The Dependability Trap: When Being the “Go-To” Holds You Back

I want to start today with something that might be a little uncomfortable to hear.

If working this hard, staying late, taking the call late on Friday afternoon when everybody else has already gone home or If holding things together, behind the scenes, while everyone pats you in the back…. If all of that, alone, was going to get you promoted…

It would have already happened.

I know that is a bold statement.

And, trust me – I am not saying you shouldn’t work hard.

I believe that your work ethic is a huge part of what will get you where you want to go. My own work ethic has been essential in my own journey, for sure! There is incredible value in being the person people can count on, doing excellent work, knowing your job, caring about the mission, and being willing to solve problems that other people either cannot -- or will not solve.

Your own willingness to roll up your sleeves and get things done has made you as successful as you already are, today.

But I want you to consider something that a lot of exceptionally high-achieving introverted people don’t consider, at least not as soon as they could…

Doing valuable work is one thing, but making sure the right people understand the value you are creating is technically a completely different line of effort.

And there is another challenge I want to talk to you about, before we even worry about if your value is being overlooked in any capacity:

You can become so dependable in your current role that everybody around you develops a very good reasons and their own assumptions to keep things exactly the way they are.

That is what I call the Dependability Trap.

You are the person people call because you know how things really work.

You know who to call.

Due to your deep experience, you can usually explain a root-cause to an issue while 90% of the people are still debating symptoms.

You know your customer, and feel a personal responsibility to take care of them.

You know that thing that happened three years ago, the decision that nobody wrote down anywhere, but still affects what is happening today.

When something goes wrong, people come to find you.

Your customer knows that even when things are messy, difficult, or complex -- you are going to do everything you can to help them. They thank you often, and it is one of the things that keeps you going.

Your boss knows that if something absolutely has to get done, you are one of the people he can give it to. You always say yes, and then you figure out how to make it happen.

Your colleagues are happy you are there, because they each know at least part of everything you just “take care of” – and maybe, if we are being honest – they don’t see you as a threat to their own careers. Even they expect you to stay exactly where you are.

When you go on vacation, suddenly people are irritated because they have to do things they normally do not even think about.

That all sounds like evidence that you are doing a great job.

It probably is.

The trap comes when everybody benefits so much from you continuing to do that work, that moving you creates an immediate problem.

If you go lead the big cross-functional project, who is going to do everything you are doing now?

If you spend three months in an executive development program, who is going to take those customer calls?

If you move into a next-level position, who knows all the things you know?

Who has the relationships?

Who understands all the weird exceptions, or one off challenges that occur less often?

Because, truly – there is absolutely nobody, sitting in a conference room making a strategic plan to hold you back. In most cases, these are probably completely unconscious actions on the part of your boss and your colleagues.

That is part of what makes this issue difficult to see.

Your boss probably genuinely think you are fantastic.

Your coworkers may truly love working with you.

Your customers may see you as their champion and probably even call you out in conversations with your organizational leadership.

It can easily become a cycle, increasing in intensity.,,

You do highly reliable, excellent work.

Everybody is grateful.

So they give you more work.

And after a while, being appreciated and being developed for something larger can start moving in two different directions.

I know an amazing woman who makes me think about this all the time.

She is wicked smart.

She is one of the most helpful people I know, and she has an enormous amount of expertise. She is one of those people who rolls up her sleeves and gets the work done. Customers not only trust her – they love her. People come to her because she actually understands what is happening and listens to them, then directly integrates their feeback.

And yet… I have watched her have to prove herself over and over and over.

Earlier in her career, she was working very directly with the customer. She could spend days working intensely with a relatively small group of people, understanding exactly what was happening, figuring out what they needed, and helping them solve their problems.

She cared deeply about those people.

We talked a lot about her career and about the bigger things she could potentially do, and part of the difficulty was that she felt personally responsible for the people she was serving.

Leaving that very direct work felt, to her, like she was leaving them.

She knew what would happened if she was not there, she knew how much they depended on what she did.

