Find the Hub of Your Team

Nadia has her coat on. She's had her coat on for nine minutes.

Theo, who joined in April, stops at her desk on his way past. "Quick one. Does the finance export run before or after the reconciliation job?" She knows. She always knows. She tells him it runs after, and that if he's seeing blank columns, it's because someone kicked off the reconciliation manually at lunch, and he should check the timestamp before he raises a ticket.

Forty seconds. He says thanks and he means it. Nadia sits back down, because she may as well look at the thing she meant to finish at three.

That was the seventeenth question she had answered that day, by her count, on a Tuesday she'd described that morning as quiet. Her manager, Ravi, thinks of Nadia as steady. Three deliverables this quarter all landed on time; none of them were especially hard. He has her marked as someone who's coasting a little and might need a stretch project.

What was actually going on at Nadia's desk

Nadia is the router. Sam, who runs the reporting pack, checks with her before he changes a definition. Theo asks her the questions he feels embarrassed to ask Ravi. Two people from finance who don't report to Ravi at all have her name saved as the person who explains the export.

Her calendar shows six hours of meetings a week, which looks light. What it doesn't show is the ninety minutes she spends each day answering quick questions. Each interruption feels too small to refuse, but together they push her own work past four.

Ravi can't see any of these details, and the reason is structural. He manages by keeping track of what he assigned. Nadia's real job was never assigned to anybody.

Questions travel differently than tasks

Tasks come down. Somebody decides, somebody records it, somebody follows up in a status meeting. You can point at a task.

Questions route themselves. A question goes to whoever answered it last time and answered it well, and once that path is worn in, it stays worn in for years. Nobody decided Nadia would be the hub. She just answered clearly in her second week, and the traffic found her.

Amazon learned the same thing from the other direction. A service called Self-Service Order Fulfillment sat around for well over a year, always about to happen, never happening, and the people responsible for it were genuinely capable. It was one of many things on their list. In 2005 Jeff Wilke pulled Tom Taylor off everything else and gave him the project and nothing but the project. Wilke's description of that arrangement: "Single-threaded" means they don't work on anything else. The service launched in September 2006 as Fulfillment by Amazon. (press.aboutamazon.com, 2026)​

The load nobody counts is the load that quietly decides what happens. Amazon's version was invisible work not getting done. Yours is invisible work getting done by one person for free, which is more comfortable and considerably more dangerous, because it holds until the day she takes a fortnight off in August.

Try this on Monday

Log the questions for five days. Every time someone asks you something, write down who asked and what about. Then ask two other people on the team to do the same for that week. You're looking for the name that appears in other people's logs, not your own.

Ask three people, separately, the same question: When you're stuck on something and you don't want to raise it in the standup, who do you go to? Say nothing when they answer. The third repeat of the same name is your answer.

Then take the top five questions your hub gets asked and look at them properly.

• Some of them are a documentation problem and can be written down once.
• Some are a permissions problem, where people ask because they can't see the thing themselves.
• One or two will turn out to be a decision that never got made, which is why it keeps arriving as a question.

Last, subtract something. Take a real deliverable off her plate this quarter and say out loud why you're doing it.

Where this goes wrong

The first mistake is making it official. Ravi's instinct will be to name Nadia the team's point of contact, put it in her objectives, and add it to the wiki. This converts a fast, informal, forty-second thing into a queue with an expectation attached, and the volume goes up while her ability to say no goes down.

The second is to document everything and then stop there. Write down all seventeen answers, and you'll have a page that's accurate for about six weeks, after which people go back to asking Nadia, who now also owns the page.

The third is the one that feels generous. Praise her in the team meeting, tell everyone how much she holds together, and change nothing about her workload. Recognition without subtraction raises the traffic, because you've just told nine people her door is open.

The fourth only shows up later. Promote her out, or lose her to a competitor, and the questions won't disappear. They redistribute badly, landing on people who answer them wrong, and Ravi spends a confusing quarter watching quality drop across work that has nothing obvious to do with the person who left.

One thing this week

Go and find your Nadia and ask her the question nobody asks her.

"What do people come to you for that isn't on your objectives?"

Then stop talking, because she'll start with the small version. The real answer is in the second thing she says, and it usually arrives once she's decided you're asking for a reason.

She'll have her coat on. Ask anyway.