By Reginal Campbell · October 13, 2026 · 10-minute read

Indispensable Is What We Call a Bottleneck When We Like the Person

The Reward for Being Needed

What do you expect from someone who gets rewarded every time they take on more, and then is told one day that it’s time to give some of it back? I can tell you what I did. I resisted.

Within two weeks of joining a client engagement as a senior project manager, my direct supervisor left, and I was asked to fill the gap. What started as helping a newly formed team find its footing turned into carrying responsibilities across multiple roles. I was new, leadership had a problem, and I wanted to prove they could count on me.

The workload was exhausting. I was burning out, but I was also becoming increasingly valuable to the organization. My delivery and leadership earned me multiple raises, more visibility, and influence over decisions that might otherwise have been outside my responsibilities. And I liked it. That’s the part that’s harder to admit.

Eventually, everyone adjusted. The team learned that Reggie would figure it out, and so did leadership. Most dangerously, Reggie learned that Reggie would figure it out.

So when people outside the team began pushing to redistribute some of my responsibilities, I didn’t see it as relief. I saw it as losing something I’d worked hard to earn. The responsibilities weren’t just work anymore; they had become part of my standing in the organization. I pushed back. My resistance was interpreted as insubordination, and I fell out of favor.

When leadership valued what I was carrying, I was indispensable. When it wanted those responsibilities redistributed, my reluctance became a problem. I should have recognized that redistributing the work could strengthen the team. Instead, I experienced it as a threat to the standing I had earned. That was my responsibility. But the rewards had helped teach me to confuse being needed with being valuable.

I’ve thought about that experience whenever another LinkedIn debate surfaces about why candidates should stop saying “we” and start saying “I” during interviews. Hiring managers want to know what you personally accomplished: what decisions you made, what problems you solved, what results you can claim. I understand the question. If I’m hiring someone, I want to know whether they contributed to the outcome or simply occupied a seat at the table.

It’s a fair question with an incomplete answer. We spend more time deciding who gets credit for the win than examining what made the win possible. We say teamwork. We reward heroes. And sometimes, we learn to become exactly what the system rewards.

The Game We’re Actually Rewarding

I learned something about teamwork long before I entered corporate America. Playing college basketball taught me that setting a screen is one of the least glamorous jobs on the floor. You establish position, create separation, and give a teammate an opportunity they wouldn’t otherwise have. If the play works, somebody else gets the basket, the crowd cheers for the shooter, and the points appear next to their name. Your contribution made the play possible, but the traditional box score doesn’t tell that story.

The Army taught me another version of the lesson. There’s nothing particularly glamorous about training in the rain, repeating tasks you’ve performed countless times. Some of it feels mundane. But when circumstances change and those skills become essential, nobody cares who received the most recognition during training. They care whether the person standing next to them knows their job. The Army also taught me that leadership can’t end with personal competence. A leader’s job is to develop people who can operate without them.

Now look at how many organizations operate. We promote collaboration, shared accountability, and collective ownership as foundational values, and we tell employees we’re one team working toward a common purpose. Then performance-review season arrives, and suddenly everyone needs to explain what they personally delivered, which outcomes they individually influenced, and why their contribution deserves more recognition than the next person’s. The same thing happens during interviews. We ask candidates to explain their contribution. We ask less often how that contribution made others more effective.

In my experience, people respond to what gets rewarded. They learn that visibility matters, that being associated with high-profile initiatives matters, and that being the person executives remember when something goes wrong matters. The employee who quietly transfers knowledge, develops colleagues, or prevents the next crisis may be appreciated, but appreciation doesn’t always translate into opportunity. Teamwork is the value we advertise. Individual heroics are the currency we spend.

This is where things get complicated. Sometimes the people receiving the most recognition benefit from the very dysfunction they’re celebrated for overcoming. Not because they created it or deliberately sustained it, but because the organization rewards the rescue without examining why rescues keep being necessary. The project manager who repeatedly saves a struggling initiative may be exceptional. But if the same organization keeps needing the same kind of rescue, shouldn’t somebody be asking why?

