When the most competent person in the practice becomes a liability

There is a veterinary technician—you probably know her, or someone exactly like her—who has been at the practice for 11 years. She knows which cats will bite before they're out of the carrier, which clients need 5 extra minutes, and how to talk a panicked owner off a ledge at 4:45 [PM] on a Friday. She is, by every reasonable measure, indispensable—and that is precisely the problem.

Veterinary medicine selects for competence. Veterinary professionals study for it, test for it, and are judged by it on every shift. The more issues one individual solves, the more challenges find their way to them. The more people rely on them, the less they learn to function without them. And somewhere in that feedback loop, the practice's greatest asset can become its most significant bottleneck.

Cohosts Jennifer Edwards, DVM, ACC, CPC, ELI-MP, and Aaron Shaw, OTR/L, CHT, CSCS, call this pattern "overfunctioning." In this episode of The Resilient Vet: Mind and Body Strategies for Success, they make the case that this system can burn out individuals, stall team development, and make entire organizations more fragile than they appear.

Below is a partial transcript, lightly edited for improved clarity.

Edwards: What happens when your competence becomes a liability? Did I really just say that? Because it’s true; sometimes our competence, our knowledge, our skills, and the experience we bring to a project or a career actually end up holding us and everyone else back.

Today, we're going to unpack what that means, what it looks like, and what we do about it. In many veterinary practices, the most competent person actually ends up becoming the bottleneck. Because they know everything and do everything, they are always the "go-to" person. The problem is that they don't even realize it until they're absolutely exhausted.

When everything in the practice has to funnel through one person, that person becomes a stopping point. Nothing moves forward without them. Examples of this might be team members constantly checking in for decisions or having to check with the doctor. Maybe the doctor is being interrupted all day long and just can't write their records or focus on a lab result. Perhaps work that should just be done is being rechecked and revised. Again, it’s that feeling like nothing can move forward unless you approve it.

The more capable you are, the more problems flow toward you. And the more problems you solve, the more people rely on you. It becomes a vicious cycle. Competence is one of the most valued traits in veterinary medicine—and of course it is. We all want to be good at what we do. We study hard to become veterinarians or technicians, but when everything starts flowing through one person, that competence can become a liability.

Today, we're talking about why this pattern happens and how it affects resilience in veterinary teams.