Toby is brilliant. And a problem.

Somebody I know calls everybody of a certain type “a Toby”, because that was the name of the first one she encountered.

If you come into a company as a consultant and begin asking questions, Toby’s name will come up a lot. Because Toby knows the things that everybody else just takes for granted.

Toby can do the things nobody else can do, and understands the things that nobody else can quite grasp, so everybody else leaves them to him. Toby has created things that everybody else uses. Toby is the only one who can speak to that awkward customer or supplier. Only Toby knows how to use that machine. Or fix it when it breaks. Only Toby can remember the regulations that apply to that important complex duty. Many things in the company lead back to Toby, somehow, and nobody is quite sure why, but he has ideas that work and so that’s what happens.

“You should be talking to Toby. But he’s probably busy.”

For a consultant … massive alarm bells.

If anything happened to Toby – let’s be positive and assumes he wins the lottery, quits without notice, and moves to a tropical island the next day where there’s no internet – a lot of processes in the company are going to stop working. Either suddenly and catastrophically, or more likely slowly, insidiously, until the crippling problem needs effort and resources to fix. A consultant will know this at once, and advise that work needs to begin as a priority to make the company Toby-proof.

The benefits of being standard

Well-run companies will know this already, and don’t let Toby get to this point in the first place. And few companies get to any size without realising it.

The correct answer, everybody will tell you, is standardisation. Make everything in the company a process, document the process, and ensure that anyone can follow the process. That way nobody is indispensible, because if needed somebody else can take over and do what they do. It may take them longer, at least to begin with, and they may not do it so well, but it’ll be possible to do it. Never have anything that only one person can do, or only one person knows.

This leads to manageable job descriptions, too, because you can list the things that need to be done and the skills needed to do them.

Organisations like to be predictable, and this suits the way organisations work.

So all is well?

The potential of a genius

Toby may not be happy with this. Toby may leave. People may miss him and his ideas.

But the company feels safer, and less likely to hit disaster because of something out of its control.

However …

Let’s suppose that Toby is somehow a reincarnation of Leonardo da Vinci, or some other unequalled genius. Or a clone of the greatest in the field at whatever the company does. He just happens to be working at the company, uncelebrated.

His capabilities are so far beyond anyone else working there, or anyone else the company has a hope of attracting, that nobody could ever do what he does. It’s either undocumentable or nobody could follow it or do what it says.

But he’s a genius!

If you restrict him to what anyone else can do, you’re missing out on opportunities the company would never have otherwise. Worse, if he hates the restrictions and goes to get a job with a competitor, THEY have those opportunities.

So, miss out, or let him take the company hostage by making it dependent on him? Are those the only choices?

Is this realistic?

It’s not going to happen, is it? A genius isn’t going to slip in unannounced and be happy working in the mundane environment you probably see around you.

But the possibility exists at the end of a scale. And the existence of that scale shows that work and achievement is not interchangeable. Some people can do things that others can’t.

You can require jobs to be filled by the category of people who are capable of them. And for some jobs you’ll find those people. Which is fine.

Some people, though, are capable of things you haven’t thought of. Or have no proof are possible. Some people, with freedom, may make a difference you wouldn’t believe, even without being a one-of-a-kind genius. Because almost everybody is one-of-a-kind, so it’s not uncommon to find people with unique capabilities. They probably don’t look like you think.

The awkward person may be your unique advantage

In fact, as a manager, you may find that the difficult person is difficult for precisely that reason.

Not necessarily, of course. People are difficult for all sorts of reasons.

But if you have a standardised organisation, and somebody is chafing at not being allowed to do what they know they could, achieve the things they see are possible, they are very likely to seem difficult.

And then you have the Toby question in some form.

So what to do with them?

Here, I should confess that if I seem sympathetic to Toby, that’s because in my employed life I’ve found myself closer to Toby’s position in these scenarios than anyone else, short of being a genius. I’m not that, but it’s a fact that I usually end up with all sorts of things others can’t do.

I don’t fit well into standardised processes. I’m the type that pulls them apart and sees things wrong with them. That’s annoying for management, who don’t think it matters when they were working anyway. I’m also the type who, when discussing what to do, has the left-field idea that has never been tried but might give an edge when what they wanted was the known industry-standard solution that works everywhere. I’m the one who has been looking into this, and found that actually …

And I’ve solved this for myself by becoming the consultant, which works nicely for me. But has also led to me thinking a lot about what I would have done with my past self, and how to treat people when I recognise those qualities.

The short answer is for them only to do things that don’t need repeating.

The jargon answer is that they should work “on the business, not in the business”.

For some types of people, that means project work, from creating product lines, to running events, to winning particular customers or markets. The kind of thing that, once it’s done, is done, and the benefits last.

Overall, that’s the key.

But wait, there’s more …

I’m biased, but the very best use of the irreplaceable person, to me, is not to do work, but to create work.

By that, I mean that if someone has vision and capability that improves things, but you don’t want to come to depend on them or the capability, their responsibility should be to make the things that others do. Put that not at the service of getting things done, but in finding ways for others to get those same things done.

That way, you magnify the effect, and it lasts beyond their presence.

It might be training. It might be change management. It might be management itself (but probably won’t be). It might be some form of systems (not IT as such). They have to be allowed to make a difference, obviously. They usually need to be allowed to build, whether that’s in some kind of skunkworks effort or more official. The only condition is that whatever is done is made completely clear so that the result is standalone and doesn’t need their continued input.

Most companies, I find, don’t really want any of this. And that’s fine. Most organisations are about continuity above all, and the safest kind of continuity comes from predictability. And when something more is needed, there are probably consultants as a low-risk alternative, if usually more expensive.

But I’ve thought about this a lot and wanted to say somewhere that there is a way of squaring the circle, where you can get the most out of an exceptional person without them becoming an unexploded bomb. In my experience, most people want, more than anything else apart from their basic needs being met, to feel as though they’re useful. And the unusually capable person even more so.

When there’s nothing more to improve, you won’t mind Toby leaving, will you? So it’s win win.