It is 10:07 on Tuesday morning and a project has developed what management is calling “a slight wobble.”
A slight wobble is corporate language for being on fire, but with the fire still awaiting approval from Communications.
The deadline has been missed. The client is unhappy. Several important figures appear to have been calculated using astrology. Nobody is entirely sure who is responsible, although everyone agrees that lessons will eventually be learned.
The senior manager looks around the Teams screen.
“We need someone to take ownership of this.”
Ownership is another interesting workplace word. It sounds empowering. In practice, it often means adopting a problem whose biological parents have left the country.
Eight intelligent adults suddenly become fascinated by something just below their cameras. One studies the agenda. Another frowns at their calendar with the solemnity of a cardiologist examining a scan. Someone nods thoughtfully, hoping to look strategic rather than available.
Then one person makes the fatal mistake of looking up.
“I could take a quick look,” they say.
And there it is.
The career-limiting act of competence.
They do not, of course, take a quick look. They spend two days reconstructing the project, calming the client and discovering that the final budget was saved in a folder called “Budget_FINAL_v6_USE_THIS_ONE_NEW.”
By Friday, the crisis is over.
“Brilliant work,” says the manager. “I knew we could rely on you.”
This sounds like gratitude.
It is actually a warning.
From this moment onward, every similar problem will find its way to the same person. They have proved that they can solve it, which means they now own it until retirement or death, whichever is acceptable under company policy.
This is the competence tax.
It does not appear on your payslip. There is no box for it on your tax return. It is collected in small instalments, usually beginning with the words:
“Could you just…?”
Could you just check these figures?
Could you just speak to the client?
Could you just take over because somebody else is struggling?
The word just deserves its own investigation. It has been used to make three hours of unpaid work sound like holding a door open.
There is a strange law operating in many organisations: do something badly twice and you may never be asked to do it again. Do it brilliantly once and it becomes part of your permanent responsibilities.
Fail to understand Excel and the spreadsheet will be reassigned. Understand Excel and you may become responsible for every spreadsheet produced within a 400-metre radius.
Announce confidently that you are “not really a details person,” and people may even begin to suspect that you are leadership material.
Meanwhile, the capable person becomes the organisation’s unofficial emergency service. There is no blue light. Just a Teams notification.
To be fair, this is not usually the result of an evil management plan. When something matters, managers give it to the person they trust. In the short term, this is perfectly rational. Why hand a crisis to someone who may convert it into four meetings, a steering committee and eventually a second crisis?
The trouble is that a series of sensible short-term decisions can create a spectacularly stupid system.
The strongest people become overloaded. The weaker ones are carefully protected from the distressing experience of becoming better. Knowledge accumulates in a few exhausted heads, while the organisation congratulates itself on its efficiency.
Psychologists have a name for the helpful things people do beyond their formal role: organisational citizenship behaviour. This sounds rather noble, as though correcting somebody else’s PowerPoint might qualify you for a passport and a small civic ceremony.
Helping colleagues and taking initiative are obviously valuable. No organisation could survive if everybody responded to every request with, “That is not explicitly mentioned in paragraph four of my job description.”
But voluntary helpfulness has an unfortunate habit of becoming expected helpfulness. Researchers call this citizenship pressure. Studies have linked it with job stress, conflict between work and personal life, and intentions to leave. There is even something called citizenship fatigue: the exhaustion that follows repeatedly being the person who helps, rescues and quietly keeps the whole circus inside the tent. (Bolino et al., 2010; Fu et al., 2022)
Apparently, even helpfulness has a recommended dosage.
But management is not solely responsible. Competent people are often enthusiastic participants in their own exploitation.
We like being needed. We take pride in being dependable. We see a badly executed task and develop an urgent physical need to fix it. Eventually, we utter the most dangerous sentence in organisational life:
“It will be quicker if I do it myself.”
It usually will.
It is also how everybody else learns that they do not have to.
Over time, competence becomes part of our identity. Saying no does not feel like declining additional work. It feels like refusing to be the capable, generous person we believe ourselves to be.
And so the arrangement continues. The organisation keeps depending on us, and we keep supplying the evidence that it can.
Then comes the performance review.
“You’re invaluable,” says the manager.
Invaluable is another word worth approaching carefully. Sometimes it means highly appreciated. Sometimes it means far too useful where you are to be promoted anywhere else.
The competent person is then advised to delegate more, become more strategic and improve their work-life balance.
They may even be invited to a resilience webinar, which they cannot attend because they are covering for someone else.
The answer is not to make reliable employees more resilient to being overloaded. It is to stop overloading them.
Every new request should be met with a simple question:
What would you like me to stop doing?
This question tends to produce silence because it introduces arithmetic into a system that has been operating largely on hope.
Capacity is not a personality trait. Reliable people do not possess a secret eighth day of the week. Work added in one place must be removed somewhere else.
The invisible work of rescuing projects, correcting mistakes, mentoring colleagues and remembering everything needs to be visible—and rewarded. Other people must be allowed to struggle, learn and initially produce something less polished. Otherwise, the competent become indispensable, the less competent remain curiously well-rested, and the organisation becomes one resignation away from complete panic.
Competence should earn greater autonomy, influence, development and, occasionally, money.
It should not earn permanent availability.
So the next time a problem appears and the same person’s name immediately comes to mind, pause.
You may not have a high-performing culture.
You may simply have one competent human being being slowly eaten by it.
And before you ask, “Could you just…?”, remove the word just.
It has been doing unpaid overtime for years.
This article was originally published in my newsletter, The Next Decade. Read it on Substack or subscribe to get the next edition in your inbox.