The Workaround Is the Warning
When a team quietly builds a workaround around someone, it has usually answered a question the manager is still asking.
Almost every team I’ve worked with has quietly built a workaround around someone. A peer double-checks a certain person’s numbers before anyone else sees them. A task that used to go to the whole group now routes around one desk, and nobody ever said so out loud.
Nobody calls it a workaround, either. It gets a smaller label, like “just being careful” or “that’s how we do it now.” By the time it has a name, the decision it covers has usually been waiting a while.
The Team’s Answer
A workaround is the team’s honest assessment of someone’s reliability, expressed through behavior instead of words. No one has to say it. The double-check and the rerouted task are the team’s answer to a question the manager hasn’t gotten around to asking yet.
The manager, meanwhile, is still asking a softer question: bad quarter or bad fit? That’s a fair question to ask once. The problem is how long it stays open after the team has already answered its own version and moved on.
It’s the same gap I wrote about in The Leader Who Knows What They Don’t Want, where a team has to guess at the standard it’s being held to. Here, the roles are reversed. The team answered through what it built, and the leader is the one still catching up.
Why the Delay Feels Rational
In the moment, keeping the workaround open feels like the sensible call. A hard conversation is scheduled and specific, and it costs an afternoon plus a knot in your stomach beforehand. The cost of waiting is spread out and easy to miss day to day, as a little more work gets redistributed and a little more trust gets spent on the people covering someone else’s gap.
In a startup, that redistribution is easy to spot because two or three people are visibly covering for one. In a larger org, it’s easier to hide, since there’s more slack to absorb it before anyone connects the dots.
So the specific cost usually wins, even when the spread-out cost is larger. That’s true for good managers as much as bad ones (I’d know).
When It’s Temporary
Of course, some workarounds are temporary. Teams build them around real bad quarters too, whether that’s someone going through something outside work or a skill gap that’s genuinely closing with coaching. The difference shows in whether the workaround is shrinking or hardening.
A shrinking workaround, with less double-checking than three months ago and tasks slowly moving back to the person, is evidence the coaching is working. A stable or expanding one, with the same double-check six months running or one more task moved away this quarter, is the harder signal. It’s also the one that’s easy to reclassify as “just how we do it now” instead of addressing it.
This test has one blind spot. A workaround built around a documented medical or disability accommodation can look identical to a hardening one, with the same double-check running for months for reasons that have nothing to do with fit. That distinction matters enough, both to the person and the organization, that it deserves its own conversation with HR before anyone reads a long-running workaround as a judgment on the person.
The Cost
The person it’s built around pays for the workaround too, and that’s the part I find easiest to forget when I’m the one avoiding the conversation.
Someone who’s been worked around for months usually knows, at some level, that something is off. They feel the room adjust without ever being told what changed. That’s a worse position than a direct, honest conversation about what isn’t working and what would need to change. Putting that conversation off doesn’t make it easier for anyone, and the longer it waits, the less clear it is whose job it was to have it.
What To Do
Instead of asking whether it’s a bad quarter or a bad fit, try asking what the team has already built to work around this person, and how long it’s been running. A workaround a few weeks old is worth watching. A workaround that’s become part of how the team operates, the kind nobody remembers setting up, is closer to a decision the team has already made on its own.
I’ve been slow on this more than once. The workaround is always obvious in hindsight, but it’s rarely obvious walking past it every day, because by the time it’s fully built, it just looks like how the team works.
What has your team quietly built a workaround for, and how long has it been running?
