For the last 3 years, I’ve spent every day trying to work myself out of a job. Each day I strive to make myself less critical in the day-to-day tasks of my team. I do this by automating, by making sure everyone who’s willing to listen knows how to do my job, and by training those who work for me to eventually replace me. If, by the end of the week, I haven’t decreased my criticality, I didn’t do my job well.
Now, this doesn’t mean I don’t work hard, or that I just try to get others to do my job for me. Every day I work to deliver value, to move my projects forward, to support my teams and to generally be a net positive to whoever employs me. Working myself out of a job is absolutely not about being less valuable, but by being less critical… and there’s a world of difference between the two.
Personally, I define critical as being the only person who knows/is capable of doing a given task or solving a particular problem. Alternatively, being valuable is being a person who can use their knowledge or skills to help the wider organisation achieve its goals. This help can be by sharing knowledge, improving process, improving communications between teams etc. It’s less about a specific task, and more about making it easier for the company to accomplish many tasks and projects.
You could be the guy whose job it is to post updates to your company’s news page. You’re the only one who knows how to work the complicated, ancient set of tools necessary to get text onto the news page. So in this sense, you’re critical as only you can post this news… but are you really delivering a whole lot of value?
I used to be one of 2 people who could package and publish a game for Impulse. One of 3 people who understood how the admin tools behind the store worked together. One of less than 5 people in a company of thousands who could decipher store transaction logs. In fact, at one point I was the only person with an end-to-end view of the system. Sure there were a lot of people who were expert in a specific link in the chain, but no one could see the whole thing from start to finish. I thought this was value. I was the engine that powered the business. Without me, no games could be released (or at least released correctly/quickly). No one could make a decision about what to do as well as I could because no one was as informed as me… or so I told myself.
Turned out I was incredibly critical, but my value was highly questionable. Probably 75% of what I was doing could have been automated. Process could have been simplified. And people could have been trained up to do parts of the work for far cheaper than me. But I thought being critical was the same thing as job security, was the same thing as being valuable, so I hoarded my knowledge.
This all changed when my boss at the time sat me down and asked me “What would happen if you were hit by the lottery tomorrow?”
This is a much more positive spin on the old “What would we do if Joe was hit by a bus tomorrow?” view of contingency planning. The idea being that you really don’t want too much to depend on one person, because if anything were to happen, the company/team would be screwed.
I liked this take on the problem because it really made me think about my work in a more positive way. It made me think about:
• What if I got a fantastic job offer somewhere else tomorrow? What state would I leave things in if I just left suddenly and would this leave a mess behind me others had to frantically clean up?
• What if I wanted more money and responsibility? Would I be allowed to move up or would I have to stay where I was?
• What if I just wanted to go on a 2 week vacation and not have to check my e-mail to make sure things were going well?
Instead of seeing being critical as protecting my job, I began to see it as impeding my potential growth. This talk coincided with some people I knew getting laid off from their jobs. One of them was the only one at his company that knew how to do several core tasks. He was laid off anyway and the company just spent a few weeks figuring out how to fill in the gap. His critical knowledge didn’t protect him. In truth, it rarely protects anyone.
If hoarding my knowledge wasn’t really providing job security, and it was definitely limiting my potential, what the hell good was it doing?
This was a hard realisation and required me to totally retool how I approached work. From being a Guru that guarded my secrets and resisted change that might threaten my position, to being a coach that educated, encouraged change and spread knowledge as much as I could. Today, I spend most of my time sharing knowledge and making the work my teams do as transparent to the company as possible. I encourage my team leads and peers to do the same. I believe we all make better decisions and do better work when we know what’s going on around us.
Now, my days are spent educating, training, coaching, and removing roadblocks for my team and others. I want to build something that can thrive and last independent of myself. To do that, I can’t be critical to the day-to-day tasks.
Plus, doing this means I can take a vacation and not check my e-mail… and let’s be honest, that’s what everyone wants most of all these days!
This is a re-post of an article I originally wrote on LinkedIn where I talk about what I call my Core Work Values. I first post these to LinkedIn and later bring them over to my personal site here. If you want to read them as they’re posted, please feel free to follow/connect with me on LinkedIn. You can find my profile here.