And other people knew how good she was too.

I had conversations with senior people who thought extraordinarily highly of her. Her supervisors loved her. She had, and continues to have, a very strong reputation – especially with the customer.

But from my perspective, there was also a fairly narrow picture of what her career might evolve, if she stayed inside that particular arrangement.

There may have been another level for her there, where she was. It was not as though there was literally nowhere else for her to go.

But nobody was automatically looking at everything she was doing and saying, “We need to find a way to scale her brand of awesomeness and give her a much larger platform.”

And the more I think about her story, the more I think the issue was fairly simple.

So much of her value was being delivered in small groups, but her personally.

She knew what needed to be fixed, and then she personally helped fix it.

And because she was so capable and so dependable, it worked -- but in that form, it was difficult to scale.

Eventually, she did find a path to scale her impact.

She moved into a different organization that still served the same broader customer, but from a more strategic level.

And this is where her story gets really interesting to me, moving to that more strategic position did not make her more brilliant – she was the same awesome human, with her own brand of superpowers.

What changed was the scale at which she could do something about all the issues she was a deep expert in solving.

Instead of spending a week helping one relatively small group of customers at a time, the things she had learned could start becoming system upgrades, focused on resolving the challenges before the customer ever encountered them. She could implement policy changes, she could develop a strategic vision and set a “North Star” for what great looked like for her customer.

She now has a fairly large team of people helping her, they can influence or develop products that support the customer much more broadly.

She has the support for her vision from organizational leadership and across leaders in the overall industry. Senior people know what she is trying to do.

Her strategic vision is actually being executed.

The same person who had been personally carrying enormous amounts of value, implementing something that was necessary, industry wide, to 30 people at a time, can now be implemented at a completely different scale.

And I think there is something, in her story, that is especially important for people like us.

When you are highly responsible, leaving something that you have been personally holding together can feel wrong, it might even feel like you are abandoning people you care about.

You may look around and think, “But if I don’t do this, who will?”

And sometimes the answer right now really is: nobody.

But if you really want to make sure a vision you have is realized, if you really believe in something this strongly – if it really matters to you…

At some point you have to consider how you can ensure the value you are delivering lives on past you. If the change you know is so important – it will have to become integrated into processes, policy, methods and not completely on you personally sitting at the heart of the solution.

You may need to teach others what you know, document updated processes, automate large portions of the work with a customer-centered solution.

Do you have anything that currently lives only in your brain? If so - it needs to become part of the actual system workflow.

Maybe the organization needs to understand just how much knowledge has become concentrated in one person and maybe you need to start recognizing that solving every problem yourself is not necessarily the highest-level contribution you can make anymore.

This can be a difficult journey for a high achiever, because solving problems feels useful. I know one of my favorite feelings is when a specific ship is having a system issue and I help them get their specific issue corrected, probably because I connected them to the people who could most help them, depending on their specific issue – it feels very satisfying. Still, that is work I did everyday as a Junior Officer in the Navy, and is it really the best use of my personal time? Especially where there are many Junior Officers and other experts who have that type of support fully under control? I would say – I should be doing much more strategic work to prevent those system issues from happening in the first place and making it easier for people to know how to get support. Strategic communications, so to speak.

The gratification from solving the smaller fires, like one system casualty, is that you can see the result immediately.

The customer is happy, and they provide positive feedback – it feels good.

Developing somebody else to do it may take more time, initially, and you will get less of those immediate “gratitude dopamine hits”. All of this makes it very tempting to stay right where you are.

But -- there is another issue happening at the same time.

The work you are doing may also be giving the people who make decisions about your future a weirdly incomplete picture of your value to the organization.

This is where visibility comes into the Dependability Trap.

Visibility is not the trap itself.

You can be highly visible to the people immediately around you and still be in the Dependability Trap.

Your boss, collogues, and customer probably all know how valuable you are.

The problem is that the organization primarily knows you as the person who is awesome, but they might also see you in a specific context.

