We all know them. They know who to ask, rebuild the missing information, send the right message to whoever needs to approve, and unblock the hand-off that nobody owned. “Don’t worry, I’ll handle it.”
And the project moves on. Often it gets delivered precisely thanks to them.
(Confession: for many years that person was me. So I know what I’m talking about.)
What the organisation doesn’t see
The problem isn’t the individual contribution, which is valuable and deserves recognition. The problem is that the organisation sees the result, but not the work it took to get there: the time, the calls, the coordination outside any plan.
So it may conclude that the process works. When in fact it works because a few people make up for its gaps, every single day.
When it becomes an issue
Helping each other is part of work, thank goodness. It becomes an organisational issue when:
- the recovery always concerns the same hand-off;
- it always involves the same people;
- no one asks how to prevent it upstream.
At that point “I’ll handle it” is no longer generosity: it’s undeclared infrastructure. Fragile, because it depends on someone’s availability (and patience). And expensive, because that time is taken away from something else.
When “I’ll handle it” becomes the system, it’s no longer generosity: it’s undeclared infrastructure.
Telling talent from patchwork
The useful question isn’t “how will we manage without them?”, but: which part of this effort truly requires experience, and which part depends on inaccessible information, a missing agreement or a postponed decision?
In the first case, that skill should be recognised and planned for. In the others, it’s the process — or its ownership — that needs revisiting.
A two-week experiment
For a limited time, try tracking recurring recoveries: what happened, why stepping in was needed, which work was pushed aside to do it.
Then sit down with the people who know that hand-off and with whoever can decide to change it. The useful fix usually emerges quickly. And the “I’ll handle it” person will thank you. Although they’ll probably keep doing it anyway. 🙂
The situations described are illustrative and do not refer to any single client.