Indispensable? Am I ..!!!

Every good employee (though good is relative term off course), who has been associated with the company for a long time does leave a void when he / she move for greener pastures. Well there is nothing wrong in an employee leaving the organization, it’s an integral part of one’s growth saga; to move on in life for growth and better prospects. Companies hire new talents for the upcoming requirements and during the process many old people leave the company, either angrily or happily or because they have no choice. Alike birth and death situation, this becomes the birth of a new employee and death of the later.

But one of such movement has literally left me and my organization in lurch.

"It was when I really started missing him, as one of the key players of my team has moved; suddenly I started feeling that a vacuum has been created and felt the necessity during the critical operations”.

It was not that the mate was super-performer, he being a good employee and was equipped with a specific domain expertise which no other employee had, he also use to get due respect and appreciation for the expertise and the type of job he use to pursue, he also jagged exponential financial growth and recognition because of the longer association with the company from last so many years.

Slowly he become indispensable in the organization and on many occasion I felt that organization is on knees against his undue requirement of financial and status growth. I could see the trouble in the future, lately I discovered that the profile he uses to handle was on different technology and there was no backup for the skill set and he was a single point failure for many things which he has created over a period of time.

I also felt that he had intentionally made himself indispensable; there were times when a team was assigned to him which he was supposed to impart the domain knowledge and equip them with the know how’s of the domain, but he failed to impart any learning value to his team members and gradually every member in his team walked away for one or the other reason.

Though company as an entity is big and far above the individuals status, but generally it’s big which gets hijacked by the miniscule. Employee forgets that it’s the individual whose fate is determined by the company and very rarely does an individual determine the fate of an institution, there is always someone who can take his place.

I’ve also learnt that at time the lack of systems & process, one person given charge of many things forces the individual to develop a feeling of being indispensable and unavoidable. There are different schools of thoughts which suggest that employee should work towards making himself indispensable, but I think that person should work to create process and systems so that once he leaves, the organization doesn’t feel the absence and the operations move smoothly. If this happens the person has really done a commendable job and delivered some values to the organization.

Everyone thinks the world cannot exist without him. But it does

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