Cheryl had already lost two of the 12 people on her team in the company’s first reduction in force. Then her product marketing lead resigned to join a competitor. A few weeks later, she was asked to cut two more roles.

But Cheryl, the company’s chief marketing officer, was most concerned about the marketing manager who ran the firm’s content platform—and had told her months earlier that she was burned out. As Cheryl explained, “I need to accelerate our training plan. If she leaves, we’re screwed.”

The people you rely on most can also be your biggest risk.

I’ve thought about Cheryl’s team this summer, mostly while sitting in airports. Three of my flights were canceled and two were severely delayed, and two colleagues had theirs canceled on the same day due to “air traffic control restrictions.”

An independent National Academies report found that 19 of the largest U.S. air traffic control facilities, accounting for 40% of system delays, were more than 15% below their staffing targets.

The gap was years in the making, and is difficult to reverse. Between fiscal 2010 and fiscal 2024, the number of controllers shrank by 13% even as operations rose by 4%. Overtime more than tripled as the system relied more on the controllers who remained.

Hiring alone will not quickly restore capacity. As of April 2026, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) had about 4,000 controllers in the training pipeline—but at the largest facilities, new hires take an average of 5.5 years from a tentative job offer to become fully certified.

For most businesses, roles don’t require certification, so it’s assumed replacing someone will be relatively quick. Yet what Cheryl’s manager knows took five years to learn and lives nowhere but in her head. That is a certification period as well, just without the governing body.

When a role disappears during a reorganization, the work is reallocated to those who remain. After repeated layoffs, employees may be carrying work from several previous iterations of the team, spanning multiple roles and responsibilities, with processes that were never designed for fewer people. Yet as long as targets continue to be met, leaders may mistake that performance for proof that the team structure is sound. This is a mistake.

Stop covering the gap

The FAA’s mistake wasn’t using overtime. It was allowing a temporary fix to compensate for a problem that had been building for over a decade. For years, the FAA hired fewer controllers than its own staffing models said it needed. At critical facilities, the certified controllers needed to train new hires were also needed to keep daily traffic moving. This limited how many new controllers a facility could train at a time.

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