Are you a linchpin?

It's that part at the center of the wheel of a horse cart... that when pulled out, the whole thing crumbles down.

Anyway...

So there seems to be a lot of hoopla around becoming a thought leader or an influencer and build one's personal brand on LinkedIn.

But what people seem to forget that you don't have to focus on trying to build a very large audience of folks who are kinda, sorta interested in what you have to speak and give you the dopamine hit with likes on your LinkedIn posts.

You can build your personal brand within your current company.

You can become synonymous with whatever themes or topics or characters you want to be known for.

Energetic, creative, A/B tester, ideas guy, resourceful, open-minded, growth- & data-driven, and helpful are some of the values that I put conscious effort at work to become a part of my personal brand at Vaadin.

About Linchpin

So the idea of becoming a Linchpin at work is based on the book Linchpin by Seth Godin.

Linchpins are the team members who are not only skilled and exceptional at doing the job they were hired for i.e. they execute on their responsibilities well.

But they also contribute to multiple departments as much as within their capacity that often ends up generating a much greater ROI of their time and efforts —that ends up positively impacting the top- or bottom-line for the business.

Let me explain.

Take a look at the below quadrant to see how a Linchpin differs from PERL (Percentage of Easily Replaceable Labors).

A linchpin functions such that:

1. She can contribute as much as possible at her work i.e. there is no ceiling on the impact she can make.
2. And she is also doing a work that only a few of her colleagues are willing to do.

Let's see how that plays out in different departments & roles:

In sales:

• A sales/business development representative is tasked with setting meetings for their Account Executives. is tasked with setting meetings for their Account Executives.

He can just do that or he can do the background research on the account for his AE, interview existing customers to build sales enablement on the exact language their target personas speak that the entire BDR team can use, and help save his manager's time by screening the SalesTech vendors out there as a champion and introducing the tools that will impact the sales KPIs the team is focusing on a given quarter.

• A new business AE can just close net new accounts and keep marching forward like a mercenary.

But a linchpin AE will align the Customer Success team with the Customer's expectations, collaborate with marketing, product management, & operations to win the account while sharing relevant feedback, and then also strengthen the relationship with the Customer (educating them to do their work in a smarter, faster, & better way) such that any time the Customer needs help on the topic the AE sells a solution, they call her asking for advice.

In engineering:

• A software developer can just focus on coding the functional part of the application.

But a linchpin developer sits with the product manager and architect to really understand how the application serves the core business and be mindful of the non-functional requirements when building the application. The very good ones will even manage vendor relationships to take the burden off of their engineering managers.

I hope the above examples give you some context on the difference between a linchpin and a PERL.

The Linchpin Test

Take this short questionnaire to find whether you’re doing the work as a Linchpin or not.

1. How many months would it take your current employer to find a replacement for your current role with the same responsibilities, ramp them up to the knowledge you have about the product and company, and produce similar results - 3 months, 6 months, over a year?
2. What’s the average annual salary for someone with your experience? Divide it by 1960 to get the hourly rate.
3. What are some top-line revenue or cost savings numbers you can associate with your output over a period of 12 months?
4. In addition to your existing department, how many other departments (sales, marketing, operations, supply chain, product development, product marketing, R&D, data analytics, etc) are able to benefit from the work you do? This work could be personal or departmental initiatives you're contributing to outside of your regular job responsibilities.

You can calculate the cost of your replacement to the company as:

# of months it takes to replace you multiplied by 160 hours/month X (hourly rate for your role + (annual top-line revenue or cost-savings / 1960)) + (# of departments you contribute to X Ask the VPs or Leads of those departments on what's a rough dollar amount of the work you contributed to their team & projects)

Let's see an example:

Role: Software Engineer with 5 years of experience with 3 years in the current company

# of months it takes to find a software engineer with 5y experience: 5 months

Hourly rate with a $225,000 salary ($150K) + G&A costs (.5x salary) = $114/h

Annual top-line revenue produced can be calculated by dividing the annual sales revenue of the SaaS product the developer is building divided by the size of the app development team. Let's say for a $1M ARR with an engineering team of 7, the rough number comes to: $142,857

This developer was in fact a linchpin developer who has taught the UX/UI designers a way to hand-off the Figma code that saves each developer 10h/month i.e. 10h x $114/h x 7 developers = $7,980 saved per month

Cost of replacement of the above developer to the company = 5 months x 160h/month x ($114/h + $142,857 / 1960 /h + $7,980/160 /h) = $189,408 approx

If I was the engineering manager and I would make sure the above developer can grow to his next role in the company and help him get there.

The algebra could be off above. But you get the point right?

So I ask you again:

Are you a Linchpin - yay or nay?