Would customers still receive the same service? Could someone produce the monthly reports? Would approvals continue? Could another employee manage important vendor relationships? Would anyone know how to handle unusual situations?
Every uncomfortable answer identifies a risk.
Leaders can then rank those risks based on importance. Critical responsibilities with no backup should be addressed first. Companies can document the process, cross-train another employee, provide necessary access, and then test the backup.
This should not be treated as preparation for replacing valued employees. It is preparation for running a healthy business.
Make Your Best Employees Multipliers
The strongest employee is not necessarily the person who holds the most information. It may be the person who leaves everyone around them more capable.
Companies should therefore change the goal. Instead of creating heroes who repeatedly rescue broken processes, create experts who teach, document, coach, and develop others.
Managers can start this week by identifying their most important employees and asking three questions. What knowledge exists only in this person’s head? Who is currently learning from them? What would happen if they were unavailable for a month?
The answers will show where the company needs better documentation, cross-training, succession planning, or career development.
Making great employees less indispensable does not reduce their value. It increases their impact.
The best employees should leave fingerprints all over the organization through the people they trained, the knowledge they shared, and the processes they improved. When that happens, their value continues to compound even when they get promoted, take a vacation, or eventually move on.
