Want to blaze trails? Become dispensable.

I recently gave a talk at Metro Bank at a LinkedIn local event. During my talk I mentioned that I had left the RAF partly because I had found a new passion. I wanted to help people understand and train their minds to feel and perform at their best. I had found a new calling.?A new purpose. And I’d come to the conclusion that the RAF was not best suited to understand and capitalise on what I now had to offer.?I needed to find a new tribe. A tribe of people who needed and wanted what I had to give.?

Afterwards I got chatting to an intriguing woman called? Laura Cole the Manager at Slough Foodbank. She told me her own story of transformation. She had been well paid and well established in the corporate world. Then two things happened. Her husband was made redundant and their house sale fell through. This might have been a time to double down and work harder than ever. But they decided to take an 8 month sabbatical. On return rather than going back to “making money for other people” Laura took a brave decision. She started volunteering and then decided to use her skills to work in the charity sector. She told me simply “I wanted to make a difference.” I nodded enthusiastically. I totally get that, I thought.

To make a lasting difference we ultimately need to become dispensable

What she said next really impressed me. Her new purpose was to “make a difference.” So far, so expected. But she had quickly realised the only way to do that was to be dispensable. She recalled when she was interviewing for a Head of Community role at a housing charity, she had an epiphany.

If she truly wanted to make a difference in the community, the answer wasn’t to expand her role. It wasn’t to make the charity an irreplaceable crutch to it’s residents. It was to make her team, and ultimately the community, autonomous. Self-sufficient. In other words, the answer was to make herself redundant.

She said this out loud apparently and the interviewers all laughed. But it was a defining moment. Laura had completely reframed what success looked like. Success wasn’t about growing her role. It was about figuring out how to make it’s existence completely unnecessary.?

We can reframe success to include making ourselves redundant

Laura told me she’d taken this mindset to Slough Foodbank, where she now works. Foodbanks provide emergency food parcels for those in food poverty crisis – who cannot afford to buy food. She explained, foodbanks simply shouldn’t exist. Everybody should be able to afford to eat. Poverty in the UK shouldn’t exist. Laura’s singular aim is to work out how to make herself redundant. I asked her “what would you like everyone to know that they don’t know.” She answered without hesitation. “It could happen to anyone.” A lesson she had learned when her husband’s redundancy coincided with the house sale falling through. “Losing your job, health or family support are all factors that can lead to someone needing a foodbank. That could be any of us”.?

We like feeling indispensable even when it causes us difficulty

There are so many things I found intriguing and inspiring about our conversation, but the idea I really want to focus on is dispensability. Dispensability is something I’ve really come to respect in a leader. For example, when COVID first struck, I was the head of the Centre of Air Safety Training school at the Defence Academy Shrivenham. I’d been due to serve my last day in office about a month after COVID hit. But my chain of command begged me to stay in the RAF. We had to rapidly convert face to face training courses into online courses and they simply couldn’t do it without me, or so they said. In other words, I was indispensable. So I stayed. I converted all the RAF safety training courses to online, ran a start-up and home-schooled my son. I was working like a one-armed paper hanger, doing 3 full-time jobs, barely hanging on with my fingernails.

At one point I considered taking sick leave for stress but concluded I was too busy to be stressed (I remember feeling a perverse thrill of self-importance when I arrived at this conclusion).

So I soldiered on. Whilst (and I’m sorry to say this but it’s true) the two male officers in my team, of the same rank, who were perfectly capable of doing the same job, sat at home “feeling a bit bored.” When I got my annual report that year I got a B+. They had given an A- to one of the bored male officers.?(“There’s no point giving you an A- minus Sarah, you’re leaving,” was the explanation).?

So not that indispensable after all then.

But really, who’s the idiot?

I could have left the job. I clearly could have let other people take on my role. I could have asked for more help. But I didn’t.?

Because that would have proved I was dispensable. And who wants that?

Dispensability increases our capacity and creates the space for succession and growth

I think there are clear advantages to being dispensable. If you think about it, the definition of blazing trails is that SO THAT OTHER PEOPLE CAN FOLLOW IN OUR FOOTSTEPS.?So, when we allow ourselves to be dispensable, not only we can leave a role that no longer serves us, take some leave, or even just wait 30 minutes before we answer an email. When we give ourselves permission to be dispensable, we can also create the space to empower and develop others through delegation and autonomy.?