That is different from knowing the potential impact you’d make with broader authority and the ability to scale your vision.

You might have noticed that your solutions or ideas, kind of disappear or get watered down -- diluted, as information moves through the organization.

You understand the customer because you actually talk to them – and more importantly, you LISTEN to them. Because you’re an expert in this field and what they need, you understand the detailed conversation you have with them.

You are the one who notices a pattern, you’re the one who can explain the nuanced issues at the center of the problem, and then somewhere farther up the chain, all of that becomes a polished PowerPoint, a beautiful dashboard, or an executive briefing – sometimes delivered by a person who has no time to listen, isn’t interested in letting other people shine, and by someone who thinks they know a whole lot more than they do.

I can talk about these people in a different episode, but they would look MUCH more like a leader, one who is highly secure in their position – interested in developing future leaders if they would allow others to demonstrate deep expertise when it is appropriate.

Of course – the person giving the briefing, built on your expertise, looks very strategic. And this is not about them “stealing your idea,” they will probably give you some type fo credit. “This was Michelle’s idea,” but the way they say that can sound like you are a technical expert while minimizing your leadership potential, while minimizing your overall vision. This usually happens if they “DON’T GET IT”. It happens when they are simply trying to check boxes, complete tasks to keep a CEO off their backs and so they generally continue to look like they have their own ducks in a row. Information has to move through organizations, and this is a very common scenario – some more senior people re-brief other people’s ideas better than others, for sure.

Senior leaders cannot personally visit every location, talk to every customer, read every technical analysis, or sit in every working meeting, so their teams do need so summarize information and condense it for senior consumption. But there can be a career consequence when senior people repeatedly see the synthesis without understanding how much of the judgment underneath it came directly from you.

They might know how hard you worked, but they may have missed how deeply you thought, processed information and the connections you personally made – they just know that you handed them a solution they needed and they are ready to check that box complete.

Maybe you are the person who takes a customer call late on Friday afternoon.

Later somebody hears, “Wow, Mary solved a customer problem, they sent a note to thank her.”

Okay. But do they know what you actually did? what you noticed? the decision you made? what crisis you prevented? Or why the customer trusted you enough to tell you what was really happening?

Do they know what you recommended afterward – did you recommend and engineering change? Does anyone know you recognized a larger pattern? Or that you connected two pieces of information nobody else had connected?

Maybe they hear, “Kathy went out and talked to the team.”

That sentence can make the important part sound like a typical site-visit, but the important part may have been what you saw once you got there.What insight did you have that would be missed from the whitepaper or the polished slide deck? What did people tell you? What did you notice across multiple conversations? Did any of that change your assumptions?

What insight did you bring back that could improve the organizations support to the customer, going forward? Did anyone capture that in enough detail so it can be incorporated?

That is a very different story than a simple site-visit and understanding of your capability.

And this is where I think a lot of very introverted high-achieving people get frustrated.

You are doing all this work – at a very high level… Then somebody else gets the developmental opportunity, the strategic assignment, the mentorship, the promotion, whatever it is.

And you are thinking, “What else do I have to prove?”

Maybe there are things you still need to develop. That is completely possible.

Sometimes the issue really is readiness, access, bias or politics or even the organization itself.

We are going to talk about those things because telling every person who is stuck in her career to simply work harder is not what I do here.

But if you recognize yourself in the Dependability Trap, I want you to look at two things:

First, look at how much of the organization’s success currently depends on you staying in your exact role, doing things that other people have not learned, systematized, or taken any responsibility for – or maybe they don’t seem to care about.

And second, look at the leaders, who influence your future career inside of the organization: What do they really understand about the work you do on their behalf – how much can they see you future capability? This can be challenging, but try to be as realistic as possible.

Those are different, but related problems.

One is about over-dependence on you and the other is about visibility.

No part of this answer can result in your becoming less visible. Also, there is no part of this where I want an attempt for you to become more visible, to evolve you into somebody you can’t stand.

