You’re not alone. It is a human self-preservation reflex. We all want to be recognized as someone who brings a unique and unmatched value to the company.  However being indispensable differs from being essential not only in definition but also in how to reach this state. Let’s explore those differences.

Making yourself indispensable is dangerous

I’ve been working in web software development since 2001, and I met plenty of people who became indispensable, sometimes on purpose, sometimes involuntarily.

A classic example is a developer who worked for a long time on a system that is progressively phasing out but is still in use. The rest of the company migrates towards new technology, but you need someone to maintain that legacy system since some clients are still using it.

The indispensable often volunteers nicely

There is always a volunteer who is comfortable with the legacy technology and that sees this context as an opportunity to bring unique value to the organization. This person concentrates on this work, taking care of all the demands and tasks coming his way as he becomes the sole master of the archaic system.

One day, this developer wants to go on vacation, but we realize that no one else can cover for him. That’s usually the first red flag. But some companies are still comfortable taking this risk. From that moment, things will depend on the decisions that will be taken. If the developer does nothing, he becomes a danger to the company. If the company does nothing, it becomes a danger to itself.

If the developer quits, the company can’t provide services to its clients anymore. If he stays, taking vacations will become more and more a nightmare, always preceded by very painful and urgent knowledge transfer. I’d say that this kind of situation can equally be created by both employees and companies. On purpose, or not.

The indispensable sometimes plans his act

From time to time, someone will specifically desire to become indispensable. By withholding and monopolizing information, refusing to work with others, and being very territorial with his work, his project or his product. He is a self-proclaimed expert in the matter. He will sometimes go to the point of working in very complex ways on purpose and avoid documenting anything so that others can’t do his job.

It goes without saying that it is a very unhealthy practice that will cause an impact proportional to the employee’s ego. The danger doesn’t only reside in the know-how, but also overflows in the mindset. I could absolutely not blame a company for lancing the boil and letting this person go, and then heal the wound with something else than an adhesive bandage.

The indispensable forces the company to take a decision

A company that becomes aware of the situation has a few options: coaching the employees to train one another on the archaic technology, create a rotation of employees to take care of maintenance, or simply get rid of the obsolete technology.

That last option can hurt. The employee who dedicated his last experiences to an outdated system suddenly brings much less value, and there’s no guarantee that the organization holds its employees very dear. It could very well get rid of its expert along with the old technology. It is certainly questionable, especially if the company heavily contributed to painting the employee into a corner. Be that as it may, most companies will at least consider this easy and unfortunate solution.

The indispensable brings negative value

Those who make themselves indispensable on purpose are an imminent danger to their own job and to the company they work for. Be it voluntarily or not, it is not a behavior that is viable in the long term and needs to be corrected since nobody will gain anything by waiting for the situation to go from bad to worse. The value of the indispensable is determined by how much it would cost if they leave. 

Making yourself essential is desirable

The fundamental difference with the portrait drawn above is that while the indispensable wants to become useful to an extreme, the person trying to become essential aims at being useless. The essential person believes they should share their know-how and social skills with as many people as possible.

The essential person is altruistic

One must understand that essential people are fundamentally altruistic: they do what they do because it is the right thing to do. They generally expect nothing in return. Helping others, for them, is not an effort but a habit that’s encoded in their DNA. They share their knowledge because they consider that if it’s useful to them, it will be useful to everyone.

The essential person is a leader

There are lots of style of leadership. But the essential person is what we call an everyman leader. Someone who makes the extra effort to help whoever needs it. You know, this person who walks the extra mile to make someone else’s life easier? The essential person is an agent of change, no matter the place, the role and does it every day. Very often, an employee will immediately ask for help from the essential person rather than his manager when facing a problem. This leader makes sure to stay available for the good of everyone.

And, most of all, essential people know that whatever needs to be done, nothing they do is about themselves.

