How To Become Indispensable At Work
After getting a job, the next thought usually is how to preserve your position and become valuable to your organization. Everyone desires to be indispensable at work and be among that number that gets the respect.
To become indispensable at work, you must be able to offer something different, something unique, something no one else has to give the company. To put this another way, how valuable are you to your company?
Can you become so valuable to the company that they’ll never want to see you go? In reality, nobody is indispensable in the true sense of the word. If anything were to happen to that person, the company would still be able to survive or manage as long as it already had a fairly good system running.
Here are some steps to take if you want to become indispensable at work:
- Be Skillful: This is the first step to becoming indispensable. You know the skills your profession values, these are the skills you should ensure you are not found lacking. Become a master in them. Even if you joined the organization with barely any skills, you must ensure you do not remain like that.
Give your all to gathering a complete and perfect skill set. Get even extra skills that seem not to be useful at the time. Be ever-increasing in skills. When your boss needs something done and can come to you just because it’s an extra capability of yours, you are making yourself indispensable. It’s like getting three for the price of one deal.
- Stand Out: The best way to stand out is to be unique. Make yourself useful around the office. Don’t follow the crowd but be different- an extra way you handle customers, an extra way you handle details, an extra way you solve situations, etc. Set high standards for yourself and keep reaching for them. Be ever-revolving, never stagnant.
- Quality Output: It’s not about the number of tasks or how fast you can dish them out. A hundred others outside the company can probably compete with your number and are willing to go with half of your pay.
Go for quality. Deliver high-level work. Go the extra mile. Nothing says you value your job or love your job like quality output. It shows you put a lot of time and thought into what you do. Every company values people like this.
- Character: Work on your character. Don’t be found amongst the group quick to say negative things about the company or the boss. Don’t be mean. Even if the job you do is very stressful, do not go around carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders, and do not carry family problems into work with you.
You know the whole list of negatives when it comes to attitudes and character; name-calling, proud, braggadocious, disrespectful, etc. They make the people around you uncomfortable. Be sure that if these kinds of things are found in you, you might not be one your department head or manager is recommending to the boss for that next level project, to represent the department or the likes.
It’s already hard work trying to stand out, you don’t need the extra work of men trying to take you down in workplace politics.
- Learn! Learn! Learn!: Be on your feet to gather knowledge from anywhere or in any form it presents itself to you. Learn from your failures and the failures of others. Learn from your success and study how to replicate the process to keep yielding the same results. Learn how to and when to upgrade the results too.
Learn from your superiors, why is this person respected more than the other? What does Mr. B do to give him these results? How has Miss C won best employee 3 times consecutively?
Learn from colleagues, from the internet, from groups you belong to, training you to attend.
The difference between two persons is the level of information (knowledge) they have. While one is stranded, the other can find a door or another disguised opportunity to soar.
- Invest in Worthwhile Relationship: Do not be an island. If you try to be, you will not last long in that workplace. As earlier said, you might find the information from someone valuable in the long run. Work on your relationship with your superiors too. Many don’t usually know how to proceed with this. Do not be shy or act without confidence.
Relationship with Company Customers: the good relationship with one high-value customer can be the breaking line between the company letting you go or keeping you.
Relationship with Colleagues: they matter a lot. They are the ones that you spend most of your day with and if you’re planning on becoming indispensable then you’ll be staying quite some time in that organization. Don’t behave in a manner that you’ll regret in the future.
- Teamwork: It’s only right that this comes right after the last point. You need to be able to work well with your team members. There is a reason this requirement shows up in many job advertisements. Teamwork is important and highly valuable to organizations.
- Healthy Competition: Pick a highly enterprising individual in your line of work capable of motivating you to be a better version of yourself. Healthy competition can be an engine to spur you to become better but do not get carried away. Always remember that you’re first an individual, a different make from that person.
- Reliable: Your organization needs to know that you’re someone they can trust, someone that values the work they do and believe in the core goals too. You can not be in-between and become indispensable to them.
You must be focused. Coming late to work, choosing personal errands overwork every time does not make you look reliable to your company, taking sick leaves, causing a public spectacle outside, none of these things bode well for you and the company you represent. When the time calls for it, you might just find yourself amongst the first to be cut off.
- Help Others Grow: At some point, you’ll be in the position to help others. As you increase in knowledge and skills, do not keep these things to yourself. Share them with your company. Give pointers, and make suggestions that become the solutions to problems they have been having. Share information with your co-workers so they can grow too.
You’re probably thinking that YOU want to be the indispensable one so why increase the competition? This is not what you’re doing but the opposite. The more you share, the more you stand out as a leader amongst them. As long as you stick to points number 1 and 5, you will not end up with the short end of the stick.
- Do Not Hide Away: If you are the best at what you do but hide away from the spotlight you may never become indispensable. No one is asking you to love the spotlight, everyone is not tailored that way but to become indispensable, you need to be seen by the right people. Be seen doing your work right, your accomplishments need to be seen, your growth needs to be noticed. You must learn to handle exposure and manage it to suit your purposes.
- Find Joy and Purpose in What You Do: The journey to the top can often be more lonely than planned which is why the effort in investing in relationships must become a conscious one. Another way to smoothen the path is to find joy in your job. Let it become more than a job, a means of getting income for you.
Make sure you are doing something you love. This way, the extra push and back-breaking work of adding value to yourself become more interesting than to the ordinary man. Study your company’s goal, and align it with personal goals. If you can’t do this, you might never get the fulfillment out of the job even when you get to that position you want.
- Be Adaptable to Change: You never can know what will come up or when. Many times, we face challenges they or the company never bargained for. How you handle yourself in these emergencies or new routine says more about you than half the talk you do in a serene environment.
True leaders build tough skin. They have shock absorbers. While others are scattering in confusion, they are optimistic. They gather the team together and lead them out of the tunnel or show them how to make light bulbs in the darkness.
- Obey Company Rules and Regulations: A quick way to degrade yourself before the company is to disregard the rules put in place for smooth running. Better still, take the back road and be caught going against the ethics of your profession. Companies want to be proud of their employees. Being disciplined by not just the company but the industry head is a sure way to go downhill.
- Be Careful: Stay in line, avoid rumours or being blacklisted. The reason some persons can never get to some peak of leadership in their organizations can be the things they did in the past. Erroneous decisions that got recorded, crimes, lawsuits, etc so while they may be thriving, they cannot progress past a certain point. Bad exposure is worse than no exposure at all.
