"Train Your Replacement" - Great advice or moronic pablum?

In My Humble Opinion
1

This thread gets me steamed. Not at anyone in the thread, but because I’ve recently been wondering about the decisions I’ve made in my career. Just after I started my career (ca 1984), my group head, who’d eventually become a good friend, told me that the best advice he’d ever heard relating to working was, “Train your replacement.” Upon first blush, that seems self-evidently true. By making your work of such high quality that anyone can pick it up and build upon it, or by explicitly mentoring someone or volunteering for internal teaching opportunities, you (a) show how valuable you are and (b) that you’re already operating at a level slightly above your position and (c) enable them to promote you up rather than have you chained to a particular piece of work.

This worked out well for me for about fifteen years, but since the turn of the century, I’ve not really made much progress. First, the whole thing only makes sense if managers are making good decisions based on their correct understanding of everything involved. Second, it only works if there’s a healthy flow of people into and out of the environment, and can only be evaluated over a long term. Third, maybe I should have thought more, because expecting managers to make good decisions based on their understanding of things is, well, not supported by my empirical observations. Many have a history of making bad or at least misguided decisions, and realistically, the majority will only help advance my career if they can see how it might help their own careers.

My managers get replaced whenever we reorganize, which is about once every 15 months. A guy I once worked with summed it up with a sign on his cubicle wall: if my boss calls, please ask him to leave his name and number, and I’ll get back to him. (That isn’t relevant, but I think the line is funny). The thing is, I’ve worked about half my career on things that my managers can’t know about, because they lack the specific security clearance. Even the managers who know me have to rely on second hand info from the program managers. So, people in more “vanilla” programs get a lot of attention, because their bosses can see the good jobs they do. For me, well, a program manager may or may not advocate for me, but I can’t hold my breath. Like CEOs, they exist in a world with only one goal: how do I keep my own program going? Do I think about the crisis that’s before me right now (because everything’s a crisis) or do I sit down and prepare notes to have a thoughtful conversation with groo’s line manager about his contributions to the company’s long term success?

I dunno. I haven’t gotten a promotion in eight years, and I grow weary of putting on a happy-and-not-the-least-bit-jealous smile and congratulating people who’ve just been promoted above me. And what hurts is that I usually agree that they deserve promotions because I, along with everyone else, can see the good work they’ve done. But somewhere in there I thought I was doing a bang-up job as well.

Any ideas? Corroborating or refuting observations?

2

At the moment, I’d be thankful to have a job.

3

Well, the opposite would be to keep information to yourself and try to become indispensable (not by merit, but by hostage-taking of knowledge), which I think would be bad.

I’ve always found it a good, wholesome and constructive thing to make sure that my work is well-documented, able to be transparently understood, etc :-
-It’s what any decent boss would want
-It means you can easily delegate or hand over parts of your job - to free up time to take on new, bigger responsibilities (i.e. promotion by small steps)
-It makes it less likely they’ll call you up to ask a question when you’re on holiday

Even in those cases where it enables one of your colleagues to get promoted over your head, it can a good thing - because at the very least, that person will be competent and understand your role intimately - which is a good quality to have in a boss.

4

In general I agree with the transparency and train your replacement approach. However, I wonder if the secrecy element of your job does change the dynamic a little bit. There will be some inherent “glue” tying you to those particular projects, just because the fewer people who need to be brought in on a confidential topic, the better. Being the kind of person who can be trusted with the confidential stuff is a plus, and probably a plus especially for job security. However, there is a line of thought that, to advance, one should always try to get assigned to highly visible projects. You might try to negotiate the opportunity to split your time between confidential and non-confidential work. Maybe you’ve inadvertently wound up on a job security more than an upward mobility track.

5

I don’t want to unnecessarily bump my own thread that is apparently not the most interesting topic, but thanks for the responses.

When I’m not in the midst of a panic attack, I usually remain hopeful about the world, and believe that the world essentially becomes what you want it to become (not for any mystical reasons; it just encourages me to look for positive ways to interpret things and to put energy into things that would make that perspective make sense). So, I continue to be the ever-helpful guy who doesn’t jealously guard his knowledge. I’ve seen many examples of people who were so protective of their own code that they’ve effectively chained themselves to that work for their entire careers.

In the past, I’d alternate between proposal efforts (usually unclassified) and “real work” in order to maintain my credibility, but lately, the only interesting proposals are the classified ones. Although I believe I work with some really amazing people, we all occasionally end up in discussions where we admit that a big part of our (hopefully accurate) sense of job security is that (a) our jobs can’t be outsourced* and (b) the long, drawn out clearance process tends to keep us employed, because program managers need to “hit the ground running” and not be held back because they’re waiting (sometimes more than a year) for people to get the requisite clearances.

