Layoffs abound and people are worried about their jobs. What should we do? Probably the exact opposite of what our instinct tells us.
Forget hoarding information, carving out a small fiefdom and just putting your head down in order to become indispensable. That’s the mentality of the weak and scared. It’ll not only hurt the quality of your team’s work, but that fearfulness will be sniffed out a mile away. How you treat others will subtly change and suddenly you’ll find a bulls eye on your back. Everything you were trying to prevent will come to fruition.
Your goal shouldn’t be to keep the machine running. Yes, you should focus on doing good work, but that only takes you so far.
Instead make yourself redundant.
Coach someone on your team to do your job. Optimize processes in order to eliminate yourself as a bottleneck. Do something extraordinary that increases your company’s return on their human investments. You’ll have little ‘competition’ and your achievements will be more likely to get noticed.
photo by marielito
Doing these things has the upshot of inspiring the people on your team by challenging them to take on more responsibility, gets them in the mindset of looking for solutions to the company’s problems and frees you up to proactively work on bigger picture projects and ideas you’ve wanted to tackle but haven’t had the time.
If you’ve been able to accomplish making yourself redundant then you’ve done something of real value. You’ve proven your leadership chops, coaching abilities and saved the company money. That’s something that not everyone has the guts to do and will enable you to stand out. Not something that’s in a job description but who gets noticed just for doing their job?
Not to mention these things are 100% transferable and something far more valuable than that last PowerPoint deck that you can take with you to a new company.
For a little inspiration on getting started check out this excellent post from Steve Farber on the ‘Greater-Than-Yourself Project.’
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