Author’s Note

Yes, “unicorn” is a ridiculous word. So are “guru,” “ninja,” and “wizard”—and we’re not here to glorify them. These labels get tossed around too casually in tech and corporate slang, usually as buzzword shorthand for undefined brilliance or vaguely heroic productivity.

We’re using “unicorn” here not because it’s the most accurate, but because it’s the least co-opted. It still sounds a little silly; maybe a little mythical. And that’s useful—because while the creature may be fictional, the friction experienced by cross-functional, boundary-breaking high performers inside most organizations is anything but.

This isn’t about magical talent. It’s about real people operating at the edges of rigid systems, and the very real challenges they face when their impact spills across the boundaries the system was built to preserve.

These individuals often sit at the Pareto inflection point—the 20% generating 80% of the forward motion. Yet their work is often misunderstood, misaligned, and misattributed. Their impact is clear, but their rewards are inconsistent. Recognition lags. Compensation stalls. And because their output frequently lives between functions and outside prescribed swim lanes, it’s not always visible to the very systems tasked with measuring contribution.

The result? Strategic value disguised as side work. Mission-critical progress that looks like process deviation. And a quiet pattern of fatigue that builds not from the work itself—but from watching the work go unseen.

The goal of this article is simple: To have you wonder how often you’ve celebrated the team with sudden productivity increases, without considering who wrote the automation workflow that made it possible?

~Dom

America’s rail system is an engineering marvel—if you’re shipping grain, coal, or cars. It’s optimized for freight: long distances, heavy loads, low speed, and high volume. You don’t ride it; you load it. Trains are built to haul tons, not turn on a dime. They are efficient, predictable, and staggeringly capable at scale.

Japan’s rail system is the opposite. The Shinkansen, or bullet train, is famous for its speed, precision, and near-zero tolerance for delay. It’s designed for people—to move them quickly, seamlessly, and safely between densely packed cities. It sacrifices flexibility for consistency. Everything is streamlined. The system works because it’s tightly coordinated, incredibly clean, and fundamentally not built for improvisation.

Then there’s Europe, which blends the two. It has passenger trains, freight corridors, and multi-modal links that reflect the region’s patchwork of needs. It’s not as fast as Japan nor as heavy-duty as America, but it’s versatile. You can get a shipping container from Hamburg to Milan or a traveler from Paris to Brussels with minimal friction. The system values coverage and balance over any one metric.

Why start here? Because these train systems mirror the structural choices organizations make—whether they prioritize stability, speed, or flexibility. And when we talk about unicorns—those rare, cross-functional high performers inside corporate environments—we’re really talking about what happens when speed and adaptability meet systems built for control and repetition. The problems with unicorns are ultimately problems of infrastructure: mismatched expectations, rigid track designs, and operating principles built for throughput rather than transformation.

Unicorns are like high-speed rail dropped onto freight infrastructure. They move fast, they cross silos, they make people question why things take so long. But without systems designed for their pace and flexibility, they create friction. Signals get missed. Timelines clash. Momentum feels dangerous.

This piece is not about exceptionalism. It’s about structural tension. And to be clear, the “unicorns” we’re talking about here aren’t just high-performing individuals. There are plenty of those, and many encounter few roadblocks inside well-run systems. No, this is about a specific type: the ones who don’t stop at the boundaries of their role. The ones who treat blockers as part of the assignment.

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Spotting the Myth – What We Mean by “Unicorn”

So what exactly are we talking about when we say “unicorn”? Not just high-output individuals. Not just the go-to people who always deliver or exceed expectations within their role. Those individuals are crucial, but their work often stays within established lanes.

Unicorns, in this context, are a different breed.

They defy traditional role boundaries. Their resumes are often nonlinear and their daily work spans multiple domains. One week, they’re doing stakeholder analysis. The next, they’re building the internal tool everyone now depends on—but no one formally asked for.

They tend to spot problems early—not because they’re psychic, but because their span gives them sightlines most roles obscure. Their solutions aren’t heroic—just unblocked.

Unicorns are:

• The analyst who rebuilds a failing data pipeline over the weekend, and builds an app to address the problem that the corrected data illuminates.
• The BI developer who still gets called to lead projects on customer-facing product improvements in between internal reporting cycles.
• The data scientist who sets up a RAG architecture and deploys internal LLM tools alongside their core modeling responsibilities.

