Pondering Coping is not carrying
People don't announce their limits by buckling. They absorb, they cope, and then they quietly get worse. Here's how to spot it before something crowded happens.
In July 1981, during a crowded tea dance at a Kansas City hotel, two suspended walkways collapsed into the atrium below. One hundred and fourteen people died. The investigation didn't find a villain. It found a small change to a connection detail, approved during fabrication, that doubled the load on one joint. For a year that joint held. Right up until it didn't.
I start Volume 2 of Blueprints for Leadership there, not to be grim, but because it's the cleanest picture I know of a problem I've watched play out in organisations again and again: a load placed on a member that couldn't carry it, and nobody with a method for checking.
Unlike steel, people don't announce their limits by buckling.
They absorb the extra weight quietly. They cope: longer hours, weekends, the work still going out the door. And then they get quietly worse at the job while looking busier at it. From the outside, coping and carrying look identical. That's the trap.
Three ways it shows up
The promoted expert. Your best engineer, nurse or salesperson is promoted to lead the function they used to serve. Eighteen months later they're working harder than ever and achieving less. The one lever they've always pulled, more effort and more craft, is now the wrong lever. We call it a development need. Often it's a structural mismatch: we moved them from work where you solve each case brilliantly yourself to work where you build the system that solves cases without you.
The star signing. A team under pressure spends big on someone of undeniable talent and gets worse. The person isn't the problem. The frame they were dropped into had no role of the right shape for them.
The missing floor. In the name of agility, a layer of management comes out. Some layers really were decoration. Others were load-bearing, and when they go, decisions stall, the top drowns in detail, and the people who needed a real manager leave to find one.
Three stories, one story
Each of these is a structural problem read as a personal one. The Load-Bearing blueprint draws your organisation as a cross-section of a building: each floor is a level of work, each beam a managerial relationship. You draw in the real reporting lines, mark where the weight actually sits, and look for the strained beams, the doubled-up floors and the people who are stranded or stretched.
It draws on Elliott Jaques's work on levels of work, but you don't need to have read a word of Jaques to use it. You need a big printout, pencils rather than pens, and the honesty to mark what's really there.
A question to take into this week
Where in your organisation is someone coping, rather than carrying? Not who's complaining. Who's gone quiet, working longer, and getting a little worse?
Try the Load-Bearing blueprint, free
The whole of Chapter 1 is free, blueprint included. Print it as large as you can and grab a pencil, or draw on it on screen and come back to it later.
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