“They’ll never get rid of you,” is something I have heard many times in my career. My usual response is something like “They can, they might, and in certain circumstances they very much should”—but that is a discussion for another time.

What I wanted to talk about here was the idea of being indispensable. Once at a dinner during a workflow conference in Germany while discussing passing information to colleagues I made the bold statement “I make myself indispensable by making myself obsolete”.

It is an interesting expression, it is a great thing to say at dinner to other people who have had a few drinks, and I’ve said it many times since but I don’t think I’ve ever fully realized what it actually means until recently.

I have talked before about one of the jobs of a leader being to build a framework—or, in my case, I used the analogy of a well-designed race track—to help our coworkers live up to their responsibilities. If we want to be more literal: as a leader we build systems to keep our coworkers on track.

I will get to how this relates to our original premise later but first I wanted to talk about how we—as a leader—actually build our track.

It is quite straightforward, one word in fact: expectations. There are two aspects to setting expectations—the actual content ie: what they are, and communicating them.

The form and content will depend largely on the job or tasks we are performing but there are some simple rules we can follow regardless of who we are leading in what industry.

Expectations should be clearly defined. This one is straightforward: if our coworkers don’t know what a given expectation is then they should know where to go to read / view / learn from well maintained documentation. This could take the form of broad company policies or individual department / team training and procedures.

The important part is that any of our individual coworkers all have the access to the same detailed information to enable their work tasks.

Expectations should be measurable and not too subjective. I’ve read job descriptions recently with phrases like “Do amazing things” or “Delight our customers” and while fun, these ideas are really unsupportable. If you can’t imagine a conversation in a 1-1 or other evaluation about the topic then don’t set it as an expectation.

Our goal here is to ensure that our coworkers spend as little time as possible saying “I don’t know what to do in this situation”—the less subjective our expectations the more likely we are to achieve this. People are at their most productive when they know what needs to be done and how to do it.

Task and behavior based expectations should be preferred over outcome based expectations wherever possible. For example: “Smile, be approachable, and offer help where possible to our clients” is much better than “Make our clients happy”—we as leaders may expect the first behavior to lead to the second outcome but we can’t expect our coworkers to be responsible for things outside of their control.

If one of our coworkers does all the right things (ie: executes the tasks as requested) but ends up with “wrong” (undesirable) results—that relates to the actual process put in place, not a failure on their part. People feel empowered when they have control of their own outcomes. 

Expectations should also be achievable. We are all familiar with the idea of expecting the impossible to get where we think we need to be when people inevitably fall short of that goal. This is probably worthy of a broader discussion but as this relates to expectations, effectively asking a coworker for 110% all the time is demoralizing and exhausting—ask them for what the business needs.

Having goals that can be reasonably reached effectively sets a standard for our coworkers. People who do not meet this standard can have additional training or encouragement and having defined requirements promotes equality amongst our coworkers ie: we expect the same (achievable) things from everybody. People are secure knowing that they are doing what is expected of them and that it is equitable with their comparable coworkers.

Expectations should allow for excellence. When setting our expectations as achievable goals we need to have some idea of what exceeding these goals looks like.

Allowing for excellence lets us know when our processes are working and gives our coworkers a measurable goal to achieve if they desire promotion or other responsibility change. It makes evaluation easier as with defined expectations we can clearly see when a coworker is (literally) exceeding them. People get a sense of achievement knowing that they can excel at a task or position.

So now that we know how our expectations should be defined and we can talk about communicating them.

Whilst communication is a complicated, nuanced, and often misunderstood process—checking the results of it in this case is actually straightforward. Simply ask your coworker what it is as a leader that you want them to do. If you get a clear, concise answer then you have done your job. If not there is more communication work to be done.

Answers do not have to have a high level of detail, they may direct you to documentation, policies, or other information but ultimately they know what to do, or where to find and confirm what to do. 

One of the most empowering times I have had in my career was working with a leader who set such clear expectations that I could say with confidence in a meeting “nope, we aren’t going to do that” or “yes, that is exactly what they would want us to do”.

And this brings us back to our original idea. As a leader—if one of my coworkers understands our goals and expectations well enough to speak for me then I don’t need to be there. If I don’t need to be there, I am obsolete.

If I was able to effectively produce a framework that enabled those I lead to work without my direct input—I’d say that makes me indispensable. After all, I’d be the person that made me unnecessary. So the logic there might be a little dubious but I’ll stand by the idea of expectations—if you aren’t handing them to your coworkers as a leader, or if you aren’t asking for them as somebody who is led, then what are you doing (both literally and figuratively)?