American View: The Right and the Wrong Ways to Make Yourself Seem Indispensable

Human Resources26 Nov 2024

Some new employee advice never goes out of style: always get to a meeting before your boss. Meet your deadlines. Be cautious who you trust with sensitive information. Don’t talk smack about your higher-ups because someone’s always listening. Many business books and courses aimed at first time workers have recycled these truisms for decades because they remain relevant. Every new hire should heed these lessons if they wish to stay employed. One aphorism in particular stands out for me: make yourself indispensable. It’s good career survival advice … but it’s also advice that can backfire on you if you go about achieving it incorrectly.

This came to mind back in October when a pal of mine groused about a terrible co-worker over a pint. He described a senior manager in his outfit who had taken my favorite piece of new hire advice and botched its implementation so badly that the manager was in imminent danger of being fired. I’ll share her story in just a moment … first, though, let’s consider how this nugget of career advice should be implemented: 

When I was first brought on active duty with the U.S. Army, I met a soldier who had made a career out of fulfilling this principle. Master Sergeant Luton^[1] was a short, bespectacled, chain-smoking, older gentleman working at 1st Medical Group (our higher headquarters element). He never deployed; he’d injured himself so badly in his early career that he qualified for a full medical retirement. MSgt. Luton’s commanders, though, kept refusing his requests to separate because they felt he was so dangled good at his job.  

Specifically, Luton’s function was to manage the monthly Status of Operational Readiness, and Training (SORT) reports. These were the commanders’ assessments of their unit’s ability to go to war. The SORT report was a massive administrative pain in the next that annoyed everyone involved to no end. In our battalion — featuring an HQ element, four companies, and two detachments — there were seven unique SORTS reports to file every month. One of my main duties was to quality control those commanders’ reports and ensure they would all pass inspection at Group HQ before being submitted up the chain to the general. MSgt. Luton was the quality control expert who inspected my battalion’s seven reports along with five from the MEDEVAC battalion, Zeus knows how many from the Combat Support Hospital, and the Group Headquarters’ report. All had to be meticulously correct and be filed on time or heads would roll. Quite a challenge for just one subject matter expert.

At one point, I discovered was personally using over half of our battalion’s entire allocation of photocopying every month just on SORT report paperwork. In the days before computers, the old SORT process was a paperwork nightmare.

MSgt. Luton had earned his reputation of being the most knowledgeable expert on the SORTS process and its governing regulation on the entire installation. His reports always passed muster at higher HQ. That made him one of the most valuable administrative specialists in the 1,400-person Group. His diligence and meticulous attention to detail could make or break a commander’s career. Every error discovered by the general’s staff could block a promotion, deny a transfer, or inspire other administrative retaliation.

The irony of MSgt. Luton’s situation was that he’d only ever learned the SORT process in the first place because it was the only job he could do in the Army after having both of his wrists fused following a horrible accident. He’s crashed his bike while serving on the Army Motocross Team (yes, that was really a thing back in the day). From that accident on, MSgt. Luton couldn’t bend his wrists at all which made him unable to perform common soldiering tasks like donning a gas mask or firing a rifle. By the regulation, he should have been discharged immediately … but his encyclopedic knowledge of the arcane SORT process made him untouchable once he finished his convalescence.  

Some people found MSgt. Luton to be nerdy and off-putting. Others griped that disabled and non-deployable soldier shouldn’t be allowed to remain on active duty. Personally, I never had an issue with MSgt. Luton since I found him to be cheerful, helpful, and funny. After I got shafted with the SORT job in my battalion, MSgt. Luton took me on as his apprentice. Not to help me succeed in my career, but because (a) he wanted to minimize preventable errors, and (b) I was willing to learn. That paid off for both of us. By studying under the master, I quickly learned how to make our seven monthly reports bulletproof. I could cite chapter and verse for every variance and shortfall on each report which made monthly submission painless.

Well, mostly painless … there were, and I’m not exaggerating, seventeen different meetings each month involving the generation and approval of these bloody reports. There didn’t need to be that many, but the sheer volume of “cover your *#&$” meetings illustrates how frightened the commanders and staff officers were about the horrible fate awaiting them if they got something wrong. That’s how I was able to make myself indispensable to my battalion commander the way that MSgt. Luton had made himself indispensable to his group commander: By taking on a repugnant task and learning how to do it exceedingly well, he became an MVP (Most Valuable Paper-pusher).

