The idea may sound strange, at first. Nevertheless, the meaning is similar to the idea we have become familiar with when it comes to computer data. If you don’t do backups, you are at risk of losing something valuable. With people, it’s the same thing.

Except in some smaller organizations in highly regulated industries where skill-sets are not transferrable from one job category to another (eg. small medical labs or clinics), there is almost always the opportunity to benefit from cross-training people for different roles.

If your operation depends on the availability of one specific person in a specific role, then you should be thinking about what might happen if that person:

  • got “headhunted” with a better employment offer
  • became seriously ill or got beamed up to the “mother-ship”
  • became unhappy in their role, perhaps due to the pressure
  • saw the value of their unique skills as an incentive to go shopping for a better deal
  • turned to the dark side and exploited their privileged position to rob the organization or use it for extortion in salary negotiations

Whatever the reason, it makes no more sense to rely on a single employee for a critical business process than it does to rely on a customer list that isn’t backed up, or a single-processor CPU for handling thousands of billable transactions per day.

Many employees see themselves as being indispensible to their organization. Furthermore, chances are pretty good that if they do have very deep technical or process knowledge, most of their co-workers would agree. More than once, I’ve heard staff in the lunch room muttering, “You know, if Beavis left and went to our competitor, we’d be out of business in less than a month…” (Of course, competitive and intellectual property issues are another story that should be addressed, but not in this article.) It’s not always true, but it can cost a lot more than it needs to when someone leaves.

Think about your organization. Often, key roles are tied to IT-intensive processes, and the skillset is a mix of technical system knowledge and business processes. You know, something like…

“We’re waiting for the vendor to fix that new version of AIRMAX-SYS 2000. So, you can’t let the system schedule all the junior air traffic controllers to work on payday, or the flight planning system will send all flights through the same sector…” (to borrow an idea from a long-past Dilbert cartoon)

Obviously, in mission-critical systems, this kind of reliability requirement is usually regulated better than a department store work-scheduling system.

So, if someone in your organization says, “We’d be sunk if she left…” it may be time to at least review your critical business processes, and make sure there are people who can step in when bad things happen at the worst possible time. The side benefits are that employees may take a stronger interest in their work if they see opportunities for future advancement through new skills, and you may be able to save a few bucks on salary negotiations when people aren’t thinking to themselves, “They really need me here. Nobody else can do what I do. I’m going to ask for a BIG raise this year…”

The funny thing is, before they come to such a realization, the very same people may be eager to help train others on how they do what they do, just to show others what they know. If you act to diffuse the skillsets in your organization before things get to a critical point, it is much easier to defuse the situation when a key player becomes unavailable. Just pull the “backup” and push the “restore” button.