Five Tips For Becoming Indispensable At Work
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Dear Liz,
I am 30 years old but I am already on my fifth job since college.
In my career so far I’ve had one four-year job, one two-year job and two one-year jobs. I am sick of all the jumping around. The four-year job ended when the owner retired and his son took over the business and laid off half the staff.
The two-year job went away when my boss outsourced our department, including me.
She told me, “You are the employee it pains me the most to let go, but we have to do it for financial reasons.”
My first one-year job was a terrible place to work, so I did a stealth job search and got what turned out to be my second one-year job. The second one-year job was OK but I got a call from a recruiter who found me on LinkedIn and who had a better opportunity for me. I just started that job (the fifth job in my career so far) in May.
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I am excited to finally, I hope, have a job where I can stay for awhile. I want to do a great job in this company and become indispensable so I don’t get laid off.
Can you please share some tips for becoming indispensable to my employer? I would love to stay at this job for five or seven years or more. Thanks in advance, Liz!
Yours,
Gemma
Dear Gemma,
Congratulations on your new job! Let’s take a quick look at your career history so far.
Your first job went away after four years because your CEO’s son decided to chop half your company’s staff. I assume you did a great job in that company, but doing a great job didn’t save your position. In your second job, you may have been an incredible performer but your boss decided to outsource your department anyway.
Do you see a pattern? Fantastic performance in your job can have nothing to do with your job security. I want your services to be in high demand, but I want you to get over the idea that you must be “indispensable” to an employer in order to create job security for yourself.
No employer can give you job security anymore, but you can give it to yourself by being highly employable.
Businesses are constantly changing, and a skill set that is indispensable one day maybe be unnecessary the next. I don’t recommend that working people strive to become indispensable to their employees, for several reasons:
1. “Indispensability” is in the eye of the beholder, is contextual and can change in an instant. Your employer’s strategic plan may call for certain projects and priorities that make your talents indispensable right now, but that doesn’t mean that you’ll still be indispensable next year or even next month.
2. If you were to focus so hard on meeting your employer’s needs that you became indispensable to them, that wouldn’t be a good thing for you or for the organization. If I were your boss and you were indispensable to me, as much as I might respect and admire you, I’d still be looking for a back-up plan in case you left the company. It would be irresponsible of me as a manager to do anything less! Thus you’d have a manager actively looking to replace your skills and feeling the business risk of putting too many eggs in one basket. That’s not where you want to be!
3. If your highest priority is becoming indispensable to your company, you’re wasting your precious mojo trying to keep your job. That’s a losing strategy. Instead, you can grow your muscles so that if this job goes away, you can get another one!
The workplace has fundamentally changed. Indispensability to one employer is the booby prize.
You can’t sustain that indispensable state and even if you could, why is it so important to stay with one employer? You have learned a tremendous amount by working at four different jobs in eight years. Even though it wasn’t your choice to move around so much, I know your muscles got huge in the process!
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Getting good at making changes is the imperative for every working person now.
I can understand why you’d like to stay at your new job longer than you stayed at either of your last two jobs, but how long any of us stays at any given job is Mother Nature’s decision, not ours.
Rather than trying to become indispensable to your current company, I’d recommend that you look more broadly at the talent market and find a niche for yourself that will make you valuable and desirable to lots of different employers.
Here are five tips for doing that:
• Get a journal and write in it. Write about what you do well and what you love to do. At age 30 you must have a good idea of your particular talents. Focus on them!
• Make a list of the job titles you are qualified for right now and then a second list of the job titles you’d like to be qualified for one year, two years and three years from now. You are in a private self-study program, and all of us are! We are all learning how to navigate in this new-millennium workplace.
• Give up the idea of becoming indispensable to your new employer and focus on becoming an expert at what you are good at and love to do, instead. Your current boss is one person on a planet populated by 7 billion people. You can’t spend your time and energy trying to make your boss love you (or keep your boss in love with you)! Instead, you’ll invest your time and attention in becoming so good at what you do that if your boss falls out of love with you, it’s no problem — lots of other managers will scoop you up.
• Create a vision for your life and career. Write about your vision in your journal. Age 30 is a wonderful time to imagine the possibilities for your life far beyond the unworthy goal of staying glued to your current employer for the next five years. Your flame may have grown so huge in five years that you wouldn’t dream of continuing in your present job. Imagine your future as more exciting and expansive than your life is now, not less!
• Lastly, never put your boss’s or your employer’s needs ahead of your own. It’s your career and no one else’s. I would never want you to veer off your path just in order to hang onto any one position a little longer. That would be a disservice to you!
I work with executives and CEOs around the world. They tell me about great employees on their teams right now and other great employees who have worked for them in the past.
They remember outstanding co-workers because of who those people are, not because of their skills.
Years after they have worked with someone, they’ll say, “Joel is an incredible young man and if moved back to the U.S. and were interested in working with me, I’d hire him a heartbeat.”
The CEO who said this hadn’t seen or talked with Joel in three years. What impressed him about Joel was not anything on Joel’s resume. It was Joel’s character that impressed the CEO and made him remember Joel so fondly.
The CEO couldn’t care less what Joel’s current skill set might be. He was more interested in Joel the person than Joel the bundle of skills!
Focus on your path and your job security will recede in importance. People who are personally credible, capable and creative don’t use their finite resources trying to avoid being laid off. That’s impossible and it’s a waste of your talent.
Rather than trying to avoid another layoff, you can invest your time and energy finding your voice and bringing yourself to work more and more every day. That’s how you’ll become someone like Joel — someone managers would kill to hire the minute they have the chance.
All the best to you in your new job, Gemma!
Yours,
Liz
Liz Ryan is the CEO and founder of Human Workplace. Follow her onTwitter and read the rest of her Forbes.com columns here.
I write about bringing life to work and bringing work to life.
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