The essential person aims at being useless

It is usually the hardest part to understand for some. The essential person always aims for being completely useless. The goal is to help others help themselves. The essential person wishes to be who others grow beyond. Knowledge and skills are transferred to others so that they won’t need help anymore. The essential person creates other leaders. Once others are autonomous, they will still go towards the essential person when facing new problems.

The essential person brings positive value

The essential person, far from being a danger to the organization, inspires others to become better and surpass themselves and eases the daily pains by helping whoever needs it. To the point of creating new opportunities to help their surroundings with things, they had no idea they needed help with. The essential person is last on the list of “people to let go in time of crisis”. The value of the essential person is determined by what they bring to others.

Update (May 21st, 2018)

This article was the topic of a podcast by Hacking Your Leadership on May 21st, 2018

(Episode 74: Do you know the difference between essential employees and indispensable employees?)
Access Hacking Your Leadership podcast sur iTunes.
Access Hacking Your Leadership podcast sur PodBeans.

Olivier Fortier

Owner of Primos Populi, partner and coach at Moabi. As a former manager, I prefer to use a “people first, the rest will follow” kind of approach. My favorite topics are organizational culture, safe work environments, and lowering the center of gravity of the decision making process. I cultivate people’s awesomeness.

www.primospopuli.com

But we are actually turning the tides of traditional management, though. And since we are a small team, it’s an ideal environment to test the waters – HA! – with some innovative management and leadership approaches.

A Matter of Principles for Us Managers

Before going deeper into what we’re doing and how we do it, you need to know about the managers in the Product and Technology department at Marine Press, and what they believe. There are five of us. We don’t always think alike and we’re not all full-time managers. Some are executives, some are still working hands-on with the products. However, we pretty much agree on the following principles:

Principle 1: People = Awesome

The most important guiding principle of Modern Agile: Make People Awesome. A manager’s job is to take care of people. Not just the employees “under them” (I really don’t like to consider this relationship a vertical one), but any colleague, even other managers and executives.

The lack of humanity, of caring and nurturing towards people in the workplace is, in my opinion, a rampant plague that keeps companies in a chronic state of underachievement. Recently, I vowed to devote my career to fighting this problem, and when I joined Marine Press I made it clear: “If I’m to be a manager here, I won’t be telling people what to do. I’ll be taking care of them so that they can do what needs to be done. I’ll actually be working for them, and not the other way around”. Turns out that this is exactly what they wanted and needed.

My colleagues joined me in this mindset, and sentences such as “Take care of your people and they will take care of your business” isn’t a cute quote anymore. It’s a principle we live by.

Principle 2: Trust > Control

We believe in structure, but the minimal necessary amount of structure. We agreed that we don’t have to come up with strict rules and processes for employees to follow. We provide people with business objectives, and they can come up with their own way of reaching them.

The end goal is more important for managers than the path taken to reach it. Once everyone agrees on the goal, the employees have full decision-making power – yes you read that right – to make things happen. “But what if [insert your worry here]?”. Turns out that we simply choose to trust their judgement. If we don’t want to tell people how to work, you can imagine we’re not much interested in telling them what they can’t do as well. The only rule is “Use your judgement, gather feedback from your peers, and if you’re not sure, ask for help”. We’ll figure it out together. And if management is worried about something, we engage in discussion with the teams.

Processes imposed by management can be easily and unscrupulously manipulated. Adhesion to the process becomes the rule, and people have no trust relationship with a process, so they can cheat it without any kind of remorse. It’s much easier than risking to break the trust of your peers.

In our setting, we mainly care for the end result and we trust people to create and improve their own processes to achieve the best results. By being in full control of their processes, the team members won’t (and can’t) hide behind it. I can’t imagine a colleague saying “Well it’s not my fault we’re not delivering, I’m just following the process”. The process is theirs. In these conditions, manipulating or cheating the process becomes nonsense.

To reduce control and accentuate trust, we try to keep everything as simple and flexible as possible. If we need to talk and adjust, then let’s talk and adjust.

