Body of Knowledge · Glossary
Key-person risk
Critical capability, context or ownership concentrated in one person, so that the organisation is destabilised when they leave or are courted. It is a structural property to design away rather than a personal failing to lament.
Where the standard develops it
- PL-5Career development and growth pathsOne-on-ones, promotions, the Staff+ track, and the IC/manager choice.
- PL-6Leading through leadersSelecting, developing, and holding accountable the managers who report to you.
- DE-4Managing scope, risk, and dependencies across workstreamsSeeing the whole, naming the risk, negotiating the boundary.
Related terms
- One-on-one
- The recurring, protected meeting between a manager and a report.
- Readiness
- Already exercising the judgment of a larger scope on real stakes before holding the title.
- Succession
- A ready or nearly ready successor for every key role, the executive's own included, treated as an explicit expectation of senior roles and not as a personal virtue.
- Calibration
- Aligning evaluation standards across interviewers, managers or organisations so that the same capability or performance earns the same judgment.
- Contract testing
- Automated verification of the agreement between a service and its consumers, which catches a breaking change at the boundary before integration does.
- Disengagement signals
- Withdrawal, cynicism and ideas that stop coming.
- Glue work
- The coordinating, documenting and unblocking work that holds a team together and rarely shows up in the artifacts a promotion process values.
- Ground truth
- The real state of a piece of work, established by looking rather than by reading a status report.
Cite this definition
Chicago, BibTeX and licence →Engineering Management Academy. (2026). Key-person risk. In Engineering Management Academy Body of Knowledge (Version 3.1, GLO.key-person-risk). https://www.engineeringmanagement.academy/body-of-knowledge/glossary/key-person-risk