There's a wise post up at Working Smarter, the blog of business graphics software SmartDraw, about what it calls "the key employee problem": namely, what you should do if that key employee--you know him or her, the one without whom your company's trains simply could not run on time--should suddenly and without lengthy warning need to be absent for an extended period due to any of the thousand natural or artificial shocks the flesh is heir to.

...Well, what do you do? Working Smarter suggests planning for an absent-employee rainy day by keeping an accessible, central database of all relevant company information (in other words, there should not exist any company information that you or another similarly-ranked employee could obtain only by going through your key employee) as well as planning for last-minute successions beforehand. The blog also recommends having key employees who leave under more managed, if still relatively sudden, circumstances--a firing or a quitting, for example--write down exactly what they did, so that his or her replacement will have an exact idea.

All of this is solid advice. But it also obscures a more fundamental point: ideally, you do not have one crucial, all-but-indispensable employee. We made this point in this post about one entrepreneur who took a one-month vacation without sweating (except at the beach) or causing his company harm. It doesn't just go for you, the small business owner: any one of your employees should be able to take a one-month vacation without preventing the company from running just about as smoothly as ever, or at least as smoothly as could be expected when you're down one man or woman (whether they should be permitted to take month-long vacations is another matter, of course). You should not stifle your employees from being independent-minded and going beyond the contours of their given job descriptions. But neither should you find yourself relying on the extraordinary dynamism or work ethic or what-have-you of one single employee.

It's a fine line, encouraging your employees to go above and beyond the call of duty without creating a potential absent-employee catastrophe. It is the best administrators who figure out how to walk that line.