Stop trying to be indispensable at work

“Be indispensable.” This commonly given career advice is hard to argue with. No doubt it sounds appealing these days, with a softening economy and layoffs once again dominating the business news. It’s advice I’ve tried to follow for much of my own working life.
But the idea is deeply flawed. Yes, being indispensable ought to be insurance against getting fired, and getting fired is horrible. Anyone who has been through even a single round of layoffs knows the anxiety it causes, the “Hunger Games”-ish feeling of needing to out-compete one’s friends and colleagues. Indispensability seems like the best armor — but that armor can become a cage.
Sometimes an effort to be indispensable turns an employee into a one-person bottleneck. But if they’re the single point of failure for a project, or the only person who knows how the system works, or the one employee the client is willing to talk to, it can be near impossible for them to leave — whether that’s taking time off for vacation or advancing to a bigger job.
A boss might reluctantly think, “Janice has really earned a promotion, but we’d need to hire two people to replace her,” or “It’s not fair to keep sending Paul to deal with the angriest customers, but he’s the only one who can talk them down.”
These employees are so valuable in their current jobs that promoting them would create an immediate problem for their managers. In a 2020 survey by LinkedIn, talent professionals said the biggest barrier to internal recruiting was bosses wanting to hold on to their best people.
—Bloomberg