Reliability as a competence trap
- YT :: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AF07fzRpSA0
- Original title :: You're Not Reliable. You're Trapped.
Being the most reliable person on a team means everyone routes their worst, lowest-value work to you - and because you're good, it gets done well, which makes it invisible, which means it never gets reassigned. This is a misallocation problem, not a time-management one, and the fix is deliberately filtering work by strategic value rather than by what you're capable of doing.
The competence trap
Someone notices you're good, hands you something slightly below your level, you do it well and fast, and now you're "the person who handles that." Months later you're running the team's invisible administrative layer while your actual high-leverage work slows to a crawl - the reward for excellence becomes more work, just lower-quality work.
Leverage points vs tasks
Work splits into things almost nobody else at your level can do (leverage points - these justify your role and reputation) and things plenty of other people could also do (tasks). "Tactical incompetence"
- distinct from weaponized incompetence, which is manipulation - means
deliberately not becoming the permanent unofficial expert on a low-value system (the expense tool, a legacy dashboard) just because you happened to be capable of learning it first: a surgeon doesn't sharpen their own scalpels because that time is worth more applied elsewhere.
Tactics for redirecting low-value requests
- Yes-and-redirect: agree to the task but name the trade-off explicitly ("I can do it Thursday given my current focus - if it's more urgent, which milestone should we push?").
- Ticket barrier: route it through backlog review: real requests survive the process, requests that were just social pressure disappear.
- Point back to existing documentation/SOPs when the asker should be building the skill themselves.
- For recurring requests, stop negotiating case by case and turn the refusal into structure: a rotation, an SLA, defined ownership - "that falls outside our current SLA" reads as operational, not personal.
Making the cost visible
Track time for two weeks, splitting high-leverage delivery from administrative support and reactive requests; if a large share of the week goes to below-level work, that's a business case to bring to a manager who typically sees the output but not what it costs to produce it. Push to renegotiate what "success" means on the team - away from tasks-closed/hours-logged and toward outcomes and systems improved - since being useful (absorbing work) and being promotable (building leverage) are different things.
For managers
Watch for one reliable person becoming the default destination for office housework, notes, scheduling, and cleanup that everyone else avoids; that work is real, but if it always lands on the same person it's a quiet tax on your best people - rotate, formalize, automate, or assign it honestly instead of treating it as free.