Yes, you read that right. Good leaders make themselves dispensable.
I read this quotation in a comments section, oddly enough, of a recent WSJ journal article. It immediately resonated with me, because it really is so true. I had subconsciously always believed it, but never read it quite so succinctly.
If you’re really good at what you do, and lead people the right way, you become dispensable over time. Not dispensable in the sense that you can be shitty at your job and get away with it; rather, dispensable because you have done so much good in whatever it is you do, that you can’t possibly do anymore.
This notion doesn’t at all imply that the value, knowledge and insight you provide to a company or business diminishes over time. It is ironically the opposite. Your value greatly increases under this mantra. How is it possible for someone to become dispensable AND for their value to a business increase?
Ever hear the term “rising all boats higher”? Great leaders metaphorically make all boats in the harbor rise higher. Using that analogy in business, the best people take others around them to new heights they couldn’t have imagined previously. It is a very non-self centered mindset. The more people your leadership applies to, or the more people you are able to impact, the greater the value of the business or enterprise. These leaders not only cement a legacy, they ensure that their legacy lives on long after their days of shaping their department, business or company. Sometimes your legacy carries on through one person; sometimes it is thousands.
I’ll give you a personal anecdote. The last three career stops I’ve had have each lasted almost exactly five years. Like literally, almost five years to the date I started that particular venture. I’m not touting myself as a great leader here, but I have made myself dispensable right around the five year mark at every turn and felt great about it. I live by a very specific process and formula, in everything I do, and that formula has a life cycle of five years (as I’ve found out). What is your life cycle? Shorter? Longer? It is important to know. I’m not talking about the “I need a long vacation” feelings or the standard burnout everyone feels at some point in time. I’m referring to something much deeper.
Good leaders ensure long-term success of their people. Depending on what you do, or how much power or clout you have in a business or company, affects how many people you can impact in this manner. The point is that the great ones always seem to provide a bulletproof road map for those left behind that provides them the tools to know how to survive – and thrive – long after he or she leaves in ANY work environment.
I understand that the traditional mindset is something akin to: “make sure you are deemed the most valuable person in the interest of job or work security, so that they can’t get rid of you.” I couldn’t disagree with that more as a path to being great in anything. After all, how many people do you hear about these days who do the exact same thing for 25 years? Do people even want to do the same thing for 25 years?
The point is especially poignant in political elections. Great presidents, for instance, are typically seen as “great” years after they held office. They’re either dispensable after four years, or after eight years; yet, the common notion of greatness is seen as how things went while they were in office, sure, but even more so how things went after they left office, how they left the country, which often can’t be measured in anything close to real-time.
Having the “be indispensable so they can’t get rid of you” mentality causes bad decisions over time, and in no way raises the value of the enterprise long-term. What makes great leaders in the confines of a business or workplace is tied to the value you provide to others around you that you work with every day. In fact, it is closely tied to another mantra of mine that I have used all the time for over ten years now: “always hire people better than you for whatever it is you’re hiring for.”
The best hires I’ve made in my life were people who I truly believed were better than me in any one given subject matter or area. It wasn’t that I believed I couldn’t add more value to these people; it was simply that I knew they had a foundation in something I didn’t have that I could build upon with them. I knew that ultimately those people would be able to carry on long after I left their midst, and carry on in such a way that they would thrive either at the same role or a different one down the road.
This is why, ultimately, I believe everyone that is really good at what they do is dispensable. For one, really good people know when they need to take the next step and move onto the next challenge. Secondly, really good people know when they reach a point when the people they manage have been impacted sufficiently to carry on in the normal confines of their business, or doing something else.
The whole notion of making yourself dispensable is uncomfortable to some because it connotes weakness. Like I said, if you’re shitty at something, that is one kind of “dispensable”. But being really good at what you do is a whole different kind of dispensable. The good kind.
