There are people who are genuinely intrinsic wunderkind rock stars that do the work of three normal people. I lost one from my team over a year ago, and me and two other replacements are limping along but will never be capable of the output she did. You love to hold on to them, but dread the day that they leave for greater potential futures.
I frequently use the “my dad” example when management and HR try and pursue the myth of the interchangeable cog employee. I don’t care how much training, certifications, and mentoring you would put my dad through, he will still be wasting hours of your time every week forgetting his login password and needing to be hand-held through every micro-task.
Usually what happens in these cases is the critical, emergency, house-on-fire events suddenly get classified as cloudy and overcast with a chance of rain. And suddenly there are a lot fewer of them. Then things look a lot different.
At my last job, I spent 6 months trying my damnedest to teach someone how to do what I did. (Even knowing that they wanted me to teach someone cheaper my job, because the new manager wanted to lay me off–I didn’t care, I just wanted them to pay me to leave.) No luck. The people they assigned me simply could not or would not learn it, because it required a combination of technical skill and creativity that they couldn’t cope with. They would get the technical bits, eventually, but that doesn’t get you past a novel problem that requires lateral thinking.
So, even if they do assign someone to learn the ropes, poor (i.e., cheapskate) hiring practices can render the effort pointless.
About a decade ago I got full of myself and thought I was the best worker in my dept. Figured if I left the dept. would fall apart. A friend of mine said “When you go on vacation the product still goes out the door, right?” Knocked some sense into my head. lol
Many years ago I read a quote from Charles de Gaulle. He said,“The cemeteries are full of indispensable men.”
It made a big impression on me – #1, that was the first time that I had seen or heard the concept displayed in such stark terms, and #2, it’s quite possibly the only sensible thing that the man ever said.
The “cemeteries” (i.e. bankruptcy courts) of the business world are also full of indispensable men.
I know several small businesses where one person left, and management learned that he truly had been indispensable. The business died within months.
Sometimes that guy you,ve been taking for granted really is morr important than you knew.
Yup. Wanting Champagne at Ginger Beer price is also a problem.
I should clarify further to my post above that* I am not the indispensible person* in the context I describe (but members of my team are, and have been - and I, as their manager, am not permitted sufficient control of the situation to retain them, or even their skills through transfer to another individual)
This thread reminded me of Bob, an engineer coworker from 30-ish years ago. He was really good - he could design, troubleshoot, communicate with the production folks, work directly with customers, manage the budget - so he was always being given the lead on new projects, even when older ones were ongoing. When his burden became too much, the boss would take the least important of his assignments and give them to someone else. (In one instance, I was the recipient.)
Bob would come in early, put in a full day, then come back after dinner many nights and work late, even tho overtime was not authorized. I always thought it was short-sighted of management not to groom the other engineers by allowing them to take the lead on some things. If Bob ever got run over by a bus, chaos would reign! But as far as I know, he’s still there doing what he did best. I do have to wonder how many of his kids’ events he missed because of his dedication to his job. Or maybe he didn’t much like his kids… :dubious:
Still, it seemed to me the managers weren’t managing.
Our office manager is retiring at the end of the year. Her replacement started in July, and she only gets 20 % of the tasks. What’s the use of a transition period if the original person still does 80 % of the tasks?
I send everything to the replacement, and even stopped keeping the original office manager on cc. As of January 1st the replacement has to know what to do, that’s it.
There are some people, that when they leave, there’s barely a bump in productivity. For some, there’s maybe a bit of a reduction, but the department/company will recover.
And there’s those that know where the bodies are hidden. It won’t be the first year, or even the second year that their absence is noticed. It’s a few years down the line. And even then the department/company won’t collapse. But there will be a hard slog for a bit. And things will go back to the new normal, and now someone else knows about the hidden body. At least that one.
There’s also the reverse. There was a guy that was the only person who worked on a task. He had his own pace and working style. His replacement may not have the same knowledge level, which is improving, but he does answer emails.
A while back I got a retail job where the manager firmly believed he was essential. He was the only person who knew how to use the really complicated computer system the company had set up for start and end of day accounting and payroll records, and refused to try to train anyone else on it, despite the assistant and a few supervisors offering. He declared it was kind of them to offer, but really, it was so complex it was simpler for him to just come in and do it every day, even on his day off, which meant being there 6am and 10.30pm, every day, even Christmas and other holidays. Took him about 15 minutes in the morning and 45ish every evening.
I’d been there two weeks when the guy suddenly had a heart attack at work. He got rushed to hospital, leaving a supervisor and a hastily summoned assistant manager to finish up and close for the day, using the ancient handbooks they found in a filing cabinet. Using the books, and wading through the ‘really complicated system’ took them… uhh… about half an hour. By the end of the week, it was down to about 15 minutes.
Turns out, sometimes an ‘essential’ employee is just someone doing something no-one else understands, making it seem so complicated that no-one realises how crap they are at it.
He did recover from the heart attack, but lost his job when he came back, as the company found so many problems caused by mismanagement.
Let me introduce you to this alternate reality that is my workplace, where everything is exactly the opposite.
We’ve recently gained a totally unessential management-level full-time employee that we didn’t need, can’t realistically provide enough work hours for because in this area we were fully staffed even before he arrived, and who is as useless and incompetent as can be. Let’s call him Nepotism Ned, because the only reason he is here is that he’s personal friends with the CEO. And now we’re stuck with him.
He’s been here for over three months already, and so far we’ve seen nothing good. Nepotism Ned barely does the minimum of work required, and often not even that. It’s honestly so bad that when he’s the last to leave the office when we’re closing down for the night, he doesn’t even bother to turn off the lights or lock the doors or shut down the PC or really anything at all. Well, he did power down the Xerox one time but nobody really knows why, because that machine should always stay on.
So wanna swap and get some of that “do less with more” instead?
I was the “go-to” guy in our office. When I decided to retire, I sat down with my director a couple of years in advance and planned the whole process of training my eventual replacement, and also documenting all the stuff I did, why it needed to be done, what to do if there was a problem, and probably most important, the background important but obscure bits of information explaining why we would have all sorts of legal problems if certain stuff wasn’t done exactly as per the documentation.