Why Being Indispensable Can Hold Your Business Back

Being needed can become addictive.

I've worked with business owners and senior leaders who tell me they can't take a proper holiday because everything starts falling apart when they're away. They're usually frustrated by it. Sometimes, though, I wonder whether there's also a small amount of pride hidden in the frustration.

Being the person everyone turns to can feel good. You solve the difficult problems. Your opinion carries weight. You know the history, the clients and the business better than anyone else. When something goes wrong, people come looking for you. Over time, being needed can become closely connected to feeling valuable.

That's where leadership can get complicated. You delegate a decision, then step back in when it isn't being made quickly enough. Someone tackles a problem differently from the way you would, so you correct the course. A client has always dealt with you, so you continue managing the relationship. It's often easier to answer the question than to let someone else wrestle with it.

None of this looks particularly significant from a business perspective. In isolation, most of it is perfectly reasonable. Gradually, though, you can build an organisation full of capable people who have learnt to wait for the most capable person in the room.

At some point, being indispensable stops being a measure of your value and starts becoming a measure of the organisation's dependence on you.

For an experienced leader, the next stage of growth may require a very different measure of success: what happens when you're not there.

Can people make good decisions? Can they solve problems without checking with you? Can they disagree, take responsibility and occasionally get something wrong without you stepping back in?

There's an uncomfortable question underneath all of this.

Perhaps the hardest part isn't discovering whether your team can cope without you.

It's discovering whether you're comfortable when they can.