Of course, in the very chaotic world we find ourselves in, anything can happen, and since I came from a humble (socioeconomic) background, I alternate between thinking that I’m lucky to even have a job and that I’m completely underpaid for what I do. I get frustrated with a relative of mine who’s underemployed, working 20 hours a week at Target and living with her in-laws, because she knows I make a lot of money (relative to her, at least), but gives me grief when I say I’m going to work over the weekend to try to make a particular deadline. I know I should really go out and cruise the juice bars looking for the wimmens, but in my mind, a bad economy makes me worry that I’ll be broke and out on the street, and it’s very difficult to NOT put any extra energy I have into getting the job done. (In my mind, I think there’s a tendency for managers to think that people who are very diligent are that way because they’re making up for lack of genius in other ways).

*Well, anything can be outsourced; but some stuff is very difficult to outsource.

6

Well, my specific job was created for me, but I am documenting everything, and creating procedures that will make it easy to hand over my job to a replacement or to have someone join me in what I do with a minimum of fuss. Luckily I have a wicked good boss who understand that when you start with a brand new job it helps to have everything specifically mapped out. That way there are fewer instances where you have misunderstandings.

I feel that you should make it easy to transition, it makes it more likely you will be remembered as helpful in case you have a chance to resume the job in the future instead of being remembered as the asshole who fucked all teh records up in a 5 year olds tempertantrum…

7

Managers learn that they should train their replacements also - it’s called succession planning. I always made sure that at least two people in my group knew about every important thing we did. People leave, but if you want to be politically correct, you can say that people also get hit by trucks.

If you want to get promoted, the best way to do it is to convince your boss to train you as his or her replacement. It won’t work all the time, but if they decide to promote from within, who better than the person who knows the job already? In every promotion meeting I ever attended, the top guy asked if the person up for promotion was already doing the job.

8

You are in an impossible situation. Either you start working to have your efforts documented in some fashion, or making some political connections to help you ascend the ladder, or you remain stuck.

You need to do a dispassionate, real world arms length analysis of how employable (at the same or better compensation) you are outside of your current situation. While managers (if that is what you aspire to) are more highly compensated they are also often let go with some regularity in technical industries. People with mission critical niche knowledge in profitable sectors are much safer.

If you see no way out start curtailing excess hours to live your life more fully.

9

If you want to climb the proverbial ladder, then I guess it’s decent advice.

For most of my career I have not worked in jobs where I would have a replacement should I leave. I’ve either worked in a position that was created specifically for me based on the work I’ve decided to take on, or worked as a consultant where I am assigned to projects based on my expertise.

If you want to be promoted, or valued for your efforts you cannot rely upon someone else noticing your good work. You are responsible for marketing yourself. It’s not your boss’ job to maintain a list of your accomplishments as justification for your continued advancement - that’s your job. It sounds like it will be tough since your boss doesn’t have the same clearance you do and may not be able to easily see your achievements, however it’s not impossible.

Any time you work with colleagues, clients, or other managers and you think you’ve done a good job, pull them aside and ask them for a recommendation. “Would you mind letting my boss know about my performance on this job? Since he doesn’t have clearance it can be difficult for him to measure my progress, I would really appreciate it.”

It can be hard to ask for recommendations, especially from your peers but I promise you’ll find that people are generally eager to help out and provide positive feedback when you’ve helped them look good or have done a good job. Asking someone to do you a favor like this is a great networking skill - people love to feel like they are helping someone, and it forces them to actually think about how good a job you did (assuming you did a good job). The exercise of writing you a recommendation will make them that much more likely to think favorably of you in the future, and you never know who will help you out down the road.

10

Well with your reference to “security clearances” I assume you are in government or a goverment related industry like defense, so it might be a different dynamic.
Basically, what gets you promoted is demonstrating an ability to do the job of the level above you. By “training you replacement” or basically delegating many of your tasks, that allows you to take on additional work and responsibility. It should not be taken to mean you teach someone else how to do your job and then wait to get promoted while they do all your work and you sit around doing nothing.

This advice assumes a couple of things though. For one, you need to work in a culture that recognizes that kind of initiative. If you work in an organization where how long you’ve been there is more important than what you do, it may not matter.

Also, there has to be organizational growth. In other words there has to be somewhere to promote you to. Some (mostly professional services) companies have a number of levels and promote every year or so, but those levels are essentially meaningless in terms of organizational hierarchy. For example, no matter what your title is, the entire group is still run by a single director or partner.