Make Yourself Irrelevant

Try to work your way out of a job and you never will

I have a few guiding principles that have helped me navigate my career … and my life.

You’ve heard a couple of them from me before: Keep moving forward. Be unapologetically you.

I was reminded of another principle today during a conversation with a colleague who had a key leader leave their organization recently—Make yourself irrelevant.

In the grand scheme of things, we’re all sort of irrelevant.

As soon as this leader left, things started falling apart.

There’s no strategy. Communications are limited. Operational decisions are not being made. This leader left and the glue that held the team together left with them.

Which is a complete failure of leadership.

The sign of a good leader isn’t that the place can’t run without you. It’s quite literally the opposite—you can leave for a day, a week, a month … and things keep running.

You’ve put strong leaders in place who can carry on without you. You’ve empowered your teams. You’ve built the mechanisms and processes and culture that persists whether you’re there, or not.

Yay, you! Photo by krakenimages on Unsplash

Which is quite a legacy to leave. And also incredibly threatening to a lot of folks.

After all, if the place runs just fine without you, then why are you needed at all? You’ll be out of a job—right? Wrong.

Whether you’re a leader or an individual contributor, you should always work to make yourself replaceable. Irrelevant.

Fix the root cause of issues so you no longer need people to attend to the symptoms (e.g., make your product, service, or company so user friendly you don’t need a large customer support team).

Be the one who figures out how to replace your role with an AI agent. Develop your people to be even better leaders than you.

It’s only a matter of time before we’re all replaced by robots anyway, right? Photo by julien Tromeur on Unsplash

Ironically, working to eliminate your job is the ultimate in job security.

Because if you can fix problems, create efficiencies, or reduce costs for your company, there are a lot of other places they’ll want to apply your talents. (Or if not them, some other company will.)

So go ahead … make yourself irrelevant and you never, ever will be.

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