A business that relies on favours is not a viable business. This applies to everyone at every level. If you make yourself indispensable, you can never move on. Never switch off. And that puts the business at risk. What if you’re ill? What if you decide to leave? What if you need a holiday?
I’ve been there, working 90-hour weeks and weekends for 6 months straight. Taking a week’s holiday only to get a call from my boss asking me to cut it short when a problem crops up. It’s deeply unpleasant.
Freeing yourself from being indispensable takes personal leadership and confidence. It starts with succession planning. From day 1, whether this is your first job or your 10th , start asking yourself how you can make what you do doable by someone other than you? Far from doing yourself out of a job, you’re creating opportunities. Opportunities to do something different: a new role, a new project, a different team. It won’t happen on day 1, of course, but you need that mindset and approach from the off.
Learn the task, then document it, demonstrate it and look for opportunities to show someone else how to do it. Take feedback. When you demonstrate your understanding, you’re inviting feedback and that’s gold dust for learning. Incorporate it and improve thanks to it.
It probably sounds a little dramatic, but your career is yours. So take it by the horns and push it in the direction you want to go. Create opportunities for yourself and others.
To do this, live by one of the cheesiest (yet truest) sayings in the book: “Don’t come to me with problems, come to me with solutions.” If you’re working on removing headaches and reducing risks for your boss and their boss, you’re solving their problems. Accepting a solution to a problem is way easier than accepting the problem.
Show this kind of personal leadership and, guess what, your boss and colleagues sit up and take notice. Your reputation builds alongside the trust your team have in you. And if you’ve also made it easy to hand over your current work, your boss can’t help but set you up for the next project, team or promotion. Put that process on repeat and you’ve got a great way to keep progressing.
And let’s not forget your holiday, your downtime. This process will get your next holiday request approved and ensure your time away is uninterrupted by calls from work.
This is deeply interlinked with our other manifesto points but perhaps most of all: Build for the person logging on at 3am when the world is on fire. Make sure you’re not the only person on call. And make sure someone else can solve the problem without calling you.
Creating systems and processes you can hand over to a colleague, even at short notice, takes the pressure off. It’s no longer all on your shoulders.