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When Capability Becomes an Organizational Resource
How the ability to manage more can change what an organization believes it is reasonable to expect.
There is a particular kind of workplace efficiency that deserves closer examination. It occurs when an employee becomes so effective at managing competing demands that the organization begins to treat her ability to manage them as part of how the work gets done. Nothing necessarily changes in her job description. Her workload may not formally increase. Her performance reviews may remain positive. Yet the organization begins relying on something it has never explicitly accounted for: her capacity to compensate for what the surrounding conditions do not provide.
The employee who anticipates problems becomes the informal risk-management system. The employee who can navigate competing priorities becomes the person everyone approaches when priorities collide. The employee who understands how to move work forward despite unclear instructions becomes the mechanism through which ambiguity is absorbed rather than addressed. Each contribution may be valuable in its own right, but the pattern raises a question about what the organization is actually measuring when it evaluates performance.
