How to be the irreplaceable 'dot connector' at work

Ditching the bare minimum

Doing enough to get by will free you from your responsibilities, yet limit you from growing and expanding. How far you’ll go and how big the impact you’ll make will depend majorly on the input and effort you give.

Take the role as the key person in your team and prove your dependability by:

Thinking like a CEO

Stand out from the pack by looking beyond your current “roles and responsibilities” to find ways to help the company win. Think beyond your daily tasks and focus on optimizing company performance, not just your role's output.

Going off road with learning

Go beyond your usual learning boundaries to up your game – if you're a developer, explore product development, marketing, even sales to broaden your knowledge. Explore other skillsets that will give you an edge in your role.

Considering what’s next

Valuable employees continuously update their skills to remain relevant and adapt to emerging trends and technologies. As your job evolves, stay ahead by studying trends in adjacent industries and aligning with shifting workforce preferences.

Being a dot connector

Employees who can spot the connections between functions and roles will become vital assets for the company. Discover new insights through engaging with colleagues from other departments, and gain a deeper understanding.

Read the full story on the importance of being irreplaceable in today’s workforce here.

Connecting the work dots

To create the biggest impact at work, your contributions must be purposeful and beneficial to other functions, fostering a collaborative environment where efforts resonate across the company.

You don’t have to be the most extroverted person in the team, just stick to the following practices:

1. Build Relationships Across Departments Engage with colleagues from various teams. Take the initiative to have lunch or coffee with people outside your immediate circle to learn about their roles and how they intersect with yours.
2. Be Inquisitive and Curious Ask questions that promote deeper understanding of how different roles and projects connect. Inquire about others’ challenges and successes, which can lead to identifying opportunities for collaboration or innovation.
3. Share Knowledge Generously Actively share your expertise and insights with others. When you learn something valuable, communicate it with your colleagues. This not only positions you as a resource but also encourages a culture of knowledge sharing.
4. Look for Overlapping Interests Identify common goals or challenges among different teams and propose joint initiatives that address these areas. By facilitating projects that require input from multiple departments, you can help create a more interconnected workplace.
5. Develop a Networking Mindset Make it a goal to meet someone new each week within your organization. Be proactive in forming connections that may not seem directly related to your role but could lead to unexpected collaborations in the future.
6. Leverage Technology Effectively Use collaborative tools and platforms to streamline communication and project management across teams. Ensure everyone is on the same page by utilizing shared documents, project boards, or chat channels that encourage interaction.

Learn more on what it means to be the “connector” in John Mason’s thinkpiece here, and more on why you should care about being irreplaceable in the Forbes article here.

The good, great, and irreplaceable

IT and Management Consultant, Bob Lewis, has shared the 3 commonly spread around ‘truths’ of jobs-related anecdotes:

• Good employees who work together as a team outperform great employees who don’t.
• Good employees with great processes outperform great employees with bad processes.
• If an employee is irreplaceable, you should immediately fire that employee.

In reality, he finds that actually:

• Great employees can and do overcome bad processes.
• Great employees can and do overcome lousy managers.
• Great employees can and do pull along mediocre teams.
• Making one or two great hires is the most critical step in turning around an underperforming organization.

So, what separates the great hires from the irreplaceable employees? It’s the influence and impact that they have on and bring to the team.

Frederick Brooks’ book “The Mythical Man Month”, has laid out the algebra of irreplaceability as follows:

• The number of personal relationships in a team of size n is n(n-1)/2
• A team with 10 (n) members contains 45 personal relationships between pairs of employees, or;
• Each team member has a relationship with every member (n) excluding themselves (-1)

When you replace one employee in a 10-member team with someone new, you’ve replaced not 10%, but 20% of the team when you measure team size as the number of relationships in it.

Treating irreplaceable employees well is highly cost-effective and relates directly to team productivity.

Find more ways you can do to start as a great employee, and make your way to becoming the irreplaceable, in the full piece here.

Take a quick look of yourself and do a little self-assessment—do you think you are one of the irreplaceable members in your team?

Or, do you not even want to be one?

Regardless of your purpose at work and in life, we hope you will have 1 or 2 valuable insights you can take from this week’s Monday Mavens edition.

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