And if a single person’s absence would bring everything to a halt, have we identified an exceptional leader or exposed a significant organizational risk? Maybe both, and I know how easy it is to confuse them. Stepping up in a crisis isn’t the problem. Becoming the only way the crisis ever gets solved is.

Not every scarce expert is a bottleneck. Some decisions genuinely require specialist judgment or restricted authority. The problem is avoidable dependence: routine decisions, undocumented knowledge, or recurring escalations that run through one person when the work could be designed otherwise. Reducing that dependence doesn’t mean pretending everyone is interchangeable. It means keeping the expertise while widening the team’s ability to act.

What the Scoreboard Doesn’t Tell Us

We know how to celebrate results. We’re much less effective at recognizing the capability that makes those results possible. A result tells us what happened. A capability tells us whether we’ve built something that can happen again. In practice, a capability looks like knowledge more than one person holds, decisions that don’t wait on a single approver, and a plan that survives someone’s vacation. The same distinction applies to AI: saved time isn’t organizational value until leadership redesigns the work.

That distinction matters because much of what we attribute to individual performance depends on circumstances we rarely acknowledge. A 2008 study by Boris Groysberg, Linda-Eling Lee, and Ashish Nanda examined what happened when star securities analysts on Wall Street changed employers. Overall, their performance declined immediately, and the decline persisted for at least five years. The sharpest declines came among analysts who moved alone or joined less capable firms. Moves between similarly capable firms produced a decline that lasted about two years. Analysts who moved with teammates or joined firms with stronger capabilities showed no significant decline.^[1]

The talent was real. So were the conditions supporting it. The study is about securities analysts, not a universal law of leadership. But it does challenge the assumption that an individual’s performance can be cleanly separated from the organization that supports it. When we credit a win to one person, we often book the team’s contribution, the organization’s capabilities, and the colleagues who made the work possible to a single account. That isn’t dishonest. It’s incomplete accounting.

In the 2016 playoffs, the NBA began publicly tracking contributions the traditional box score left out, including screen assists. A screen assist credits a player whose pick directly leads to a teammate’s made basket; screens that draw a shooting foul or set up a basket a pass or two later don’t count. Teams had already tracked some of this privately. Now the league published it.^[2] The screen didn’t suddenly become valuable in 2016. It had always mattered. What changed was the decision to count it.

Think about how often something similar happens at work. The person presenting the successful program launch receives recognition. But what about the people who worked through the integration challenges, resolved dependencies, transferred knowledge, and made sure the operation could actually function after the celebration? Those contributions aren’t invisible. They’re just harder to attribute to a single person, and what we struggle to measure, we often struggle to reward.

Two Shades of Green

Imagine two teams delivering major enterprise initiatives. Both meet their deadlines, stay within their approved budgets, and satisfy their stated requirements. On the executive dashboard, they’re green.

The first team got there through constant escalation, late nights, weekend work, and a handful of people who understood how everything fit together. When something broke, everyone knew whom to call. Problems were resolved, but often through extraordinary personal effort.

The second team faced challenges too. The difference was how it handled them. Responsibilities were understood, knowledge was shared, risks were surfaced early, and people had enough context to make decisions without constantly waiting for someone to intervene.

Both teams delivered, but they didn’t create the same organizational value. The first team produced a result by consuming its people. The second produced a result and became less dependent on any one of them. Hiring shows the same gap between individual throughput and system performance.

I’m not suggesting that disciplined teams never work late, encounter crises, or need exceptional individuals to step up. Sometimes circumstances demand it. But when extraordinary effort becomes the normal operating model, we should stop treating every successful rescue as evidence that everything is working. If your operation depends on the same three people sacrificing their weekends every quarter, that’s not a sustainable capability. That’s a dependency with a delivery schedule.

And yet a review that tracks only deadlines and budget would give both teams essentially the same assessment: successful delivery, objectives achieved, strong leadership. Maybe a recognition award for the person who worked the most hours getting everyone across the finish line. Meanwhile, the team that anticipated problems, distributed knowledge, and prevented unnecessary escalation might receive considerably less attention.

