A moment of silence for the team member serving as the operational glue in a dysfunctional business.

Their job description says one thing, but their actual job is handling whatever screams the loudest on a given day.

A client issue pops up and nobody knows who should handle it? They do.

Someone drops a ball between departments? They catch it.

A process breaks and nobody technically owns fixing it? Guess who figures it out.

Someone needs information and nobody knows where it lives? Ask them.

They're usually highly competent, resourceful, and deeply knowledgeable about how the company actually works—which makes them the default destination for everything nobody else clearly owns.

The problem is that none of this work replaces the job they were hired to do. It gets added on top of it.

They block two hours to finish a project but spend the first 45 minutes resolving a client issue.

They sit down to improve a process and get pulled into three Slack threads because they're the only person who knows what should happen next.

The thing you asked for on Monday is still unfinished on Thursday, while they've spent the week solving problems you didn't even know were landing on their desk.

The team member says, "I have too much on my plate."

Meanwhile, the owner is looking at their responsibilities thinking, "Then why aren't these things getting done?"

And that's how you can have two people looking at the exact same week and seeing something completely different.

The owner sees:

"You're responsible for A, B, C. C isn't getting done."

The employee experiences:

"Yes, because I spent Tuesday fixing D, Wednesday coordinating E, and half of Thursday answering questions about F—and none of those things technically belong to me."

And because they're good at catching those things, the business can operate like this for a surprisingly long time.

Their competence is compensating for a structural problem.

You can take a few tasks off their plate or hire another assistant, project manager, or operations person.

But hiring help doesn't fix work that doesn't know where it belongs.

If the ownership gaps remain, the next weird client issue, broken handoff, or unanswered question will eventually route right back to the person you've been trying to free up.

And adding people can actually create more places for this to happen.

More people means more handoffs and more places for work to get stuck between "I did my part" and "I thought they were handling it."

If nobody clearly owns what happens next, someone eventually has to notice the ball sitting on the floor.

In most businesses, that's the highest-functioning person with enough organizational knowledge to know it shouldn't be there.

So if you have someone on your team who's involved in everything, constantly overwhelmed, and simultaneously falling behind on the work you hired them to do, don't start by auditing their job description.

Audit their actual week.

Look at everything they touched that wasn't supposed to belong to them.

The client problem they solved.

The decision someone escalated to them.

The handoff they coordinated.

The question they answered because nobody else knew.

The process they stepped into to keep moving.

Then ask two questions:

Why did this land with them?

Who should own it next time?

If the answer is them, make it explicit and make sure their role actually has the capacity for it.

If the answer is someone else, move the ownership there.

If nobody knows the answer, you've probably found the problem.

Do that enough times and you'll start seeing where your business is using a competent person to compensate for unclear ownership.

That's the stuff you fix.

Work that happens repeatedly needs a clear owner. Otherwise it eventually belongs to whoever is competent enough to pick it up.

And that's how you end up evaluating someone against one job while they're quietly spending their days doing two.

Your most capable people shouldn't spend their careers compensating for work nobody bothered to clearly own.