How to become an indispensable manager for your company?
The feeling of being indispensable to your organization is an exceptional one. It has the power to satisfy every aspect of professional, social, and emotional needs you have as a working professional. It gives you a sense of being valued and respected. It doesn’t come easy. There is a lot of hard work behind it. Not just to get there. But to stay at that level also. But the rewards compensate very well for all the hard work you put in.
As a manager, being indispensable means that you and your team are critical to the organization’s success. You have a crucial role to play and contribute value to the team that others could not carry out.
For a manager, there are some tangible and intangible benefits of achieving such a status in their organizations.
- More autonomy and responsibility
- Witness faster career growth
- Work on the most critical problems faced by the company
- Get to be a role model for high-performance standards
So, the question is, How do you get to that state? It doesn’t happen magically. You need a structured thought process to get there. People are not born with such a capability. You can actually build it by working on some critical aspects. In total, there are 11 qualities that you will have to achieve. You might already have a bunch of them. You can start working towards the rest of them. You can read about all these qualities here.
In addition to these qualities, you must be a result-oriented manager. A result-oriented manager has a natural bias for results. Result-oriented managers are committed to working with their teams to achieve collective outcomes. They are always looking for short and long-term solutions to problems and put in the extra effort to succeed. These managers understand that they cannot make that progress without a shared understanding of goals and an alignment of interests. They are also decisive, take charge when necessary, and can motivate their team to achieve the desired results.
But often, there is a risk that managers may fall into a result-only trap. This is when they focus so much on results that they try to achieve them at any cost. This often leads to a negative impact on the team. The cost of falling into this trap can be enormous in the short and long term.
So what is the right way to be a result-oriented manager? Read here.
Keeping your team’s psychological safety in mind is one of the most essential points to remember to avoid falling into the result-only trap. Researchers have found that Psychological safety is one of the critical factors of successful team performance. It is the feeling among team members that they can take risks without fear of retribution. You can not become indispensable if you do not have a high-performing team backing you up.
Psychological safety is the belief that you are safe to be yourself around other people. It breeds in an environment that is free of psychological threats. In such an environment, team members feel confident that their co-workers will not embarrass, humiliate, or punish them for speaking up or making mistakes. Such an environment fosters creativity, risk-taking, emotional intelligence, empathy, growth mindset, and sound mental health of the team members.
Being indispensable to your organization is challenging yet achievable. The riches that wait for you beyond the hill are worth the effort to go through the grueling journey. Moreover, once you learn how to do it, you can easily replicate it in any new environment.
The week in Social Media
This post by Guillaume Moubeche talks about the top-performing individual contributors becoming managers.
This post by Sangita Nair talks about not forgetting the quiet ones when giving recognition
