A good worker is someone who produces so much value that they become irreplaceable.
As Cal Newport writes in the book “So Good They Can’t Ignore You” knowledge workers who have the most satisfying careers don’t just “follow their passion”. Instead, they build rare and valuable skills that they leverage to negotiate better career positions.
If you want a satisfying career, become so good at what you do that they cannot ignore you and they cannot replace you. Become irreplaceable.
But when you are a leader, you need to think differently. Leaders do whatever it takes to achieve their vision and make an impact. And one of the things that they have to necessarily do is to make more leaders and make themselves replaceable. If a movement has a single leader – a single point of failure, a bus factor of 1 – that movement is poised to fail when that leader falls. And like all humans, leaders fall.
Good leaders don’t wait for their own end to think about replacing themselves. Good leaders think about replacing themselves from day 1. Because that’s the most sustainable way forward. That’s the way things scale out of control.
If you want a successful movement, become replaceable and replace yourself as soon as you can.
PS: I’ve deliberately not talked about the intersection between leaders and workers. I believe good leaders have to necessarily be good workers. That’s an implementation detail I will cover in a future blog post.