The Hub-and-Spoke Trap

You Have Great One-on-Ones. You Might Not Have a Team.

The outage started at 9 a.m. By the time I walked into our leadership meeting, my Infrastructure Manager and my Applications Manager were still arguing about whose problem it was. The Help Desk Manager had found out from a user. My Security Manager had stopped talking weeks ago. I sat down and realized the only thing connecting these five people was me.

The Roster You Mistook for a Team

You’ve probably got good one-on-ones. You know what each of your managers is wrestling with. You give them time, guidance, a place to think out loud. If someone asked, you’d say your relationships with your leaders are strong. And you’d be right.

Here’s the hard part. A set of strong relationships isn’t a team. The skill you’re proud of, the steady one-on-one, can be the exact thing that hides how little your leaders actually work as a unit. You feel close to all of them. They feel close to you. None of that tells you whether they trust each other. And if you just pictured the two on your team who quietly avoid each other, that’s the gap.

The Hub-and-Spoke Trap

Picture a wheel. You’re the hub. Each of your leaders is a spoke, wired straight to you and to nothing else. There’s no rim. Every decision, every cross-team problem, every quiet disagreement travels in to you and back out, because you’re the only connection strong enough to carry it.

It looks like leadership. It’s closer to a single point of failure with a title.

Here’s the part that stings more. Strong managers without a rim are more dangerous than average ones who collaborate. Strong managers push hard for their own area. With no lateral trust to hold them, they pull the wheel apart at the exact seams where work crosses between them.

Build the Rim, Not the Spokes

The shift is small to say and hard to do. Stop measuring yourself by how strong your spokes are. Start building the rim.

Your job isn’t to be the best-connected person on the team. It’s to make the connections between your leaders stronger than their connections to you. That means team time that solves real problems instead of reporting status. It means goals the team wins or loses together, so no one can quietly succeed while the department fails. It means your Applications lead can hold your Infrastructure lead to a commitment without routing it through you.

Here’s the test. If you left for three weeks, would those connections hold, or would the wheel stop the day you did?

Not the strongest spokes. Not the smoothest one-on-ones. The strongest rim.

The Wheel Has to Roll Without You

The people you serve never see your org chart. They see whether the permit system works, whether the police officer can pull records in the field, whether the call gets answered on the morning you happen to be out.

A wheel held together by one person is one absence from a wobble. A wheel with a real rim keeps rolling when the hub steps away.

Build the rim. Then the team runs the department, and you get to lead it. That’s the job.