Cheryl had already lost two of the 12 people on her team in the company’s first reduction in force. Then her product marketing lead resigned to join a competitor. A few weeks later, she was asked to cut two more roles.
But Cheryl, the company’s chief marketing officer, was most concerned about the marketing manager who ran the firm’s content platform—and had told her months earlier that she was burned out. As Cheryl explained, “I need to accelerate our training plan. If she leaves, we’re screwed.”
The people you rely on most can also be your biggest risk.
I’ve thought about Cheryl’s team this summer, mostly while sitting in airports. Three of my flights were canceled and two were severely delayed, and two colleagues had theirs canceled on the same day due to “air traffic control restrictions.”
An independent National Academies report found that 19 of the largest U.S. air traffic control facilities, accounting for 40% of system delays, were more than 15% below their staffing targets.
The gap was years in the making, and is difficult to reverse. Between fiscal 2010 and fiscal 2024, the number of controllers shrank by 13% even as operations rose by 4%. Overtime more than tripled as the system relied more on the controllers who remained.
Hiring alone will not quickly restore capacity. As of April 2026, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) had about 4,000 controllers in the training pipeline—but at the largest facilities, new hires take an average of 5.5 years from a tentative job offer to become fully certified.
For most businesses, roles don’t require certification, so it’s assumed replacing someone will be relatively quick. Yet what Cheryl’s manager knows took five years to learn and lives nowhere but in her head. That is a certification period as well, just without the governing body.
When a role disappears during a reorganization, the work is reallocated to those who remain. After repeated layoffs, employees may be carrying work from several previous iterations of the team, spanning multiple roles and responsibilities, with processes that were never designed for fewer people. Yet as long as targets continue to be met, leaders may mistake that performance for proof that the team structure is sound. This is a mistake.
Stop covering the gap
The FAA’s mistake wasn’t using overtime. It was allowing a temporary fix to compensate for a problem that had been building for over a decade. For years, the FAA hired fewer controllers than its own staffing models said it needed. At critical facilities, the certified controllers needed to train new hires were also needed to keep daily traffic moving. This limited how many new controllers a facility could train at a time.
The FAA should have protected enough certified-controller time for training and directed staffing to facilities with the greatest impact on delay, rather than relying on the existing workforce to cover a structural gap.
This pattern also plays out in companies, just less overtly. A role is eliminated, yet no work is eliminated with it. Instead, the remaining employees cover the difference—even though they are often the same people who hold the knowledge and relationships needed to train whoever comes next.
With her marketing manager at risk and nearly half her team already gone or slated for cuts, Cheryl first needed to determine what work her team could stop or pause without jeopardizing key priorities.
When she looked closely, she found that some of the work consuming her team’s capacity wasn’t marketing work at all. Her marketing manager, for example, was spending most of her week reconciling data for the product team to produce the marketing materials she was responsible for.
That’s how a broken process gets absorbed instead of fixed. The work still gets done, and it buys the organization time. The question is what leaders do with that time.
Before asking your most reliable people to absorb more, identify the work they shouldn’t be carrying in the first place. Ask: What inputs have we taken on because we own the output? What processes no longer make sense now that we’re a smaller team? What work is outside of our top priorities and can be paused for the time being? Then align on the revised workload and process with your boss and peers.
Make room for other people to own the work
Your next step is to ensure what remains isn’t held by one person. That does not mean assigning someone to shadow your employee; it means giving someone else a piece to own outright.
Air traffic control trainees work “live traffic” under supervision until they can manage the position alone. Yet in companies, observation is often the whole training plan.
The distinction matters. A backup learns what the job is like. Someone who owns part of it learns how to actually do the job: what hasn’t been written down and what happens when something goes wrong.
A tax leader I work with began delegating more work to a director on his team. Within a few months, the director took on a project she wouldn’t historically have touched. As he described it, she was “aggressively wanting to push [the project] forward” to the point that he had to rein in the pace. That came from ownership, not assistance.
Cheryl discovered another complication: The person you are trying to protect may not want to give the work up. Her marketing manager’s scope had just been reduced, and now she was being asked to hand off part of what remained to a more junior colleague. Together, these felt like a demotion.
Cheryl had to say out loud what she’d assumed was obvious. The objective was not to diminish the marketing manager’s impact, but to increase it, by freeing up her time to focus on the activities on her scorecard while building redundancy into critical functions across the department.
Invest in redundancy on your own schedule
Cheryl’s marketing manager had been burned out for months before Cheryl knew, and shifting job responsibilities may take longer than an employee’s patience. Sometimes you can’t stop the work at all, because the function that owns it won’t take it back and someone above you insists it still gets done.
The FAA was warned about this in 2016. A decade later, it is trying to rebuild because the controllers needed to train the next group are the same ones keeping traffic moving today. Companies face the same constraint. By the time one person’s importance becomes obvious, they’ve become the person you can least afford to pull away from the day-to-day to train someone else. You can invest in redundancy on your own schedule or pay for it the day someone resigns.