Principle 3: Creativity > Tradition

In a recent article that I posted on the Agile Partnership’s blog, I stated that “We’ve always done it like this” was actually a toxic statement, as it’s pretty much the motto of organizations with a fixed mindset.

Things change, needs evolve, contexts fluctuate, and people mature with experience. What once was cannot remain the same for very long. Based on that, we actively try to break old habits and reflexes. We have developed a very interesting mentality between managers: if we all agree quickly on something, it’s probably worth investigating more.

This allows us to be creative where we would normally just do “the usual thing”. Sometimes, we figure out that the “usual thing” makes no sense, is too heavy, too complex, or completely obsolete. I have now learned to grow a little more suspicious of situations where everybody agrees instantaneously. It reminds me that “If everybody thinks like you, you don’t need them”, and it also encourages healthy conflicts to arise rather than artificial harmony.

Becoming a Squad

For those who aren’t used to the concept of squads, know that it was made popular by Spotify and their engineering culture. Squads are basically people from different backgrounds working together to achieve a common goal. Autonomy is the cornerstone of squads; its members have all the necessary power to make things happen.

Forming a squad of managers was not really on purpose at first. There are a few things we wanted to achieve and consolidate, and we eventually figured that we were just creating the ideal context for a squad. Here’s what happened :

We got rid of our job descriptions

We actually got rid of the concept of the job description, but responsibilities, of course, are still important. We knew that some people were responsible for some things, others took care of other things. Historically, that’s how we used to work. The main problem was that if one person is entirely responsible for this one topic, what happens if this person is sick, on leave, on vacation? If others don’t know, whatever needed to happen won’t happen.

So instead, we spent an afternoon in a meeting room, and we listed on the whiteboard everything that needs to happen in our department. From recruiting to personal and professional development, release management and product roadmap. We actually forgot some at first, which proves that when responsibilities are assigned to us, well, selective memory becomes a real danger.

What happened then was quite magical. There were 30+ items on the whiteboard, and we then decided to put our names on the topics that we wanted to champion.

I was very impressed by the results. Not only people put their names on topics that they already knew, liked and mastered, but also on topics they knew nothing about and wanted to learn. Moreover, out of 30+ items, only one was left out (and eventually found a caretaker). Even better, some topics got 2, 3 and 4 names beside them.

The lesson I kept from this is that volunteering is much more powerful than delegation. Now that we do things we chose to do and are curious doing, they do happen and are done better. There is a true sense of ownership, as we’re not doing them just because “it’s in our job description”. We’re happy to deliver because we wanted to do it, and we care.

And to ensure that these things happen outside of a vacuum, the champion’s job is not to do everything by themselves. Their job is to make sure these things happen, and we decided together that whenever someone is to work on one of these items, others had to be invited. We’re only starting, but so far it’s going very well.

We’ve become a support squad

That’s the way we found to ensure that we’re working for our colleagues, and not the other way around. Becoming a squad that’s supporting other squads ensures that we’ll better answer people’s needs.

Just like product squads, we commit to deliver certain things in a fixed amount of time. Our colleagues are our stakeholders, meaning they can refuse what we deliver, or ask us to change it if it doesn’t fulfill their needs. We select what to deliver based on the feedback we get in 1-on-1 discussions, in OfficeVibe, or simply during team workshops and discussions.

We started this a few weeks ago, and we are very positive that people will feel like management is much more active at supporting them and attending to their needs. As we are using OfficeVibe to measure the happiness in our organization, I’m thinking of using this data as a measurement of our squad’s performance.

Now, only time will tell if this approach works for people, but so far, it’s been working wonderfully for me. I feel engaged, empowered, motivated. What I think, what I say and what I do are aligned. Let’s see what happens…

Olivier Fortier

Owner of Primos Populi, partner and coach at Moabi. As a former manager, I prefer to use a “people first, the rest will follow” kind of approach. My favorite topics are organizational culture, safe work environments, and lowering the center of gravity of the decision making process. I cultivate people’s awesomeness.

www.primospopuli.com