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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?
Great teams should have people with many different strengths—so the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
It does not matter how talented individual members are if managers forget a key component of their process—and have nobody who can help them fix it.
The second most important part of team building is to get rid of the folks who claim the task is impossible. Anyone with a negative attitude needs to be out—they are a drag that can slow down or even halt any success.
About the last 20 years of my IT Career I was a contractor doing Cisco System installs/configuration for routers, switches, and Voice related products.
I always kept an updated resume online just in case, as a contractor you never knew when a company might decide to cancel a project and the project will end some day.
Plus, someone may see your resume and make you an offer that is too good to turn down, as a contractor you are very dispensable but get paid very well.
The second most important part of team building is to get rid of the folks who claim the task is impossible.
They Said It Could Not Be Done - By Benny Hill
They said that it could not be done,
He said, “Just let me try.”
They said, ‘Other men have tried and failed’,
He answered, ‘But not I.’
They said, “It is impossible,”
He said, “There’s no such word.”
He closed his mind, he closed his heart...
To everything he heard.
He said, “Within the heart of man,
There is a tiny seed.
It grows until it blossoms,
It’s called ‘The Will To Succeed.”
Its roots are strength, its stem is hope,
Its petals inspiration,
Its thorns protect its strong green leaves,
With grim determination.
“It’s stamens are its skills
Which help to shape each plan,
For there’s nothing in the universe
Beyond the scope of Man.”
They thought that it could not be done,
Some even said they knew it,
But he faced up to what could not be done...
...And he couldn’t bloody do it!
That is OK but all changes are not equal.
In our work team we had folks who had only one helpful idea every six months—but often it was so creative and powerful that it meant more than the dozens of little improvements other team members generated during the same period.
The problem with truly complex processes is that nobody fully understands them—managers who think they do are often a part of the problem and not part of the solution.
HR is often populated with the lowest IQ employees.
Department Managers should have full discretion with respect to hiring.
Of course, that would result in racist and sexist hiring practices…
Even listed at #1 it should be even higher. This is currently going on in my group now. Team member knows quite a bit and is very technical and efficient. Rubs everyone the wrong way and is abrasive. I know no one likes them.
Not sure who wrote this, but EVERYONE IS REPLACEABLE, PERIOD, at least from a business perspective, and if they aren’t you have a major issue in your organization.
If you are setting up your org, so that everyone in it is irreplaceable, then you won’t be in business long.
Yes, some people are harder and more painful to replace than others, but if your organization cannot survive the loss of someone you are a poorly managed organization.
Our IT guy is so replaceable. He rarely shows up, has an excuse every time and mostly works from home. Hard to change out a PC from home.
Has been here for a bit over a year and has not put in 40 hours in the office in one week yet.
Oh, and did I mention hes a slob? His wiring on the backup servers looks like used fishing nets.
Another opportunity occurred when Bellcore sent a 53,000 record file. Each line was name=value colon separated, newline terminated. This story dates to July 1983. The COBOL team was tasked with removing 3 name/value element when found in any line record. Running on a UNIVAC 1100/64, the COBOL code completed the task in 16 hours. I was offered an opportunity to perform the same processing, but written in C. I would do it in 10 lines of Python today, but that hadn't been invented. My solution was 400 lines of C. The file was processed in 20 minutes executing on the same host as the COBOL that took 16 hours. One difference is that my C ran in a guest UNIX subsystem. The COBOL ran natively on the 1100/64.
The C compiler I was using came from Bellcore. A very early K&R variety. As soon as I could muster time, I started building GCC on that host and wrote what we would term ANSI C today. It was still an ugly environment with 36 bit "words".
I agree that you can’t have the person who can’t get along with others and play nice... no matter how good they may be at what they do, they are TOXIC.
Had to fire a guy like that, arrogant jackass... was capable, but not nearly as awesome as he thought he was, and alienated everyone, no one wanted to work with him and would go out of their way to avoid doing so.
Took a few cycles to get rid of him because of Corporate HR BS... I would have fired him much faster. Look on his face was priceless when I finally sat him down and let him go. True to form his ego just couldn’t handle what I was telling him. Been telling him for more than 6 months he needed to work on his soft skills, and that he was going to limit his career long term with his behavior.
I don’t think the kid (late 20s) had ever heard anything other than how great he was in his life before me.
My experience, too.
When I worked for one client way back when, they had a server that would go down for about 5 minutes every night, for no apparent reason, the thing would reboot. They could tell from the logs that it rebooted every morning...
Finally someone actually stayed and physically watched the server...
Cleaning lady was coming in every night, unplugging the machine, plugging in her vaccuum, vaccuuming the floor, and then plugging it back in.
Needless to say, they decided to invest in a dedicated server room after that was discovered. hahahah
Maybe we asked mgt to train new people and to cross train experienced people in different areas AND THEY DONT LISTEN.
One of the critical jobs of managers is to persuade that “abrasive” employee that the team concept makes sense—and that all members of the team have something to contribute.
Of course—that better be true because otherwise the technically skilled employee will not be persuaded to change their ways.
One of the “tricks” to mitigate the abrasive personality is to put them in charge of a tough sub project. Let them pick their own sub team members and make it work.
Make sure the sub team duties are a little outside the area of expertise of the team leader so they are totally dependent on other team members.
The only way they can succeed is if the sub team works together.
Some of our most wonderful “impossible” process improvements were in areas where none of us were experts—we all had to learn from scratch—together.
I think you would be an excellent person to talk with.
You rock!
The only training your gonna get these days is the training you do yourself.
I am constantly taking Udemy courses to stay current.
The part you posted of that article is excellent.
However I can tell you that we are having a very difficult time finding responsible new hires.
80% of the new ones refuse to follow direction, are super sensitive, and looking to job hop into a promotion somewhere else as soon as possible.
Maybe the limited availability of good employees is leading to all these brats, but they are introducing a lot of instability into the overall IT picture with their attitudes alone.
There is no loyalty on either side these days.
My work today consists of wrapping prior standalone server environments into reusable docker containers managed with kubernetes. It's a lot of work to package the containers in a reusable form and make them capable of being tailored to the needs of the end user community. I miss the joy of writing ultra compact DSP code to run in a tiny processor. A developer on my current team needs a minimum quad core I7 and 64 GB RAM and 2 TB disk to run the VMs and kubernetes clusters.
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