There are many false good ideas in the office and one of them is that it is in our best interest to make ourselves indispensable.
It’s true that, on the face of it, this can be appealing. Since nothing can work without you, you have enhanced your status, put yourself in the spotlight, you are taken care of like a jewel, you are the person who will make the collective succeed or fail.
So much so that some people even organize their “indispensability” by making sure that no one has the autonomy or even the skills to replace or even assist them.
I still remember several years ago a colleague to whom I asked why he had chosen a particular candidate and not another replied to me in the most natural way in the world: “with her at least I can relax, she won’t take my place.”. QED.
Things did not prove him wrong, even if at times I think he was handicapped by his strategy, and overall here’s why being indispensable is the worst thing that can happen to you.
In short.
- Wanting to be indispensable may seem rewarding, but it is a strategy that isolates and makes you vulnerable.
- It blocks collaboration, prevents others from improving their skills and attracts criticism and tension.
- The indispensable person works tirelessly, exhausts themselves and becomes a drag on the team.
- Their career is also often stalled, as no one wants to take the risk of replacing them.
- Conversely, being useful, passing on knowledge and creating an autonomous system improves the team’s performance and makes it more serene.
Being indispensable does not protect you
One might think that being irreplaceable is an anti-redundancy insurance and a guarantee of permanent and lasting recognition. In fact, it puts you in a very risky position.
Being indispensable means accumulating responsibilities, finding yourself at the crossroads of several decision-making and work flows (Hyperconnectivity in the workplace: digital becomes a burden) and ultimately becoming a hindrance or even accumulating bad decisions.
Even worse: others end up realizing it and you become the target of criticism and enmity because you prevent others from being as efficient as they would like or could be.
Some businesses make the mistake of glorifying individuals either because they outperform (or think they do) or because they work so hard and make themselves so visible that they make others wonder how they could manage without them. Sometimes, moreover, they themselves have organized the indispensability of a person consciously or not: when non-collaborative management methods are promoted and power is left to the little bosses, indispensable people can be seen flourishing in every corner of the business.
In general, it works until the day when… it no longer works. Typically, either when the indispensable person cracks andwe have to pick up the pieces, or because during an absence (sickness, vacation, etc.) we realize that things are more fluid without them and that talents or even unsuspected leaders emerge.
Highway to exhaustion
When you return to a bottleneck, not only do you slow down the pace of work and decision-making in the organization, you run the risk of seeing the quality of your own work decline, but you also put your health at risk.
Essential people are constantly running out of time, their own and that of others, but they often get involved beyond what is reasonable, accumulate stress, are called upon and react at all hours, never switching off.
They have found the highway to professional burnout.
It is the complete opposite of those who make themselves easily replaceable by favoring collaboration, autonomy and delegation (How can you avoid becoming a bottleneck in the workplace?) who can approach their work with greater serenity, make the most of their moments of rest, rest their head and mind and ultimately find performance levers there.
An indispensable person does not evolve
The main problem with an indispensable person is…that they are indispensable. If you cannot be removed from where you are, well, you are going to stay there, because no employer will ever take the risk of removing an essential cog from their position, at the risk of seeing everything start to malfunction.
Who has never had the example of a person who has seen their professional development blocked by a manager who found it difficult or even impossible to replace them? But this only lasts for a while: as frustration accumulates, as a form of injustice is perceived, engagement and motivation decrease until the day when, for lack of internal development, the employee decides to develop elsewhere.
A bad choice for the manager, who will lose the “irreplaceable” talent in any case, but also for the business, which may see its manager go to the competition because a manager was a “bottleneck” to his progress or even because it loses a potential talent by keeping an average manager.
Conversely, I have always been concerned with recruiting my “successor” quickly and helping him or her grow so that I can say, “I can take this job, the team doesn’t need me, my replacement is there and recognized as such by the team, it would be dangerous to keep him waiting.”
Today, a good manager automates, documents (The knowledge base: a lifeline for your employees) and creates systems that work without him instead of trying to be the system (How to love control and not be a burden to yourself and your teams?).
The hunt for SPOF is on
I said in the introduction that there are some false good ideas that die hard, and this is one of them, but it’s more on the side of managers and employees because on the side of businesses, we are starting to realize the limits of these practices, which are sometimes put in place by employees but for which they are sometimes responsible by promoting the wrong people and allowing managerial practices that border on toxicity to continue.
Where some see role models or even performance drivers, they see a risk.
Where some see an asset, they see a liability.
Where some see a manager or an expert, they see an SPOF, a single point of failure, a person who can put a team or an organization in danger in the event of failure, absence or departure.
And they don’t like that.
An employee seen as critical becomes a risk. If you are the only one who has mastered a process or a tool, who has the relationship with a key contact at a client’s, you are a danger, a dependency from which the business will seek to free itself sooner or later, and if you do not organize the end of your “indispensability” to your advantage yourself, it is the business that will do it, perhaps in a radical way to your detriment.
Being useful rather than indispensable
An employee who makes him or herself indispensable, or finds him or herself indispensable against their will, puts their team or even their business in danger and puts themself in danger.
This is a situation that a business must avoid and in which an employee must avoid finding themselves.
How? By becoming useful rather than indispensable, and by becoming a catalyst for the success of others rather than a hindrance.
By sharing your knowledge, training and documenting to avoid dependence, by automating and streamlining recurring tasks to give yourself time, by building teams capable of operating without you to prepare for the future and deal with a possible emergency, by focusing on impact rather than the accumulation of responsibilities.
But it’s certainly not something that everyone can do and it requires a certain amount of self-confidence. The business also needs to change the way it manages careers and promotions, or even implement a new managerial model (Do you have a delivery model for management?).
Bottom line
If the only way to be visible is to prevent others from advancing, it’s not a good idea. Contrary to popular belief, you become an asset to a business or a team by allowing it to grow without you rather than depending on you.
It is often said that a manager’s objective is to organize their own uselessness, but useless does not mean indispensable: one is useless once the system is in place and functioning and one is no longer the limiting factor; one is indispensable when one becomes a hindrance to oneself and to others.
Image: weak link by Pressmaster via Shutterstock.
