Why the linchpin doesn't get promoted

Dysfunction loves dependable people. It thrives on them. But being essential isn't the same as being valued.

Companies don’t reward you for masking dysfunction. They rely on it. They reward the person patching it up with even more responsibilities. Not the kind that come with a promotion, but responsibilities that come with with more fire drills and more late nights. 

They reward you with praise for your “grit” and “reliability” while telling you you’re “too essential” to promote out of the position. So you get trapped. 

Heroics become the baseline. Effectiveness becomes invisible. Because if everything is running fine, why fix it?

The better you are at managing chaos, the more chaos you inherit. You become the go-to. The one who “just handles it.” The person who never lets anything fall through the cracks. 

Eventually, leadership stops seeing the cracks entirely. Then they stop seeing the person filling them.

The more reliable you are, the more dysfunction you’re asked to carry. Until eventually it exceeds your capacity. The cracks start to show again, and problems start to leak through. Now competence starts to look like underperformance.

“What would we do without Sharon?” becomes “What does Sharon even do, anyway?” 

“Sharon can handle it” becomes “Sharon’s lost her edge.”

And then one day Sharon’s gone and the dysfunction collapses under its own weight. 

People say, “Where’s Sharon?” then “I miss Sharon. She was the only one who could make it work.”

But that’s not a compliment to Sharon, she was the container that held someone else’s chaos. Crushed under the weight of the organization’s dysfunction. 

Don’t confuse quiet suffering with operational excellence. If leadership is proud of your ability to make the system work, they should also be asking why that system still needs someone to prop it up. 

If you’re the only person who can make it work, maybe it’s not working.

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