What Happens When Sarah Takes Three Months Off?

The CFO shifts in her chair. The operations manager stares into his coffee like it might offer guidance. Someone eventually says, "We'd work it out," and the meeting moves on.

That pause says more than the org chart does.

Because most organisations are held together by work that barely anyone sees—and that only a handful of people actually understand.

The Work That Starts as a Favour and Never Stops

Hidden manual work rarely starts as a problem. It usually begins as a favour.

A system can't quite handle an edge case. A client needs something urgent. A report needs "just one more tweak." Someone capable fills the gap so the outcome doesn't suffer.

The spreadsheet grows tabs.
The inbox rule becomes essential.
The quick double-check turns into a daily ritual.

None of this gets written down because it feels temporary, informal, or too awkward to explain without making someone look incompetent or the system look broken.

Eventually, it stops feeling temporary.

Last year, we worked with a mid-sized logistics business where one accounts payable officer was manually reconciling close to 400 invoices a week. Their ERP couldn't properly align with their freight system, so she'd built her own method over time: multiple spreadsheets, emailed rate cards, and a mental checklist she ran through every morning. She'd been doing it for six years. The numbers were always right. She'd even trained two juniors who'd since left—neither lasted more than eighteen months.

She also hadn't taken more than a week off in three years.

The Trap of "It's Working, Isn't It?"

Most leaders know exactly who their lynchpin people are.

They're dependable. They catch things. Half the time, they've fixed a problem before anyone else realises there was one.

At the same time, leaders feel the risk in their gut. If that person got sick, resigned, or simply decided they were done, the fallout would be immediate. Yet stepping in feels uncomfortable. After all, things are working.

So leaders end up stuck between praising the behaviour and quietly dreading what happens when it stops.

I remember reading a Deloitte piece a few years back—around 2021, I think—that stuck with me. They'd surveyed finance teams in large organisations and found that even with enterprise systems in place, monthly close processes still depended on spreadsheets that only two or three senior people fully understood. The technology investment looked impressive. The actual work depended on trust.

That pattern shows up everywhere: finance, project delivery, engineering teams, professional services, even fast-growing SaaS companies.

What Being Indispensable Actually Costs

Being indispensable feels flattering at first. It comes with trust, influence, and the sense that you matter.

Over time, it becomes a weight.

People carrying this load worry about taking leave. They monitor their inbox after hours. They field "quick questions" because nobody else has the context. Their job quietly expands to include holding the business together.

Last year I sat with an operations manager while she walked me through her reconciliation process. She had seventeen browser tabs open, four spreadsheets, and a Post-it note stuck to her monitor that read "CHECK FREIGHT DATES TWICE." She'd built an entire system out of fragments. It worked beautifully. It also couldn't survive her taking a proper holiday—and she knew it.

There's a body of HBR writing on what they call invisible labour—the work that's essential but never shows up in headcount planning or role descriptions. The link to burnout is well established, especially among experienced staff who feel personally responsible for outcomes.

The strange thing is that the more competent someone is, the more likely they are to get trapped this way.

These issues tend to surface during moments of change. The business grows. Volumes increase. New clients arrive. Suddenly, the workaround that took ten minutes a day now takes two hours. A new hire needs weeks of shadowing because the real process lives in someone's head. An audit asks how a figure was produced, and no one can fully trace it.

Technology teams have a blunt term for this: the "bus number". Martin Fowler and others use it to describe how many people could disappear before a system fails. While it comes from software, the idea fits operations just as well.

A low bus factor doesn't mean anyone has been careless. Usually it just means the business grew faster than anyone had time to properly design how the work should happen.

From the outside, everything looks professional. From the inside, everyone knows it's held together with sticky tape and one person's institutional memory.

This Isn't a People Problem

The obvious response is to blame individuals: they should document more, share knowledge better, stop being a bottleneck.

That misses what's actually happening.

People create workarounds because the organisation asks them to deliver outcomes without giving them systems that fully support the work. They're responding sensibly to time pressure, imperfect tools, and competing demands.

I don't have a clean answer for how you convince a high performer that documenting their process won't make them replaceable. That conversation is awkward every time. It requires trust, and it requires leaders to be honest about the risk they're carrying.

Finding Where the Real Work Lives

When this gets addressed properly, it usually starts with questions rather than audits.

What do people actually do each day to get results?
Where does information get copied, checked, or reconciled by hand?
Which steps rely on judgement that only one person holds?

When we start working with a client, the first few weeks are mostly listening. We sit with the people doing the work—not just managers describing it—and ask them to show us what really happens. Not the process map. The lived version.

That's usually where it appears: the spreadsheet with dozens of tabs, the email folder marked "exceptions," the morning routine that takes ninety minutes because three systems don't share data.

We're not trying to take people out of the process—we're trying to take the unnecessary weight off them.

That might mean connecting systems so data flows cleanly. It might mean introducing automated workflows for repeatable steps. It often means better reporting so decisions don't rely on someone remembering what changed last month.

The outcome is workdays that don't run past six, and leave that doesn't require a week of pre-work to feel possible.

So What Do You Do About It?

If you recognise your organisation in this, you probably already know who's holding things together.

The question is what you do with that knowledge.

You can keep relying on goodwill and quiet heroics, hoping nothing changes. Or you can invest in making the work more visible, shared, and sustainable.

3 Dot Digital supports organisations that have reached this point. The focus is practical: fewer workarounds, cleaner handovers, and people who can actually take leave without their phone buzzing.

If you've read this far, you're probably already thinking of someone specific.

The work will get done either way. The question is whether it keeps costing you your best people to make that happen.