She could hear the heavy HVAC system clicking back on in the otherwise silent wing of the office. It was 7:06 PM. Laura wasn’t looking at her own work; that stack of complexity had been neatly signed off and filed away hours ago, every decimal point in its place. She was staring at Ben’s spreadsheet-specifically, cell D46, where an inventory mismatch of $676,000 had somehow been entered as a receivable.
It wasn’t malice on Ben’s part. It was just sloppiness, a fundamental lack of systems thinking, perhaps the kind of tired mistake we all make sometimes. But Laura knew that if she sent the report up containing that error, the entire subsequent chain of reconciliation would be invalidated… So, she wasn’t sending it back to Ben. She was just fixing it herself, line by painful line, because correcting it was faster than teaching him how to care enough to correct it.
The reward for being exceptional is not recognition or promotion; it’s the immediate, unspoken duty to absorb the risks, fix the mistakes, and manage the emotional fallout created by everyone operating 6 levels below your standard.
I’ve been there-and worse, I’ve been the manager who relied on it. I hated the mess left by the B- and C-players, but I unconsciously treated my A-players like infinite resource buffers. It was easier to dump complex cleanup on them than to execute the painful, lengthy management process required to actually elevate the baseline performance of the rest of the team. We mistake resilience for infinite capacity, and we treat their dedication as a tool for institutional laziness.
Organizational Thermodynamics and Energy Drain
There is a deeply unsettling reality about organizational thermodynamics: businesses are structured as energy transfer systems. They locate the point of highest stored energy (your star performer), and they establish an almost perfect conduit to drain that energy to compensate for entropy elsewhere. We celebrate the person who keeps the plates spinning, never asking why so many plates were launched off balance in the first place.
Internal Monologue Example:
I tried to meditate for 46 minutes this morning, and the clock haunted me. Even when trying to shut down, the preemptive anxiety of anticipating tomorrow’s required fixes kept dragging me back. That is the internal landscape of someone paying the competence tax: the boundary between work and rest dissolves, not because the tasks are endless, but because the responsibility for stability is endless.
Blake K.-H.: The 6 Jobs Nobody Saw
Blake wasn’t burning out on inventory reconciliation. He was burning out on linguistic reconciliation, behavioral risk mitigation, and emotional labor disguised as data cleanup. He was performing 6 different jobs, but only one showed up on his performance review. This dynamic creates a quiet, festering rage that doesn’t explode; it just turns into a resignation letter.
Internalizing Systemic Risk
In high-stakes environments, this energy drain is particularly acute. Consider a foreman managing a complex construction site or a property manager overseeing a massive portfolio. Their competence is often the only thing standing between stable operations and catastrophic failure. They internalize the operational risk.
Risk Absorption
Systemic Protection
This is why proactive risk mitigation, often outsourced to highly reliable and focused specialists, becomes so critical. It pulls one high-stakes task (like constant vigilance) off the star performer’s plate and externalizes the reliability buffer. For managers tasked with keeping vast facilities safe and compliant, partnering with services like
is less about hiring a guard and more about purchasing back critical, reliable energy for themselves and their team.
The Contradiction of High Performance
Protection Role
Better you are at protecting, less the org protects you.
Tool Perception
We treat dedication as a tool for institutional laziness.
The Expectation Gap
Expecting 6-sigma performance in a 2-sigma environment.
Shifting the Burden of Proof
The genuine value you provide, as a leader, is not recognizing your star performer with a plaque. It’s analyzing where their time is actually going-not the work they are assigned, but the work others should have done. If 46% of their week is spent fixing errors that originated outside of their job description, you don’t have a workload problem; you have an
accountability vacuum.
Accountability Restoration Target
62% Progress
We need systems where mediocrity creates consequences for the mediocre, not extra work for the competent. We need to measure the ‘fix time’-the hours spent compensating for organizational friction-and budget that time into the operational cost of the low performer, not into the daily schedule of the high performer.
“
He told me he was willing to take a pay cut just to stop spending 6 hours a week managing grown adults who couldn’t use the ‘reply all’ button correctly. He wanted the reward for competence to be less stress, not more responsibility.
– Blake K.-H. (The Competence Tax Payer)
The Inescapable Conclusion
Less Stress, Not More Responsibility.
The 6-Word Summary of Failure
If your best people are leaving, they aren’t looking for a better title or a bigger desk. They are looking for a break from paying the competence tax. Are you finally willing to raise the baseline, or are you just waiting for the next star to absorb the inevitable shockwave when your current one inevitably walks away?
The question isn’t how much work you pile on. The question is:
Who is paying for the sins of the system?