Good Morning,
With this being my second email with dangers of using a go-to person, please do not think that I am down on them. Heck, I am one of them, as are many of my friends and family members. My point is, like almost everything, too much of a good thing can become a bad thing.
Using a go-to person too often does reduce the growth and learning of others, but it also has the danger of burning the go-to’s out. Especially in areas where there is physical labor and deep thinking involved.
Imagine having a team of people who push around large, heavy machines and operate them throughout the day in different parts of their office space. They move them, set them up, wait for the right time to use them, pack them up, and then move them again. The day can get tiresome. If you have a few people on that team who are more experienced or just plain better than the rest, there is a temptation to keep giving the tasks to these ‘go-to’ people over dividing up the tasks as evenly as possible.
The go-to people do what they do best and make the unit shine, but at the cost of burning them out physically and mentally, as well as creating a rift between team members who seem to get to sit around a whole lot as they are assigned less tasks.
Burning out the go-to people without properly training and expanding the skills of the rest of the team leaves the team in a bad way. Without the ability to promote from within, there is the need to consider bringing in new talent from the outside. While that is a good thing, especially for the person coming in, it can and often does put pressure on the existing team to accept the new, knowing that they were not good enough to step up themselves (either by choice or just by not having the knowledge and experience).
In the end, the go-to person is a gift from on high and like your favorite anything, should be used responsibly to avoid wearing them out and allowing the rest of the team to develop. Think of it this way, if you five pairs of shoes, and you wear the same pair every day, in six months you will still have five pairs of shoes. Four will be like new, and one will be ready for the repair shop or trash.
The best team, by the way, is a team full of go-to people. A team of leaders who know when to step up and when to step back and allow another team member to take the lead.
Having been a member of a team where I was both the go-to person and the person who watched all the choice projects going to the go-to person, I found that I learned the most when the team experience was in the middle, when there was no real go-to person, where everyone got to play a part.
This works in any team, in families and organizations of all sizes.
Enjoy!
Sanford Berenberg
Sanford@berenberg.net
http://www.berenberg.net
http://sanfordberenberg.blogspot.com/
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