Why All IT Talent Should Be Irreplaceable

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.

The great and the 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:

Good employees who work together as a team outperform great employees who don’t.
Good employees with great processes outperform great employees with bad processes.
If an employee is irreplaceable, you should immediately fire that employee.

My own firsthand experience is quite different. It tells me that:

Great employees can and do overcome bad processes.
Great employees can and do overcome lousy managers.
Great employees can and do pull along mediocre teams.
Making one or two great hires is the most critical step in turning around an underperforming organization.
And, if Frederick Brooks’ The Mythical Man Month is to be believed (it is), the best IT employees are at least 10 times more effective than average ones, even though their paychecks are nowhere near 10 times what average employees receive. So you can easily afford to hire great employees.

But isn’t there a difference between great employees and irreplaceable ones?

The algebra of irreplaceability

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.

What makes a great employee

“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.

The ‘Golden Rule of Recruiting’: Don’t settle

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?

“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.”

Been in tech for 3 decades, and I have mixed view on this.
I would say, that your experience may be your managers were not very technical deep themselves. IN tech, there are ton of people who’s egos far exceed their abilities. Usually they are bigger fish in smaller ponds, who think there poop doesn’t smell. Someone without the personal technical experience depth, cant always distinguish who’s good, and who’s good at appearing to be good.

Been hacking code for about 4 decades now myself, done every position/job/role you can imagine in that time.. Now I find myself managing more often than anything else, and I can say I have no fear of the “excellent” worker. I will say however, that often times when I speak with other managers and observe their teams, they don’t really recognize who the real stars on their teams are.

The “hero” guy, may be a good resource, but he isn’t always an “excellent” worker. Sure they show up when things go nuts and play hero, but they can, and often are, the guy who runs roughshod over the folks who would have done it right the first time so the fire never happened.

I’ve had good and bad managers, over my career. I have had horrible managers who were very technically deep, and I have hd great managers who werent. I’d say based on what you are saying is you have been dealing with mediocre managers with little technical depth if they are afraid of the “excellent” worker.

Also, 3 decades in the trenches makes you understand just how much of the tech industry is undiagnosed on the spectrum too..

Too many employees are irreplaceable not of their own choosing.

Very often it's a flawed system, always underfunded, and deal with competing internal clients.

You keep upchanneling the need for more staff and better systems but every day you look around you and there's no one new and the systems only get more band-aids.

Smart people stay away. The green newbies who didn't know to stay away get smart quick and move on.

The employee looks in the mirror and realizes the same ignoramus who insists no one is irreplaceable, at the same time made several employees irreplaceable.

I watched small companies fold when just one person left. They were in support roles, some IT, mostly finance and contracts. They kept telling the owners about all the risks but the owners didn't want to listen.

The employee finally retired or had enough and walked away. They offered to train any replacements but no one wanted to walk in and pick up that headache for what the owners could or would pay. After three months of clients switching away due to non-performance, the company was done.

Even in large corporations, look at how many CEOs or prior owners were brought back to save the sinking company (like Steve Jobs at Apple).

The most irreplaceable employee at a company, that most executives don't realize until too late if they recognize it at all, is the employee willing to tell them the truth about bad decisions. Somewhere in a Human Resources file in Anheuser-Busch / InBev is an individual of sufficient corporate rank who knew it was not a smart move to hire the people who would think hiring transvestite Dylan Mulvaney was a good idea.

No one is irreplaceable? Just ask the former board of Project Veritas about how replaceable James O'Keefe was.

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