Team Support vs Skill Dependency: How Relying on Star Employees Can Put Your Team at Risk

It’s 9 a.m. on a Monday, and your star product designer messages that they are out sick. Within hours, several critical projects are delayed, and your team has to adjust responsibilities. Many organizations face this situation more often than they expect.

According to the EY 2025 Mobility Reimagined Survey, nearly half of employers report struggling to find the talent they need, while many experience extended delays filling senior roles. When critical positions remain open, work slows, priorities shift, and teams are forced to stretch in ways that were never planned.

For you as an HR or L&D professional, this goes beyond scheduling or headcount. Skills are changing faster than roles can keep up, and organizations are finding it harder to build and sustain capability where it matters most. When too much knowledge sits with a few individuals, the risk compounds, affecting engagement, morale, and long-term performance.

Why Relying on One Person Can Sink Your Team

Team support happens when knowledge and skills are shared across your team. Multiple people can perform essential tasks, information flows naturally, and collaboration is standard. When your team members can cover for one another, work continues without interruption, learning spreads, and deadlines are consistently met.

Skill dependency occurs when critical knowledge or expertise is concentrated in one individual. Phrases like “Only Sarah can run this process” or situations where a single employee’s absence causes delays indicate a dependency risk. The costs extend beyond hiring replacements. Gallup estimates that recruiting a replacement can cost between 50% and 200% of an employee’s annual salary. Additional hidden costs include delayed projects, lost institutional knowledge, and missed opportunities for process improvement and innovation.

For you, relying on a few key individuals creates real operational risk. Critical tasks slow down, knowledge transfer is harder, and preparing future leaders becomes reactive rather than planned. Teams in this situation struggle to respond quickly to shifting priorities or new business demands. To spot these risks early, it helps to know what to look for.

Signs Your Team May Be Dependent on Individuals

Skill dependency often develops gradually. These indicators can help you identify potential risks:

• Bottlenecks in Daily Operations: Work slows or stops when one employee is unavailable.
• Tribal Knowledge: Key information exists only in one person’s mind, slowing decision-making and onboarding.
• Vacation or Leave Disruption: Absences create interruptions that could be prevented with shared knowledge.
• Knowledge Hoarding: Employees keep information to themselves to maintain perceived job security, limiting collaboration and innovation.
• Weak Succession Plans: Without structured pathways for developing critical roles, departures create gaps that take months to address.

Recognizing these signs is the first step. The next step is understanding why building team support is critical to prevent these risks from affecting your business outcomes.

Why Team Support Is Critical

The risk of skill dependency is growing because the workplace has changed. Teams are more dispersed, roles are evolving alongside new technologies, and retention pressures remain high, with 41% of workers actively exploring new opportunities. As skills continue to shift, relying on a few individuals to hold critical knowledge leaves teams exposed when roles change or people move on.

The World Economic Forum highlights that millions of roles are shifting or emerging, demanding entirely new skill sets. Teams that depend on individual employees are slower to respond to these changes, affecting operational performance, learning outcomes, and employee engagement.

By contrast, teams with shared knowledge:

• Maintain steady workflow during absences or transitions
• Adapt quickly to shifting business priorities
• Enable faster learning and development
• Encourage collaboration, innovation, and shared problem-solving

For you, this means team support is directly linked to retention, productivity, and workforce agility. Leaders who invest in distributed capability ensure that your teams remain productive, motivated, and adaptable.

Practical Strategies to Build Team Support

Reducing skill dependency takes deliberate action. The goal is not to make everyone interchangeable, but to ensure important work does not rely on a single person to move forward. These four approaches help embed shared capability into everyday work without overwhelming teams.

1. Structured Cross-Training

Cross-training reduces disruption by making sure more than one person understands how essential work gets done. When coverage exists, absences and role changes no longer stall progress.

Effective cross-training often includes:

• Rotational training, where team members spend time in core functions to build redundancy
• Horizontal training, which expands skills across roles or departments and improves flexibility
• Vertical training, which prepares employees to take on higher-responsibility work and supports succession

For you, tracking cross-training through your learning management system also highlights where skills are overly concentrated and where gaps still exist.

2. Integrated Knowledge Management

Documentation only reduces dependency when it fits naturally into how work happens. When knowledge lives in scattered files or outdated systems, teams still rely on individuals to explain processes and decisions.

Strong knowledge management focuses on:

• Using intuitive platforms that teams actually adopt, like Notion or Confluence
• Embedding documentation into active projects rather than treating it as a separate task
• Making information easy to find through a clear structure and an AI-powered search

When leaders model consistent documentation and knowledge sharing, it reinforces that information belongs to the team, not to individuals.

3. Encouraging Knowledge Sharing

Even the best systems fail without the right culture. When employees feel that expertise protects job security, knowledge stays siloed, and risk increases.

Team support grows when:

• Psychological safety allows people to share expertise and ask questions openly
• Knowledge sharing is recognized in performance and growth discussions
• Employees who mentor others or document processes are visibly valued

These signals help shift knowledge sharing from an extra task to an expected part of how work gets done.

4. Skills-Based Succession Planning

Succession planning is most effective when it focuses on capabilities rather than titles. Understanding which skills are critical and where they currently sit allows teams to prepare before disruption occurs.

This approach includes:

• Defining core competencies for key roles
• Identifying gaps and providing targeted development
• Reviewing readiness regularly as business needs evolve

Skills-based data and analytics can further support this work by identifying internal talent with adjacent capabilities and reducing over-reliance on external hiring.

With these strategies in place, you can see the direct benefits of shifting from dependency to team support.

Quick Reference: Dependency vs Team Support

This table illustrates why moving from dependency to team support directly improves both workforce and business outcomes.

Measuring the Impact of Team Support

Team support is something you can observe in how your teams perform. Tracking a few key indicators helps you understand whether knowledge is spreading, skills are being shared, and your workforce is prepared for change.

Consider these measures:

• Succession readiness: Are critical roles backed up with trained and capable successors?
• Dependency level: How many roles rely on a single individual? The goal is to reduce this to zero over time.
• Knowledge transfer: Are processes documented, and is cross-training happening consistently across the team?
• Time-to-productivity: How quickly can new employees reach full effectiveness when responsibilities shift?
• Internal mobility: Are employees moving into roles where their skills add value, showing successful development and engagement?

By keeping an eye on these indicators, you can see where team support is working and where gaps remain. Strong results don’t just reduce operational risk; they also make your teams more agile, collaborative, and resilient when change happens.

Turning Risk Into Resilience

Top employees should not create organizational risk. Building team support multiplies their impact while ensuring work continues efficiently when someone is unavailable. Knowledge flows freely, skills are shared broadly, and teams remain adaptable to change. The question is not whether skill dependency creates risk; it clearly does. The question is how to build shared capability systematically, at scale, and in ways that fit into daily work. This requires both the right strategy and the right infrastructure.

How KnowledgeCity Helps You Reduce Skill Dependency

Reducing skill dependency only works when learning is continuous, visible, and tied directly to how work gets done. This is where KnowledgeCity supports you. Our expertly curated learning library includes 50,000+ premium training videos, with most courses accredited by leading bodies such as PMI, SHRM, HRCI, and IIBA. These courses help your teams build shared capability across roles, ensuring knowledge does not sit with just one person. With our AI-powered learning management system, you can track progress clearly, identify skill gaps early, and support cross-training using data instead of assumptions.
Instead of discovering gaps when someone leaves or steps away, you can address them earlier, build depth intentionally, and keep work moving without disruption.

See the full potential of your team. Book a demo today to explore how KnowledgeCity can help you build a resilient, future-ready workforce.