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Posted on 10/05/2023 7:25:22 AM PDT by ShadowAce
Forget the conventional wisdom about firing irreplaceable employees. Because if your employees aren’t irreplaceable, you’re doing something wrong.
“The graveyards,” General De Gaulle once ironically observed, “are full of indispensable men.” Maybe so, but the same may not be so easily said about organizations whose success did depend on irreplaceable managers and staff.
Take, for example, Apple. Under Steve Jobs it created the iPod, iPhone, App Store, and iPad — products and services that ranged from radical departures to entirely new concepts.
Under Tim Cook? What his Apple has introduced to the marketplace are copycat items: A streaming service, new smartphone models, hybrid tablet/laptop — fine products, I’m sure, but not particularly innovative.
And so far as its financial performance is concerned, Apple’s Return on Invested Capital has diminished dramatically under Cook, from an astronomical 443% under Steve Jobs to a “mere” — which is to say superior — 183%.
So, from the perspective of Apple’s board of directors, Jobs was irreplaceable. From the perspective of the digital marketplace, on the other hand, he was, well, irreplaceable.
Of course, as most Jobs-related anecdotes go, this is statistics with a sample size of one. Instead, let’s look at the organization you lead. Depending on the business expert I’m listening to and the day of the week, I’m told three truths:
My own firsthand experience is quite different. It tells me that:
But isn’t there a difference between great employees and irreplaceable ones?
Brooks explained the math: The number of personal relationships in a team of size n is n(n-1)/2, so a team with 10 members contains 45 personal relationships between pairs of employees. Or, each team member has a relationship with every member (n) excluding themselves (-1).
So, doing a bit of algebra, when you replace one employee in a 10-member team with someone new, you’ve replaced not 10%, but 20% of the team when you measure team size as the number of relationships in it.
Especially if the employee you’ve lost is a great employee, you’re looking at, not a changed team, but an entirely different one. If their replacement is only average, the new team is still far less effective.
The conclusion is as obvious as it is rarely practiced: Treat your best employees as if you’re trying to recruit them, every day of every week.
Treat them that way because if they’re that good, other employers are trying to find and recruit them, every day of every week, too.
“Great employee” is easy to type. It’s less easy to define. Here’s a short list to get you started. Scrub it by discussing the question with your leadership team.
The habit of success: Some employees seemingly don’t know how to fail. Give them an assignment and they’ll figure out a way to get it done.
Competence: As a general rule, it’s better to apologize for an employee’s bad manners than for their inability to do the work. Without competence, employees with a strong success habit can do a lot of damage by, for example, creating kludges instead of sustainable solutions.
Followership: Leadership is a prized attribute for employees to have. Prized, that is, if they’re leading in their leader’s direction. Otherwise, if you and they are leading in different directions, all your prized leaders will do is generate conflict and confusion. Followership is what happens when they embrace the direction you’re setting and make it their own.
Intellectual honesty: Some employees can be persuaded with evidence and logic. Others trust their guts instead. That’s a physiological error. You want people who digest with their intestines but think with their brains.
Team orientation: You want employees who support their team, not those who compete with it.
Not that kind of irreplaceable: Great employees are and should be irreplaceable, or nearly so. But there’s another kind of irreplaceable employee — those who hoard information and techniques so that getting rid of them is impractical. Take all steps necessary to make these irreplaceable employees replaceable. Then, as soon as you can, replace them with the desirable sort of irreplaceable employee.
Fail to fill an open position and everyone will have to pick up the workload. So it’s tempting to sigh, shrug, and hire someone who seems adequate.Before you go through with it, ask yourself: Is adequate going to be good enough over the long haul? Or are you better off waiting for an applicant who will, like the employees you already have, be irreplaceable?
Why I despise HR thinking....
The author of this article is definitely replaceable.
Having spent 38 years in the IT World, I say be careful about irreplaceable employees, one day they might not be there, and you IT Operations could be severely impacted.
If you have 1 or 2 people who are the only ones that know how to run a particular procedure, that is not good IT Management, especially if it’s not well documented so that everyone is aware of what needs to be done.
My experience is that many Managers are very afraid of excellent workers. They don’t understand them. They don’t know how to talk with them. They don’t know how to manage them. A lot of Managers try to get rid of excellent workers.
If a “great employee” is subjected to bad processes, lousy managers, and/or mediocre teams.
They won’t be employees much longer. They’ll go elsewhere. The money won’t matter.
There are no IT workers who look like the woman (am I allowed to assume that?!) in the picture.
None.
Oh come on. There has to be one, right?
This article was probably written by a chatbot seeking to buy AI more time to take over IT.
Doesn’t take into account Envy—wanting another not to have a good they possess.
I came into a job with a technical competence that was on the Job Description but that the leaders 1) didn’t themselves have and 2) they needed because they were undergoing a Migration that needed workarounds that only I could do.
The Top Dog commended me for taking a daily procedure that took 1:10 hours down to 0:22 minutes.
My lead man came over to my desk and immediately started screaming at me:
“Now, can you take it down to 15 minutes? 10 minutes?”
Recognizing the power of Envy, I always take every possible opportunity of assigning him every credit for every thing.
How does that improve productivity?
He doesn’t say irreplaceable people are needed. He says great people are needed to overcome cruft and bad situations in your company.
All the mediocre and terrible and even “good” employees suck at this, which is why your poor processes and poor company performance is there, in the first place.
BINGO!!!!
I left the best job of my career for EXACTLY those reasons.
But I believe the sentiment of the author regarding irreplaceability was less about specialized knowledge and more about social skills and the impact one or two people can have on a team. Until now I thought little about his point, mainly regarding IT people as mostly introverts little affected by the social activity of the people around them. But having read the article I look back and can see that he may be onto something.
Article:
“those who hoard information and techniques so that getting rid of them is impractical”
That is what every employee should strive to be....but....
The managers may be so stupid that they don’t even know how important you are.
The best way around that problem is to make sure the competitors know how valuable you are even if your own managers have no clue.
Your post reminds me of another recommendation I would make to every talented employee...
Never show all your cards—make only minor improvements so there is lots of room for you to make more improvements later on...
The market is mature now. Everybody pretty much have cellphones. And in general they should last at least 4-5 years.
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