The hero of the workplace – the indispensible worker Martin Jansson
The indispensible worker is the one who always saves the day by touching the program by giving some magic input in order for it to work. He will quickly get the work done and make the customer happy. Upper management will see him as the perfect employee, but many co-workers will think differently.
In the indispensible workers back-water you will notice half-finished tasks, programs that need the magic input in order to work, documentation that usually are not the latest version or just not there, hidden tasks that was performed once a week manually to avoid the weekly disaster and so on.
In my experience, if someone has become indispensible, where the company cannot work without them being there, it will often lead to disaster. This can easily be seen if someone is sick, on vacation or if they leave the company, when certain things start to break down or that the team stands still waiting for the magic touch.
As a co-worker you avoid these traps by requiring documentation enough for someone else to perform the task or that you have at least a backup for the critical tasks. The hardest thing is getting upper management to see that it is not often good to focus on the short term solutions where you save a small bit of time in the moment, but where you have to pay for it tenfold in the future.
Nobody is indispensible, although sometimes misguided management acts as if they were.
True, nobody is indispensable. Still, many try to become so and are in some cases promoted by managers in going that path. My idea is that you should look for the signs of it and try to work against it.
Your point about indispensability is well-taken. In workshops that I’ve attended, Jerry Weinberg has often pointed out the urgency of getting rid of the problem of indispensability. If someone appears to be indispensable, it’s a great risk to the organization; it either has become or will become severely maladapted to existence without that person. And that person will disappear eventually.
As a co-worker you avoid these traps by requiring documentation enough for someone else to perform the task or that you have at least a backup for the critical tasks.
I’d put that in the opposite order. If you’ve got a backup (in the form of a person who can do that task), then you might not need documentation at all. This is why commercial airlines tend to have a captain and a first officer, rather than a pilot and a book on how to fly an aircraft.
—Michael B.
Let me rephrase how to avoid these traps… you should ask… can someone else do this task? Acceptable answers is in line with: Yes, I’ve explained it to this and that person, Yes, i’ve written down the fundamentals of the task and it should now be doable, Yes, i’ve automated the whole process no need to come in late fridays to patch up the system… basically a solution not to get trapped by them not being there.
I am re-reading Lessons Learned in Software Testing, and thought of this blog post when I read the last sentence of Lesson 210, Mediocrity is a self-fulfilling prophecy:
“If you declare there shall be no heroes in your company, you won’t get any.”
There is a big difference between being a hero and being indispensable.
And there is a big difference between growing excellence and growing mediocrity.
As I see it, the similarity between being a hero and being indispensable is when “being a hero” is self-proclaimed.
Good point in Lessons Learned. Still, my point above is not about heroes in general but instead about the ones that are infact working against the organisation.