Your Single Point of Failure is your Best Employee

Chuq von Rospach writes about the negative effects of employees deciding to leave on their own, when a company least expects it (especially in this economy). I have to admit, I was somewhat surprised when I left IBM that there was no kerfluffle. By the time I left, I’d been exiled to Business Innovation Services, far from my role as either the alleged Corporate Webmaster or then more recently doing my part for the Olympic Games website. Still, the response when I resigned was something akin to Thank god, one less headcount on our books instead of Gee, the guy who forced www.ibm.com to work for five years is walking out the door, do we have any questions?

There’s another aspect to this which I just remembered. When I was managing the ibm.com team or the Olympics team, I tried to keep myself and the team in the mindset of anyone can leave at any time. I wasn’t trying to be morbid or to devalue any one person’s value to the teams. Instead I was trying (and I think to some extent, succeeded) to get people into the mindset that if you were to be unavailable, for whatever reason, we still need to get the job done. And, if your coworker was unavailable, you still needed to get the job done. I came to that philosophy after an especially intense period at ibm.com where none of the technical staff took any time off for 6-9 months. It wore me out and I know it wore the team out.

It’s kind of a weird dialectic. On the one hand, you want everyone (including yourself) to feel valued and important. On the other, no one person can be so important that the project, task, job at hand won’t succeed. I mean, you may have to deal with some level of impairment, may have to redo some work, but in general you can’t have the environment such that no one person will cause an absolute failure by their non-presence. I guess it’s the last piece of building a scaleable, redundant I/T infrastructure and team. The consequence is that when you do leave, you want there to be some sort of gaping hole in your absence, yet if you did your job well and educated everyone well about what you did, there shouldn’t be a hole at all. ’Bit of a flesh wound perhaps, but nothing more.

Just wish I’d had that insight some years ago.

Note: This was originally published in ed costello's personal journal in June 2003.

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