When the most competent person in the practice becomes a liability
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Competence is one of the most valued traits in veterinary medicine. It's also, in the wrong conditions, one of the most costly. Listen to this latest episode of The Resilient Vet.
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 five extra minutes, and how to talk a panicked owner off a ledge at 4:45 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, get 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.
Cohost Jennifer Edwards, DVM, ACC, CPC, ELI-MP, and Aaron Shaw, OTR/L, CHT, CSCS, call this pattern "over-functioning." In this episode of The Resilient Vet, they make the case that this system can burn out individuals, stall team development, and make entire organizations more fragile than they appear.