You spot them not by title, but by impact. Their name shows up in unexpected places: stakeholder meetings, deployment logs, product strategy decks. They’re not the loudest in standups, but their fingerprints are on half the tools teams quietly rely on.

They differ from traditional high performers in one crucial way: they do not stop when the scope stops. When the system offers friction, they don’t escalate—they iterate. Their loyalty is to the outcome, not the swim lane.

In an ideal environment, this kind of span would be nurtured. In most environments, it creates a quiet, chronic tension. Because systems are designed to measure effort inside boxes. And unicorns, almost by definition, work between them.

The Friction Point – When Unicorns Meet the Tracks

A traditional high performer is like a train operator in Tokyo. They follow a meticulously timed system with practiced precision. They excel by mastering the tools and tracks already in place, and they earn recognition for keeping things on schedule. It’s a respected role with clear rules, and when everything aligns, the results are flawless.

But unicorns? They don’t just run the route—they notice when the map is wrong and quietly redraw it. Not because they’re superhuman, but because the system failed to route the work where it belonged. Their cross-domain work isn’t improvisation—it’s compensation.

They see the gap and close it. The system wasn’t designed to support this kind of initiative, but they don’t wait for design. The identification of a problem or opportunity doesn’t result in a presentation; it naturally flows into a solution.

But that flow isn’t always frictionless. In siloed environments—where ownership and access are tightly gated—well-meaning improvisation can cause unintended side effects: a shadow tool no one else knows how to maintain, a pipeline fix that creates unaligned dependencies downstream, or a decision made outside a team that later needs rework inside one.

Sometimes, these frictions aren’t the result of overreach—they’re the result of isolation. When partnership is absent, improvisation becomes the fallback. And in systems where collaboration isn’t structurally supported, the unicorn’s fix can look like drift. Not sabotage, but a symptom. A workaround in a room full of walls.

In this way, most organizations, like most rail systems, aren’t built to handle this kind of lateral expansion. They’re optimized for known routes, fixed milestones, and well-defined responsibilities. When a unicorn builds a side line, they unintentionally challenge the design assumptions of the larger system. Who owns it? Who maintains it? Who even knows it exists?

Their agency introduces a kind of pressure—one that feels invisible until it starts interfering with governance, resourcing, or politics. These employees make things better, faster, more integrated—but they do so in ways that defy role boundaries and seem to bypass official channels. And in systems calibrated for predictability and control, that can look like risk.

It’s not that their results are unwanted. Often, they’re celebrated at first: a new prototype, a breakthrough solution, a demo that stuns leadership. But over time, celebration gives way to confusion. Where do they fit? Why don’t their outcomes align with their title, their salary band, their formal scope of work?

“Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.”
— Common adage in quality engineering

Again, most corporate systems are designed to get predictable, safe, trackable outputs. Unicorns break that mold. They stretch the frame until it fractures, because the frame wasn’t made for span. Not like theirs.

The friction isn’t personal—it’s systemic. Until the infrastructure adapts, derailment is not a risk. It’s a pattern.

Span, Growth, and the Limits of Recognition

In most organizations, growth is vertical. The expectation is to specialize, deepen, and eventually manage. But unicorns grow laterally. Their resumes read like storyboards—moments of initiative, bursts of cross-domain learning, sprints across architecture, analytics, product, and automation. They move not because someone tells them to, but because the problem demands it.

And because their movement doesn’t follow an approved path, it rarely fits the narrative that HR and management frameworks are built to support.

These individuals don’t just grow—they expand. A unicorn might spend Monday scripting an ETL pipeline, Tuesday in a product design meeting, and Wednesday building a tool in Power Apps to eliminate manual QA steps that were never technically their responsibility. Not because someone asked, but because someone needed to.

The impulse is instinctive. For most professionals, learning is an objective; for unicorns, it’s a reflex. They chase tools, frameworks, and methods not for curiosity’s sake, but because it’s the clearest route to resolution. Their learning is functional—directly tied to mission velocity.

But that same instinct creates risk. Because the better they are, the less friction they show. The more they absorb quietly, the more invisible their effort becomes. And invisible work is the most easily discounted.

