Make Yourself Indispensable

So many of us worry about our jobs, we worry about our businesses. The challenge is that worrying doesn’t give us job security or keep business moving forward. Worrying causes stress and sleepless nights. If instead of worrying you used your energy to make yourself indispensable, you would gain confidence. Once you established confidence, the worry would fall away.

The question becomes, how can you make yourself indispensible? Begin by examining the business you are in. What are the weaknesses or challenges in that business? Next, look at your strengths. Can you apply any of your talents to the challenges that the business is experiencing?

Once you have pinpointed a problem and identified how you can solve it, the next step is to present your solution to the decision maker(s). The decision maker could be a customer, client, manager, or business owner. You know you have the right person if he or she has the authority to empower you to take care of the issue.

Assume you work for a product distributor. You realize the sales people are spending their time calling on the wrong prospects. The data they need exists, but the people in the organization aren’t doing a good job mining it. You are great with spreadsheets so you create one that scrubs the data and shows the salespeople their best prospects. You show the leaders of the firm your work. They have the sales team execute on the newly mined data and the company has a record month as a result. This leads you to other similar tasks and you have positioned yourself as a business intelligence guru. That is how you make yourself indispensable.

For homework this week: find a critical problem at work that you are able to solve. Present your solution to the key decision-maker. Execute on the required action and let the powers that be know that you have it under control. Show them the results of your work. As you experience success, ask for more responsibility. Make yourself indispensable. Let me know how it goes.