It’s difficult to accept our dispensability when we’ve got to where we are by being the best

But the ego sure does like to get in the way.?

I recall another occasion when my ego got in the way. After I was promoted to Squadron Leader I was lucky enough to do a command tour in Kabul. As you might expect as we get promoted up the ladder we have to divide our time between executive leadership and tactical operations. In other words, we do a lot less flying the higher up the chain we go. And flying is a perishable skill. The more we do, the better we get. The less we do, the shitter we get. It’s one of the reasons we have to be judged as “above average in the air” to get promoted in the first place, to offset the fact that we’ll get a lot less practice at flying when we become a Squadron Leader.?

To be dispensable we’ve got to let others be better than us

But try telling that to the ego. Whilst deployed in Kabul I was in charge of 120 people whose mission was to get people safely from A-B on our Puma helicopters. I was involved in coordination and priorisation of missions, daily running of the camp, logistics, media enquiries, pastoral support, training, gathering intelligence and reporting up to British chain of command. But I was also flying daily missions. One day, on approach into a familiar landing site, my aircraft encountered sink from downwash of the lead aircraft (we always fly in pairs in Afghanistan in case one of us gets into trouble).?I pulled in the collective lever (the thing that makes you go up in a helicopter). We kept sinking. I pulled in a bit more lever. We carried on sinking.?So I pulled it a whole lot more lever and we finally stopped sinking and made a safe landing. After landing my co-pilot, who was junior to me, said “You’ve overstressed the aircraft Ma’am. You pulled in too much lever” It felt like a bollocking, which I wasn’t’ sure I deserved. We carried on the mission with no mishaps, but when I got back to the airfield my thoughts returned to his comment and I remember feeling quite aggrieved. I had flown the aircraft to the best of my abilities and had pulled as much lever as I needed. Who was he to tell me I’d messed up? Did he think he could have done any better? Still stewing on this I taxied our aircraft into our parking spot and angrily hoiked up the parking brake. (A bit like a handbrake in your car.). Only it wasn’t the parking brake I’d just hoiked up. It was the lever. The thing that makes you go up in a helicopter. And we cartwheeled 10 metres into the air. Fortunately we landed back on all 3 wheels. But I learned a scary lesson that day. I’d been so busy obsessing over whether or not my co-pilot was better than me, that I’d nearly killed us. Years later, I was telling this story to another Squadron Leader pilot.

He said, “Sarah our job is not to be the best pilot on the squadron for ever and ever. Our job is to lead. Our job is to grow our team. Which means the people behind us will almost certainly be better than us one day. If they aren’t better than us at flying, we’ve got something seriously wrong.”

The point is, this co-pilot was right. I had overstressed the aircraft. Perhaps he would have done a better job than me of flying that approach. Perhaps he would have had the skill and finesse to pull in just enough lever, but not too much. I don’t know for sure. But I do know that it’s ok if he was a better pilot than me. Because that’s how we make way for succession. That’s how we grow our future trailblazers and leaders. That’s how we evolve. By letting the people that come after us be better than us. By allowing ourselves to become redundant. By allowing ourselves to become dispensable.?

That is how we make the world a better place.

That is how we make a difference.

That is how we blaze trails

Key takeaways

????We can reframe our idea of success to include making ourselves redundant.

????Being dispensable allows us to take leave and delegate

????Conscious Leadership involves empowering others so that they can be autonomous.

????Conscious Leadership involves letting others become better than you

????The ego will resist the idea of being dispensable, but dispensability is inevitable and we can change our mindset to accept and even celebrate it.

Sarah Furness is an ex-helicopter pilot and RAF Squadron Leader. She is now an executive coach, motivational speaker and writer and her mission is to help tough capable people feel as strong as they look. Her first book ”FLY HIGHER“ will be launched at HENLEY LITERARY FESTIVAL ?on the 3rd October. Tickets are now on sale (virtual and face to face.)

If you are looking for a motivational speaker contact?[email protected]

For support with workshops or coaching contact?[email protected]