The Big Work Lie: Being Indispensable Will Save Your Job
Becoming the only staffer with certain skills might feel like insurance. To some bosses, it’s a red flag.
Becoming the only staffer with certain skills might feel like insurance. To some bosses, it’s a red flag.
It’s career advice we’ve all heard: Make yourself indispensable. Many who thought they’d accomplished that goal have been burned in recent white-collar layoffs .
Jilted workers and others who’ve witnessed job cuts say there’s no such thing as an irreplaceable employee. Some contend striving to be untouchable at work can backfire or invite exploitation. You can naively do more than what’s required, thinking effort means job security, then get axed anyway.
That disillusionment is fuelling debate over the wisdom of pursuing indispensability, often along generational lines. Older workers recount times when they survived rounds of job cuts by being too skilful or versatile to let go, while their younger counterparts tend to share examples of great performances that yielded no protection.
Beth McLaughlin McDonald , 52, is a recent convert to the more cynical side.
Though she’d endured three layoffs over the years, she still believed it was possible to become bulletproof when she took a recruiting job in 2022. Working remotely in Savannah, Ga., she was promoted quickly and felt she made her team at a healthcare-technology startup better by shouldering tasks that used to bog down others.
“I truly thought I was indispensable,” McLaughlin McDonald says.
She discovered she wasn’t when the company downsized last year. In less than an hour her department was slashed from 13 employees to three, she says. Each affected person was given notice in a five-minute video call. McLaughlin McDonald now thinks nobody is ever safe, so she works several part-time jobs, believing it’s wise to have multiple income streams in case one dries up.
It isn’t that the labor market is in a rout. The national unemployment rate remains at 3.9% and hiring exceeded economists’ predictions in the latest jobs report. Instead, two other factors drive workers’ pessimism: the march of artificial intelligence and the way cuts are handled .
I hear constantly from people who worry that AI-powered tools threaten positions that seemed secure a short time ago. Now that pink slips are frequently doled out virtually, in emails or on Zoom, many workers question whether they were truly valued in the first place.
Managers counter that workers’ job hopping in recent years, though slowing , means savvy leadership includes minimising a business’s dependence on individuals.
Some bosses say they strategically prevent employees from becoming irreplaceable. It isn’t sabotage, they insist. Rather, being overly reliant on their best team members is risky.
So if you sense a higher-up is trying to limit your importance, your gut might be right.
The veterinary technician was good at her job. Debbie Boone fired her anyway.
Boone managed veterinary clinics in the Carolinas for two decades before becoming an independent consultant and says she sometimes dismissed talented employees who hoarded knowledge to make themselves more valuable. She recalls this particular tech went further, stashing equipment manuals and implements in a private drawer.
“It was enhancing her status, but it was diminishing us as a whole,” she says.
Employees shouldn’t try to be indispensable, in Boone’s view. Being the only person with certain skills or information might feel like insurance. But it can lead to selfishness—and a surprise ouster by a boss who prefers team players.
Avin Kline , chief executive of the cannabis marketing agency Lucyd in Florida, says he expects most of his 55 employees to spend two to five years with the company. Understanding that turnover is inevitable, and perhaps imminent, he guards against individuals becoming essential.
Each client account has a point person, but those employees are required to share notes and reports with colleagues so that someone else can step in if needed. The idea: No account manager should be so important that a client would take its business elsewhere if the primary contact left the agency.
“When we have to replace someone, I want to feel that we’re losing somebody that’s providing a lot of value,” Kline says. “But I don’t want my business or myself to freak out.”
Shannon Howard argues indispensability remains an ideal worth pursuing. The content-marketing director at a software company made that case recently to a group of college students near her home in North Carolina, urging them to resist the “ act your wage ” sentiment that drives many young workers, and others, to withhold extra effort.
At 31, Howard says she gets it. At-will employees can go above and beyond and get canned anyway, so why bother?
Still, “I’ve seen times when being the person who does their best, with a good attitude, saves someone’s neck,” she says. “At minimum, it builds a positive reputation and can help get another job.”
