wattsnextpx - Your 7.1 Is Hiding Something

I was sitting with a leadership team a little while ago, going through the results of their PX Baseline™ - the diagnostic we run when we first start working with a business. It was a good day. The scores were solid, and the numbers told the story of a team that had held together through a rough patch and come out the other side still caring.

Then one of them asked a question that was better than any number on the page.

She said: "How much would it take to tip this? For a few of our best people to slide from a seven to a four?"

The room went quiet. In the good way. Because she was right to ask.

We celebrate the average and miss the soft spot underneath

The thing about a good survey result is that it is an average, and averages are comforting. But a small team is not an average. It is a handful of specific people carrying specific things, and the health of the whole can rest on a few of them.

When one of your load-bearing people has a quiet, hard year, the number on the page barely moves. The risk doesn't show up as a bad score. It shows up as a good score with a soft spot in it that nobody is looking at.

Key person risk isn't the bus. It's the fade.

When people say key person risk, they usually picture the dramatic version. Someone resigns, the proverbial bus arrives, and suddenly nobody knows how the thing works.

But the more common way you lose a key person is slower and quieter. They don't leave. They fade. The seven becomes a four. They stop offering the extra idea. They stop covering the gaps no one else sees, because they are tired and nobody noticed. By the time it shows up in your results, you have already lost most of what made them a seven.

You reduce it by needing each person a little less

The way you protect your key people is by making the business a little less dependent on each of them. Not by valuing them less. By making sure that what lives in one person's head also lives somewhere else.

In practice that is straightforward. You get the how of the important work out of one person's memory and into something a colleague could follow. You define roles around the outcomes someone owns rather than the tasks they do, so the thread can be picked up when they are away. And when someone takes real leave and the place keeps running, that is your proof the knowledge was shared rather than quietly held by one person.

The score is the start of the conversation, not the end

A good result filed away as a win is a missed opportunity. The number is useful - it tells you where you stand and gives you something to measure against next time. But the value is not the score. It is the question the score lets you ask.

Like the one that leadership team asked me.

A team sitting on solid numbers with a quiet key person risk is in a very different place than the average suggests. The only way you find that out is by looking past the average to the real conversation underneath it.

That client didn't get a worse result than she thought. She got a better question than she expected. And she left planning to protect the three or four people who, if they slipped, would take the whole number down with them.

That is the real work. Not chasing a higher score. Knowing which parts of a good one are holding their breath.
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P.S. If you already know exactly which few people your business could not absorb the loss of, that isn't a comfort. That is your to-do list.