Part of the reason, I think, is that prevention rarely gives us a compelling story. A crisis has a beginning, a conflict, a hero, and a resolution, which gives leadership something visible to recognize. Prevention gives us something far less dramatic: nothing happened. The system worked. People understood their responsibilities. Problems were identified before they became emergencies, and nobody had to spend the weekend saving the project. Somehow, we treat that as less remarkable.

Rewrite the Question

None of this means individual talent is unimportant. Great teams need capable people, and some individuals contribute more than others. A high performer shouldn’t be penalized because leadership failed to provide resources or teammates didn’t meet their commitments, and being part of a winning team doesn’t automatically mean everyone contributed equally. But understanding someone’s contribution is different from assigning them ownership of everyone else’s achievement.

That’s why I keep coming back to the original LinkedIn debate and its central question: “What did you do?” It’s not the wrong question. It’s just not enough. If I were evaluating someone’s contribution to a successful team, I’d want to understand four things:

What did you personally deliver or decide? Show me your judgment, ownership, and contribution.
What did your work enable other people to accomplish? Help me understand the value you created beyond your own responsibilities.
What became less dependent on you? Did you share knowledge, develop others, or improve how the team operated?
What did the result cost? Did the team succeed through a sustainable approach, or did success require sacrifices it couldn’t reasonably keep making? This question is aimed at the system as much as the person. When success requires unsustainable sacrifice, examine staffing and work design before treating the sacrifice as a performance standard.

Asking these questions won’t change much if promotion decisions still reward only visible delivery. Put the answers in the review. Require evidence of what the person delivered, what they enabled, and what the team can now do without them. Whoever writes the review template and approves the awards owns that change.

Knowledge transfer can’t become another unpaid assignment for the same overloaded person, either. The manager has to provide time, a qualified backup, and clear decision rights. And the credit should come when someone else can actually do the work to the required standard, not when the document is uploaded. Test it. Give the backup owner a live decision or a routine task without the original owner in the room, and see whether quality holds. A shared folder isn’t capability. Demonstrated execution is.

It also changes how we recognize leadership. The person who consistently rescues a troubled project deserves recognition for the rescue, but so does the person who builds a team that no longer needs to be rescued. The leader whose team performs exceptionally well in their absence may have accomplished something more enduring than the leader whose presence is required for every significant decision.

That brings me back to that engagement. I was eventually rolled off. Before I left, the team was self-sufficient and the work was delivered. Some of that was my doing. Some of it happened around me, and some of it was decided over my objections. I didn’t see it clearly at the time. Only looking back did I understand that it was the right outcome. It just wasn’t the one I had been protecting.

For a time, I believed that being essential to the operation was evidence of my value. Maybe it was, but it wasn’t the whole measure. The team could succeed without me, and I had spent too much energy resisting that possibility instead of building toward it.

I try to lead differently now. I hand off ownership on purpose, even when doing the work myself would be faster. I make it easier for people to raise a concern or challenge my thinking before a problem becomes an emergency. And I pay closer attention to my own resistance when something no longer needs to come through me. The pull of being needed hasn’t gone away. I’ve just learned to notice it.

Did the team become better because you were there, or did you just become more important?

Sources

Boris Groysberg, Linda-Eling Lee, and Ashish Nanda, “Can They Take It With Them? The Portability of Star Knowledge Workers’ Performance”, Management Science 54, no. 7 (2008): 1213–1230 (HBS abstract). Panel study of star securities analysts at U.S. investment banks; the findings are specific to that profession and are presented here as illustrative, not universal. ↑
ESPN, “NBA will track ‘hustle stats’ during playoffs for first time”, 2016. Report on the league’s introduction of public postseason hustle statistics, including screen assists, following a 2015 Summer League pilot; defines screen assists and notes that teams already tracked some of these contributions internally. ↑

About the author

Reginal Campbell writes about enterprise technology, AI governance, leadership, and the systems organizations build to make consequential decisions.