Bill Canady identifies three ways employees become indispensable bottlenecks: a salesperson hoarding key accounts, an engineer fixing problems instead of preventing them, and an executive controlling information for power. Leaders must spread knowledge and build redundant processes to scale.
The one thing that I've seen is that you, all companies have those people in the company that have the hero syndrome where they have tried to make themselves indispensable so much so some of them by not even fixing the things that break so that they get pulled back in, whether it's that salesperson that is the only person with the relationship with some companies, That engineer that is the only person that knows how to fix it and stays up all night and is the hero versus making sure it doesn't break in the first time, first place, or that executive that really trades in information and uses knowledge as currency and wants to be the only person that receives information so that they can disseminate information.