It’s important to emphasize that anyone could have done what MSgt. Luton did; they just didn’t want to, and I can’t blame them for that. The work was monotonous and where were far too many ways to overlook a crucial detail and screw up in front of Very Powerful People. Embracing the challenge allowed MSgt. Luton and me to help make our respective organizations look good and run smoothly. The more drama we spared our bosses, the more they left us alone.

Which was the best gift they could possibly have given us. I’ve always worked better when I could block out office noise and concentrate on my work.

With that established as the right way to implement the make yourself indispensable aphorism, let’s consider someone who went about it the wrong way.

Bobbie^[2] is a senior manager at a big industrial site here in Dallas. The fellow who shared Bobbie’s story with me is unlucky enough to have Bobbie involved in his daily work processes. My mate has established a reliable administrative process for approving and scheduling the movement of products from his site to customers’ locations. He’s well versed with his company’s ERM, finance, and logistics systems and knows all the key managers and supervisors who complete the work. According to him, this manager Bobbie insinuated herself into several of his crucial processes as a sort of “safety valve” … at least, on paper. 

The way he described it, Bobbie serves no useful purpose in the office. For her own career protection, Bobbie supposedly pressured some higher-ups into requiring that all product orders get routed through her office before they can be approved and executed. I don’t know what reason she gave for this, but I imagine it was something like a third-party quality control check. Making sure all the forms are filled out or what-not. In and of itself, there’s nothing sinister about getting an extra pair of eyes on every crucial process to make sure nothing was missed. That’s just good business.

That, however, is not what Bobbie does. In fact, no one at the site knows what Bobbie does. Her “black box” process was named the “the web of stupid” by her peers because of how she’s over complicated the shipping process. Bobbie interruption doesn’t seem to have any inputs or outputs; she stops work but doesn’t add any value to it before begrudgingly releasing it after a random delay. My mate likened it to an assembly line worker pulling the “stop” lever multiple times a day, then restarting with no changes whatsoever after a randomly calculated duration.

To add insult to injury, Bobbie refuses to document her process. She won’t allow anyone else to understand what she’s doing and doesn’t document her work. She won’t take on apprentices and refuses to give feedback to the affected work centres about what – if anything – they can do to lessen or prevent her delays. Even better, Bobbie rages when anyone challenges her work. She’s famous across multiple sites within the larger enterprise for sending dozens of angry, ALL-CAPS emails in comic sans to executives whenever someone pushes back on her infuriating interruptions.

Also known as the “barking dog technique.” The idea is to react so violently that no one wants to tussle with you (metaphorically) and backs off. All sound and fury, signifying … something, I guess. Cut me some slack. I went to American public schools.

Like MSgt. Luton, Bobbie has made herself indispensable to her employer. They can’t get rid of her … not because she’s performing a crucial service that no one else wants to do but because no one knows what the hell she’s doing! The thing is, Bobbie’s technique of obsessively veiling her “work” only protects her from redundancy so long as her organization’s senior leaders remain too incompetent or too afraid to confront her and hold her accountable. If they ever hire a leader with a spine, a quick inspection will reveal Bobbie’s chicanery … and she’ll get the axe.

Compare that to MSgt. Luton’s approach to becoming indispensable: he cheerfully did his best to teach others how to do his job so he could leave. Ultimately, he was so good at performing his job that he completed a full 20-year career and qualified for a full retirement, not just a partial medical one. He took it and left his unit well prepared to carry on without him. Bobbie’s approach is deceptive and harmful; MSgt. Luton’s was transparent and benevolent. That in mind, if you’re planning to advice your new hires to make themselves indispensable, be kind and explain the right and wrong ways to go about it.

One final note: there’s an important leadership lesson to take away from this story. Examine every “black box” process in your organisation and make sure that each one is truly necessary. Then document everyone one of those mysterious processes so no one worker is ever truly indispensable. This isn’t a matter of destroying workers’ job security; that would be evil. It’s about business continuity. Being the only subject matter expert in a required function can be great job security, it’s also a damning process vulnerability that must be mitigated before disaster strikes … and the only person who can make a specific function happen is incapacitated.

^[1] His real name. I feel comfortable sharing it because the dude was awesome.  
^[2] Absolutely not her real name, in accordance with American View protocol.

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