Every company has a Susan.
Yours might be named something else. You know who I mean, though, because when anything gets confusing, the answer is always the same three words: *ask Susan.* Why doesn’t the invoice match the contract? Ask Susan. What did we promise this client in 2021? Ask Susan. How does the handoff between sales and delivery actually work? Ask Susan, because it’s not written anywhere, because it lives in Susan.
Leadership calls Susan a rockstar. I’ve never agreed with that description.
I don’t think Susan is a rockstar employee. I think Susan is an undocumented database with excellent attendance.
—
Nobody designed this. That’s the first thing to understand. There was no meeting where anyone decided a person should become infrastructure.
It accreted. Susan saw a gap and filled it, because she’s the kind of person who physically cannot watch something fall through a crack. Then she filled another one. Every gap she covered became hers permanently — that’s the rule nobody says out loud: in most companies, touching a broken thing twice makes you its owner. Ten years of that, and Susan isn’t doing a job anymore. She’s *being a system.*
And here’s the part that belongs in this chapter, the mental health chapter, and not just in an ops discussion: for a lot of Susans, indispensability wasn’t an accident. It was safety.
If you’ve ever worked somewhere that made you feel replaceable — or lived somewhere that made you feel worse than replaceable — being the only one who knows is armor. They can’t discard the person the building runs on. Making yourself irreplaceable works. That is exactly what makes it a trap.
—
Look at what it costs her.
Susan hasn’t taken a real vacation in years. She’s taken *trips*, with a laptop, answering the pings that start on day one, because the system can’t be out of office. She can’t be sick without a backlog forming that only she can clear. And she can’t be promoted — leadership has said so, in the softest language available: *we just can’t lose her where she is.* Read that sentence again. It means her reward for becoming essential is a cage. The indispensability that was supposed to be safety now has her pinned to the exact square of the org chart where she’ll burn out.
And after enough years, the deepest cost: the fusion. Ask Susan what she wants and she’ll answer for the company before she remembers she was asked about herself. *The one who knows* stopped being her function a long time ago. It became her identity. That’s not dedication. That’s a person who has been performing a load-bearing role so long she no longer remembers which parts of the weight are hers.
—
Now run the ending, because it’s coming.
Susan leaves. Burnout, a better offer, or just — done. And the organization discovers, over about six weeks, that her job description covered maybe a third of her job. They hire her title. The new person walks into a role where the real responsibilities were never written down, fails at work nobody told them existed, and gets blamed for it. *She’s just not Susan.*
Of course she’s not. Nobody is. That was the problem.
Meetings multiply to coordinate manually what Susan coordinated invisibly. Institutional memory turns out to have been one woman’s hippocampus. And eventually somebody in leadership says the wrong lesson out loud: *we never should have let her go.*
The right lesson is that no one should ever have been the system. The problem was never Susan. The problem was the system Susan was compensating for — and the company’s decade of gratitude for not having to build it.
—
If you have a Susan, I’m not going to tell you to appreciate her more. You already appreciate her. Appreciation is the currency you’ve been paying her in instead of relief.
The kindest thing you can do for your best employee is build the system she’s been impersonating.
Do it while she’s still there to tell you what it needs to do.