Should we really strive to become indispensable?

I once received advice from a extremely accomplished business leader that the "secret" to a long, prosperous career was to "make yourself indispensable to the people that matter, especially your customers/clients". The advice made a lot of sense to me and I shared the same advice with many others for a decade....until a different, equally successful leader threw cold water on the advice. He said, "Never forget, Dan- there are graveyards full of indispensable people". Thought provoking. Can those two points of view co-exist?

Despite many of our dreams as kids, few of us will ever reach the pinnacle of playing for a professional sports team. But that doesn’t mean we can’t be high-performing team players in other aspects of our lives, especially in the workplace. What some don’t realize (I too was part of that “some”) is that being a good business teammate goes beyond just being a great mentor/apprentice of your colleagues. In fact, we may unwittingly be stifling both our individual career growth and the growth of others by adopting the "indispensable" mantra.

An important client handed me this lesson in a very stark fashion, a story I recount in a recent interview I did for Crain's If I Knew Then Series.  Click here to read my reflections on what you should and should not be doing to balance the challenge of individual versus team "indispensability".