tl;dr: Learning to do other people's jobs—and actually doing them when others won't—is undervalued but critical, because organizations are riddled with work that falls through the cracks due to "legitimate" reasons, and the few people who step across boundaries keep things from collapsing. Submitting patches upstream, informally coordinating with another manager's reports, or filling in for absent functions is often more effective than waiting for proper processes. Beware two failure modes though: building in-house purely because headcount is easier to get than budget, and letting every department reinvent shared services to avoid cross-org dependencies.