I have seen other influences providing advice that basically tells people to speak a certain number of times in every meeting.

Why? This is ridiculous and performative – you will feel like a fraud.

There may be a meeting where you legitimately do not have anything useful to add, so just listen.

There may be another meeting where you are the person who understands the problem better than anybody else in the room and you need to talk for fifteen minutes of the meeting time.

Those are different situations.

The quality of the contribution matters much more to me than the quantity of times you opened your mouth.

The same thing is true with networking.

Relationships, mentors, sponsors all matter -- people have to know you. And I am the first to understand that being introverted does NOT mean you don’t like people – I love people, I just have to manage my social energy, so I try to use it wisely.

Your career strategy does not mean you need to go to every Thursday happy hour because somebody told you it’s required to rise in your career.

If those events drain you and they are not actually helping you build the relationships that matter, then find another way.

And please do not respond to being overlooked by becoming the person who now has to control every briefing, every presentation, every meeting with a senior leader, and every opportunity for recognition – sometimes this kind of control can leave a bad taste in everyone’s mouth. We have all seen these people.

I don’t personally think this will be an issue for you, and I don’t think those types are listening to this podcast.

Somebody else does half the work, and somehow one person is always standing at the front of the room. You do not need to take somebody else’s contribution away in order to tell the truth about your own.

If you did the deep analysis, it probably makes sense for you to brief it, so ask.

Maybe you have a real point of view about an important problem, so write it down and work it into a short, impactful proposal.

Maybe you have been doing the field work and you see a pattern senior people should understand, so put together the analysis.

There are a lot of ways to create visibility that have nothing to do with becoming acting like the more show-boat types that make your skin crawl.

But, if your organization has become dependent on you personally carrying a huge amount of important work, and you are waiting for that same work to automatically create your next opportunity, you might be waiting for the same people to solve a problem for your that they benefits from by leaving you in place.

That doesn’t mean you are stuck forever, but it does mean that once you realize this, that you can deliberately start changing the arrangement.

And your first step is simply to notice it.

So here is your experiment for this week.

For the next week, pay attention every time someone comes to you because you are the person who always handles it the issue.

Don’t track every task you perform but look for the things that really depend on you.

Maybe it is knowledge, a customer relationship, or that everyone knows you can resolve a certain kind of issue.

Are you the one person who understands how multiple systems fit together, is there a process everybody believes exists, but really the process is just you remembering seventeen things and making sure they happen.

Write a few of those down.

At the end of the week, choose one of these and ask yourself:

Why does this depend on me? Is there something I have been holding onto that should be transferred, taught, documented, systematized, or shared?

If I were offered a major opportunity tomorrow, what would have to happen so this important work I care about so deeply can continue without me personally owning all of it?

And then ask one more question:

Does anyone who makes decisions about my career development understand what this work demonstrates about what I might be capable of doing at a larger level?

You aren’t going to fix all of this this week -- just look at it and get curious about what is possible.

Because once you can see where people depend on you, you can start deciding which parts of that dependence represent genuine expertise you want to keep developing, which parts should be shared or systematized, and which parts may be keeping too much of your capacity trapped inside your current job.

You became dependable for a reason.

People trust you because you have earned that trust.

Customers call you because you have helped them.

Your boss gives you difficult work because you have demonstrated that you can handle it.

Those are good things, and that is when you need to start asking:

What could happen if all of this vision and capability were allowed to operate at a larger scale?

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If this episode made you recognize yourself, I have a free Strategic Visibility Mini-Course that can help you begin thinking about how the right people can understand more of the value and judgment you are already bringing without trying to turn yourself into someone else. You can find that in the show notes.

And in the next episode, we are going to make this more complicated.

Because the Dependability Trap is one reason a capable person can feel stuck.

It is not the only one.

The issue could be readiness, visibility, access, or the organization.

You might think you know your issue, but if it is really one of the others -- you can spend another year working extremely hard on the wrong solution.

We’ll talk about that in the next episode – so, hit the subscribe button so you don’t miss it!