Dispensable and Valuable

The focus of employee is to be Dispensable and Valuable. This goes against the normal way employees try and increase longevity in their jobs. They try and make themselves indispensable, thinking that this is the correct way of ensuring the longevity of their jobs.

The reality is that making oneself indispensable is the root of ruin. Living in a fear psychosis and trying to make sure that without oneself work cannot go on is the path to ruining one’s future. It looks like a good strategy on the surface but once we start analysing it, we find that it is the route to long term disaster.

When an Organisation looks to remove employees, it seems to logically choose employees whose removal will not impact day-to-day working. Following this, it becomes a self-evident truth that, if an employee wishes to be out of the risk of being removed (or dispensed with) he needs to make himself indispensable.

The strategy of making oneself indispensable to avoid being dispensed is bad. Inability to face the problem here is the starting point of this bad strategy. Another is the mistaking of goals for strategy. We have a bad strategic objective. Further we have a restatement of the obvious, combined with a generous sprinkling of buzzwords that masquerade as expertise.

Bad strategy is suboptimal as it ignores the power of choice and focus. Rather than that it tries to accommodate a multitude of conflicting demands and interests.

Indispensable as an adjective is akin to absolute necessity. It is also explained as essential, or requisite like an indispensable member of the staff. This means a member of staff we cannot do without.

"To make yourself indispensable" implies you avoid layoffs, get the biggest salary hikes, and earn appreciation praise and promotion opportunities for yourself from your managers.

The problem here is that we all look at this short term. In the short term if work cannot go along without you and firing you will cause disruption at work; we intuitively feel we will keep our job. This forces employees to hoard information created situations where they and only they can do a critical and unavoidable work so that they cannot be dispensed with.

In furthering this myth of indispensability employees look to work on key projects with high visibility. This is also thought to be a great way to make sure you are very highly valued. If your contributions on those projects are useful and you do good work, you will quickly be essential to the success of the project. By extension, the more important that project is, the more essential you are.

The reality is the reverse. The truly valuable employee is one who makes himself dispensable in his current role so he can move to a bigger role. His effort all the time is to train others to do what he is doing. His continuous efforts are to systematize things so that the process rather than the individual becomes the focus.

The best leaders find a way to make themselves simultaneously valued and dispensable. This looks like a dichotomy. The people and things we value most are not what we think of as easily replaceable or superfluous, the definition of dispensable. It is logical to say that the exact opposite is true in that we value the indispensable leaders.  Unfortunately, that is only until they are gone.

 

As leaders of a team you have two primary responsibilities beyond mission accomplishment. This is strengthening the team and developing other leaders. Your value as a leader is largely measured by the ability of the team to cooperatively execute today’s mission while preparing leaders to seize the opportunities of tomorrow. Your dispensability is largely measured by the amount of your direct involvement required in both the preparation for and execution of action.

When you join a team, your value is in your presence, your coaching, and your behaviour shaping. At the same time, the more present you are, the more coaching you do, and the more behaviour shaping required of you, the more indispensable you make yourselves. That is to say that the very path to becoming a valued leader may very well make the team increasingly dependent upon you. That is not the objective.

As a leader, one of the best ways to signal trust and confidence in a teammate is through the delegation of authority. There are authorities that are inherent in certain positions within a team and there are authorities that accompany specific levels of seniority, but it is in those instances when a leader chooses to add to (or subtract from) those built in authorities that true delegation occurs. Provided there is unity of effort across a team, the best teams have a low centre of gravity. They are empowered to make decisions at low levels within the organization and enjoy critical thinking, creative problem solving, and collective ownership at all levels. The challenge is ensuring that unity of effort is maintained as that centre of gravity is lowered.

It is important for you as leaders to remember that you are simultaneously managing an organization, while leading the individuals currently assigned to it – two different, but related responsibilities. You strengthen the team of today and you develop the leaders within for tomorrow. Years after you depart, the organization may look nothing like it did when you left it and that is expected – you are dispensable. But, provided you did your part to be of value, the individuals you helped shape and the relationships you built during your tenure will endure.

As leaders, you must strive to make yourselves dispensable over time (e.g., ensure others grow into your role in your absence). As human beings, you ought to make yourselves indispensable (e.g., connect with, invest in, and truly care about teammates). Your value is measured daily. Today your value is measured by mission accomplishment. Tomorrow, value is about the team you built and the relationships that endure. For every day that follows, value is measured by the success enjoyed by the teammates we helped prepare for their opportunity to shine.

Questions to answer are what are you doing to ensure you are (in)dispensable? What unintended consequences have you yet to consider? Have you found the optimal balance between delegated authority and unity of effort?

Dispensable and Valuable