Teach Your Daughters About Red Flags
I’ve worked for quite a few organizations over the years, and I don’t think I ever left thinking ‘they won’t survive without me’.
And that’s the way I like it. It’s also the situation that I think every person leaving a business should strive to achieve.
Photo by Jan Tinneberg on Unsplash
When it comes to any role within the organization, if you’ve got into the situation where you are the only person that knows how to do something, how something works, or where something is, then you’ve failed spectacularly.
Organizations are on the whole not just one person. They are groups of people, in teams or departments, who are all working together towards a common goal.
If the work towards that goal stops because one person is on annual leave, or on an overseas trip, or because they have left the business, then you’re going to face immense problems.
It’s the business’s responsibility to ensure that these single points of failure are removed as much as possible, because on any given day someone could get ill, someone could be hit by a bus, or resign, and the business needs to be in a secure enough state to keep operating with minimal disruption.
That’s what we should all be aiming for.
Does this make me less valuable if they can do everything when I’m not here?
No. Definitely not. That’s the beauty of this approach.
If your aim is to empower others, through information and processes, then you are already seen as valuable by the people in the business, as you’re the one that others see as being able to facilitate improvement and growth.
You’re the person that others will look to to validate their ideas, but importantly they’re coming up with the ideas, not you.
It’s the wider team that are taking steps to improve things. It’s the team that make sure things are ticking along without you having to stand over them all of the time.
And if the team can be managing things without you, then you’re freed up to try new things.
You can follow up a new idea, research an improvement, develop a new product. That’s really what drives businesses forward. Having time to take the next step.
If they know I’m not needed, won’t they let me go?
No, for all the reasons I mention above.
What kind of an organization lets go of people who deliver so much value to the business?
If I have someone who empowers everyone else to deliver more and more value then I try and keep hold of them as hard as I can.
So how do I make myself indispensable?
Share the knowledge, as much as you can.
Document processes.
Prepare strategy documents.
Organize information.
Make the information that you have in your head accessible to others, whenever they need it.
The more things that others can look up, the less time you have to spend answering questions, or doing the minor tasks for them.
When you’re next doing a task, document the steps that you go through in order to deliver the results. Include screenshots where it might be complicated, and make sure you tell people why they need to do they things you’re saying. The first day your not there and this task needs doing, anyone can follow the steps and the business keeps moving forwards.
Create process descriptions that highlight how we go about things within our business, so it’s clear what should be happening and when. How we go about defining a new feature. How the Jira system is set up. How the product development process works.
Most people in the business should already know this, but if a new person enters the business they don’t have to figure this stuff out. They can simply read it and away they go. The business keeps moving forwards.
Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash
Get the team making decisions on their own.
I’ve joined many a team where the engineers did what they were told. Someone handed them a feature specification and their job was to deliver what it said.
This works for a time, usually when the team is small and the person providing the brief is present to raise questions with all of the time, however when the teams get bigger, and the work gets more involved, and you need to work more quickly and more effectively, this approach doesn’t work so well.
You need to go through a process of involving the team more in the review of features, and then in the planning of features, and then in defining the features themselves, to the point where, if you’re not there for a backlog refinement session they can review the stories and do their own estimations, or if you’re not there for sprint planning the work still gets planned.
The team know what’s coming up and how we go about delivering things, which means you’ve been able to look at other areas and not get bogged down in delivery.
Who should become dispensable?
Anyone.
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It doesn’t matter if you’re the junior on the support desk or the CEO, by sharing the knowledge and empowering the team you will be driving the business forward, and freeing yourself up to do new and exciting things, either in your business or elsewhere.
The world keeps turning when we’re not there, so let’s help it turn smoothly.
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About Me
I’ve been looking after products and hiring product teams for 20+ years. I’m currently product owner at luxury watch retailer Watchfinder and I write about how those who want to get into product can go about doing so, as well as how to do the job when they get there.