Jim Moechnig , laid off by a data-storage company in November, is still waiting for 17 years of service and good karma to be reciprocated.
He devoted nearly his entire tenure to a single software line, building unsurpassed institutional knowledge. Rather than irreplaceable, he says he came to be seen as one-dimensional.
When sales of his software slowed, his role was eliminated and job prospects for his narrow specialty were limited. Moechnig, 46, is working toward additional tech certifications that he hopes will yield new opportunities remotely or locally in Minnesota.
With several months to process his job loss, he takes a coolly objective view of the situation. His team was full of smart, hardworking people, but the business needed to cut costs. Ability provided no protection.
“If they were going to cut somebody, they were going to cut somebody good,” he says.
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Social media personality Supercar Blondie, a London-based Australian whose real name is Alex Hirschi, found her niche posting automotive eyecandy for eager viewers rather accidentally.
“I started out as a journalist, and I just fell into cars through my radio show,” says Hirschi.
For someone who “fell into” cars, they’ve certainly been good to her—the Supercar Blondie network of social channels that includes Supercarblondie.com has 110 million subscribers, including 18.4 million on YouTube and 56 million on Facebook. The content has 2 billion views per month, according to the company.
Hirschi, whose first car was a lowly Mitsubishi Lancer, produces the Supercar Blondie content with her husband, Nik Hirschi, who is Swiss. The radio show was on the Arabian Radio Network in Dubai from 2012 to 2017. Dubai is full of supercars, and Hirschi, then known as “Radio Blondie,” said it was a natural fit to drive some of them—Bentleys, McLarens, Ferraris—for on-air features. The independent Supercar Blondie content creation company was launched in Dubai (where Nik Hirschi worked at Bloomberg, Barclays, and Thomson Reuters) in 2017 and has been growing ever since.
“I just loved supercars, and what started out as a hobby after I was loaned a Bentley Flying Spur to drive around Dubai eventually got more serious,” Alex Hirschi says. “We started filming my encounters with cars and uploading the video to our channel.” These days the couple travels 300 days a year; Penta first caught up with them at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas .
And now SB Media Group, based in London with 65 employees, Nik as CEO and Alex as the co-founder and on-air talent, is going into the auto auction business. SBX Cars, based in California, launched this week. The inaugural inventory goes beyond cars, and includes an electric Tyde hydrofoil yacht designed by BMW. There’s also a no-reserve Tesla Cybertruck, a one-of-nine Lamborghini Veneno Roadster, and a one-of-three Lamborghini Veneno Coupe. Likely attracting attention will be the first public auctions of the Mercedes-AMG One and the Hyperion XP-1 hydrogen-powered prototype. There were three LaFerrari prototypes, and one will be auctioned by SBX Cars.
A collection of John Player Special Lotus F1 racing cars will also be auctioned, as well as Lotus transporters, and founder Colin Chapman’s personal plane and some vehicles from his garage. Other high-dollar items include a Mercedes 300SL “Gullwing,” a Lamborghini Miura, a BMW 507, and an Aston Martin DB5. The estimated valuation of the auction lots consigned is US$100 million.
The auctions will be online, but there could be some in-person events in the future. “We’re going to be the only digital auction site that focuses on the high end,” Nik Hirschi says. “We will focus on cars that are super-cool, with many that are one-of-a-kind, and we’re going to be attracting collectors from all over the world. Every car will be represented on the site with 200 photographs, taken by our global network.” Video will also be available.
SBX Cars says it will speed up the process for consignors, with just a few weeks until their cars become available on the site. Once up, the vehicles will remain available for one to two weeks. SBX Cars Auction Director Lance Butler, a Bonhams veteran, said in a statement that the auction “introduces our clients to a far easier buying and selling process, all while accessing one of the world’s largest global audiences by way of Supercar Blondie.”
Mercedes 300SLs, Aston Martin DB5s, and BMW 507s are frequently auctioned around the globe, but SBX features some true exotics.
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