Without structural recognition, the pattern turns dangerous:

First comes overextension—they become the default fix for every out-of-scope problem, every unsolved issue that no one else feels responsible for. Then comes title-impact dissonance—where their official role lags behind the reality of their contribution, sometimes by years. Others begin to assume, unconsciously, that they’ll just keep handling it. That assumption becomes dependency denial, which ensures no succession, no support, and no backup plan.

And then, often comes withdrawal. Not a loud exit. A quiet one. They stop volunteering. Stop shipping after hours. They deliver only what’s assigned, and nothing more. Eventually, the quiet labor adds up—and like anyone who sees their extra work go unacknowledged long enough, they pull back. It’s not disillusionment. It’s just realism.

It’s not personal. It’s systemic. And it’s preventable—but only when breadth is valued, visibility is deliberate, and recognition is built into the system instead of tacked on in applause.

Designing for Span – Supporting the Builders Between the Rails

The instinct is to fix the unicorn. Rein them in. Nudge them back inside the box. But what needs fixing is often not the contributor—it’s the container. Again, most organizations are built for ladders, not lattices. So when someone starts wiring new connections between silos, they trigger more alarms than applause.

Too often, we treat deviation as dysfunction. But what initially looks like coloring outside the lines may actually be the blueprint for a better page. From buzzwords like Gurus and Ninjas to more sincere rhetoric about cross-functional teams, the idea of boundary-breaking contributors is everywhere—but the structural support for them is still rare.

Rethink the Frame, Not the Unicorn

Unicorns don’t need tighter swim lanes; they need wider channels. The job isn’t to constrain their span—it’s to steward it. That starts with rethinking what value looks like. Not just throughput, but connective tissue. Not just ownership of scope, but reduction of friction.

Normalize Breadth as Value

Organizations should make cross-domain impact visible and legitimate. That means celebrating the internal tool built by a BI lead, not just the dashboard that shipped. It means seeing the infrastructure pattern quietly documented by a product manager, not just the project delivered on time.

Internal recognition rituals can help:

• Intentional recognition for cross-functional impacts
• Communities of practice across product, data, and engineering
• Career narratives that show depth and spread, not just seniority

Invest in Structural Support

Breadth needs scaffolding:

• Visibility Mapping: Catalog the roles one person is filling—not to punish, but to understand scope
• Role Decomposition Workshops: Clarify which responsibilities can be taught or what now-routine maintenance tasks can be transferred
• Dual-Ladder Career Paths: Let unicorns grow in influence without forcing them into people management
• Knowledge Capture Sprints: Build rituals around documenting what only they know

The goal isn’t to clone the unicorn or chain them in place. It’s to protect their pace from becoming their burden.

Enable Managers to Clear the Tracks

Managing unicorns isn’t about oversight—it’s about orchestration. The best leaders don’t direct every move; they remove every blocker. That means:

• Translating lateral wins into upward-visible success
• Advocating for comp and title when span outpaces scope
• Sharing strategic context early and often
• Shielding from bureaucracy, politics, and priority whiplash

Done right, the manager becomes air traffic control. Support doesn’t mean orchestrating brilliance—it means normalizing visibility, clearing roadblocks, and making lateral wins legible enough that they stop feeling like exceptions.

When unicorns are supported with this kind of clarity and flexibility, they don’t just stay—they build new stations, new junctions, new ways forward. Not because someone told them to. But because someone finally made room for what they were already doing.

The Cost of the Lie – And the Price of Coherence

Organizations often say they want builders, connectors, and changemakers. But more often than not, what they really want is predictability with a hint of sparkle. They admire initiative—until it bypasses the plan. They reward creativity—until it changes the shape of the work.

That contradiction doesn’t just wear people down—it erodes the systems they’re trying to improve. It creates a loop: invisible contributions, lagging recognition, and quiet departures that don’t register until the slack piles up.

This isn’t about magic. It’s about mechanics.

Systems thrive when expectations and outcomes align—when contribution matches recognition, and when structural support reflects real behavior on the ground.

Designing for breadth doesn’t mean chaos. It means being deliberate:

• Making cross-functional work legible—not exceptional
• Building flexibility into the job, not just the person
• Updating roles and ladders to reflect how value actually moves

People doing this kind of work don’t need celebration. They need clarity. They need systems that can reflect their span without stretching them thin.

If you want to keep them—adjust the tracks. Not to slow them down, but to make sure they’re not laying track while running the train.