Becoming Non-Essential

(International Space Station photo from NASA)

Many facets come into play when an organization moves from youth to maturity. One of them is also a marker of an especially valuable worker. It’s related to NASA’s obsession with avoiding, as much as possible, having any “potential single point of failure” anywhere in their systems.

What does NASA mean by that? They mean there shouldn’t be any spot anywhere, in equipment or spacecraft or team, where one item or one person failing would endanger the mission.

To have no potential single point of failure in your team, you can’t have anyone who is absolutely essential. Everyone must have backup. What each person does has to be documented and systemized in a way that someone else can use to do the same work.

Why a Business Should Want People to Have Backup

It’s obvious why a company would want not to be solely dependent on any one person for something critical to its operations. With reliance on a key person, whenever that person got sick or hurt, or took a vacation, or left for another job elsewhere, or died… the company would be in big trouble.

I’ve seen it happen at both small and large businesses. The only person who could handle release management for software that ran 60+ factories was hospitalized for months after a car crash. The only person who could lead a crucial lab team had a heart attack and was out until he recovered from a quadruple bypass operation. The only person who knew how to make a niche product used by an immense global industry died of COVID. Those are just a few examples. Losing one key person put an entire enterprise in jeopardy. It’s often a fatal blow to a business.

Reasons an Individual Should Want Backup

But why should an individual not want to be essential?

I’ve known people who intentionally made themselves indispensable. For a particular factory in a European country, I used to be the person they called to solve their worst technical crises. During one site visit, after hours their site’s technical wizard had too much to drink and told me how he maintained his reputation. He inserted bugs into the site’s software so that when he was called to respond, he could look like a genius by quickly finding and solving the problem. Some of my lost sleep from the site’s escalation of issues probably came from occasions when he inserted a bug without realizing its full ramifications (the system was hideously complex) and the situation grew beyond what he could resolve.

By making himself appear to be essential, the site’s “technical genius” thought he made it impossible for the company to get rid of him in any rounds of layoffs. He thought of it as job security. The downside? Regardless of ambition, he never rose any higher in the ranks than the lowest level of management. The company wouldn’t promote him any higher because he had made himself seem indispensable at the technical level. He boxed himself into a corner that dramatically limited his prospects (and his eventual pension).

From past discussion of capability and competency management, remember that roles which rely most heavily on high technical capability are usually at the bottom tiers of a company’s hierarchy. As people move up into management, technical skills become less important and the role needs more “soft” capabilities such as being able to deal well with people. He boxed himself in at the lowest levels by putting a neon irreplaceable technical sign on his forehead.

What he did is not unusual among technical people. Sometimes it’s done for the same reason he gave. We can see how that stunted his possibilities.

Does That Apply For People Who Want to Stay Technical?

Sometimes it’s done because a technical person genuinely likes doing technical work and knows they’d be intensely unhappy (and maybe out of their depth) in a job that needs refined people skills in a relentless stream of human interactions. In that case it’s fine to stay technical, but it’s still better for the worker to avoid becoming indispensable with a particular set of hardware or software. If you’re indispensable, you’re always on call and could have your time off interrupted by crises, and nobody can really help you with the core parts of a crisis in your area of expertise.

That’s short term impact. There are long term implications, too.

Hardware wears out or becomes obsolete and gets replaced with a more modern version. Software becomes obsolete even more quickly and gets replaced with something new. If you pin yourself to any of that, the company could send you out the door when they replace whatever is your specialty.

Here’s a personal example. When my work was mostly technical, my best skills were with the OpenVMS operating system. Never heard of it? It’s still around in niche areas that need high reliability, but outside those niches, it has been replaced by cheaper, trendier operating systems. After a certain point, my technical work moved to other platforms.

Extending the personal example, remember that for most of my working life, I’ve gone from project to project. I’ve had the honor of getting to do a wide variety of work for a range of industries, learning more in each endeavor and adding that knowledge to what I can bring to the next project. Some of my projects have broken new ground for a team or even an industry. For some of these, I was the cornerstone.

I didn’t want to remain the cornerstone anywhere. I habitually documented my work and coached people around me so that when we finished building whatever we were building together, they wouldn’t need me any more. I could move on to the next project with a clear conscience while the team carried on just fine without me.

Sometimes I’m an essential worker in a team, but I make a point of not staying that way. It’s better for the team, their business, and me personally when I finish a project by becoming non-essential.

Wrap-Up

For a business, being dependent on a key person is dangerous. If anything bad happens to that person, the whole company could fall apart and shut down.

For a person, being irreplaceable for something in particular is both hazardous and self-limiting. Hazardous, because whatever you’re indispensable for can’t last forever and you could be out the door along with it. Self-limiting because it keeps you rooted in one spot, choking off promotions and the rejuvenating spice of having some variety once in a while.

So if you’re that essential, take a look at becoming non-essential. For your own sake and that of your workmates.