For years, I thought the strongest compliment I could give someone on my team was “we couldn’t run without you.” I used it in performance reviews and on calls with friends (and some enemies) when they asked who my key people were, and I wore it like a badge of honor, both for them and for me, since it meant I had built something worth depending on.
It took me a painfully long time, and a few genuinely stressful stretches where one person being unreachable for a couple of days nearly stalled a launch, to understand that I had it backwards the entire time. “We couldn’t run without you” means I let a few people become the entire company’s heros, and never built anyone under them who could take it on. .
I was celebrating the wrong thing
Every growing company has that one person, sometimes several. It might be an engineer who is the only one who understands the payments system. Or a salesperson who is the rainmaker. We call these people irreplaceable, and we say it with pride, when what we’re really describing is a ticking timebomb. It is easy to slide into this pattern, especially when you are moving fast and stopping to teach someone else the ropes feels like a detour from actually shipping.
I have come to believe heroism in a growing company is a structural failure wearing agbada and kembe of virtue. Behind almost every hero I have ever worked with, there is usually a manager who could not, or would not, develop the people underneath them, whether out of insecurity, laziness, or the very human fear of training your own replacement. I built this exact culture for years before I ever managed to diagnose it in myself.
None of this makes the person carrying all that weight a villain. Most of them are simply chasing efficiency, trying to get things done the fastest way they know, and that instinct is exactly what turns them into a bottleneck. Showing them why that shortcut costs the business more than it saves is part of our job as leaders, and it takes patience rather than blame.
So when it dawned on me that a company’s growth will always have a ceiling when it runs through “special” people, I knew it was time to sit with my thoughts, lease some common sense, and recalibrate before everyone becomes limited by one person’s calendar, since that is a terrifying place to build a business from.
Why I think about life as a numbers game
Now, in my quest for solutions to salvage the deep mess a business like this can unintentionally land in, I stumbled on what I call the law of networks, and the clearest way I know to explain it is through luck.
Let’s say an averagely sharp person can convert about 5% of the luck that crosses their path into something useful, an opportunity turned into a deal, a chance meeting turned into a partnership, whatever form luck takes for you. If that person has a hundred people in their network, or sees a hundred opportunities over the course of a year, they will convert around five of them. That is the ceiling for someone operating alone, a fixed number no matter how sharp they are.
Imagine that same person with a network of a hundred people, each passing along even half of the opportunities that come their way. Suddenly, you are no longer looking at just a hundred opportunities. You are looking at a much larger pool, and converting the same modest 5% of it produces results that are nowhere close to what one person working in isolation could ever achieve. The 5% conversion rate never changed. What changed was the size of the pool it was applied to, and that is the difference between linear effort and exponential outcomes.
When you are running a business by yourself, whether you are an engineer, a salesperson, or a founder wearing every hat at once, so much depends on you simply staying upright. You get tired or sick. Life happens (and life can be a bitch), in the mundane and the serious ways it always does, and when it does, everything tied to you grinds to a halt along with you. There is no backup plan when everything runs through one person.
But the moment you have a network, the moment you have people you have genuinely invested in and handed real responsibility to, the entire structure stops depending on one link holding and starts holding itself up. It grows exponentially, and it keeps growing on the days you are not in the room.
The math behind working with other people in the room
There is something I have started calling synergy, in the literal sense that 1 + 1 = 5, well past whatever the word has come to mean on a corporate poster. On your own, there is a limit to what you can produce, shaped entirely by your own bandwidth, blind spots, and your own limited hours in a day.
When you bring good people into that picture, whether by hiring them or by deliberately replicating your own capabilities in them, they often grow faster than you did, because engagement surfaces things that solitude never will. There are insights that only become visible through the friction of working alongside someone else, ones neither of you would have arrived at alone.
Think of a time you were stuck on a problem, turning it over in your head with no progress, and then you start explaining it out loud to a colleague, a friend, or someone at your workspace, and somewhere in the middle of that sentence the answer simply appears, from the act of engaging with another mind.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is the compounding effect at work, and there is friction that comes with it. Plenty of us struggle with the more mundane side of this, the part where you have to explain what you do, translate your instincts into something teachable, put language around decisions you have always made by feel. It is an uncomfortable struggle, but it is one worth working through.
The one expectation I have of every senior hire
After building this the wrong way for longer than necessary, here is where I have landed. If you are ever going to build something that outlasts your own energy and attention, whether as a manager or a business owner, you have to replicate yourself deliberately, so your effort compounds into exponential results through the people around you.
Practically, this means every senior person on my team is now measured on one thing above almost everything else: whether the people reporting to them can do a fragment of their job within eighteen months, well beyond approximating it or simply surviving without them for a week. Leaders have to actively recognize this risk in themselves and fight against it, mostly through mentoring people directly and showing them by example.
If that is not happening, what the senior person has built is a monument to their own indispensability, and a monument, by definition, does not scale. I hope this has been useful in some small way. I have my doubts about how many people will go and change how they measure their own team because of it.
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