357. Upskill your coworkers and make yourself obsolete and that will get you job security

Unlock the secrets of proactive employment and discover how cultivating a workforce ready to take on executive roles—even without the executive paycheck—can transform your business. Imagine a world where every employee is empowered to lead, manage, and innovate, ensuring seamless operations even when key leaders are absent. Through candid anecdotes and real-world challenges, we highlight the critical need for delegation, upskilling, and fostering an environment where knowledge-sharing is not just encouraged but celebrated. You'll learn how creating a culture of empowerment can pave the way for greater organizational success and long-term employee retention.

Reflect on the frustrations of being thrown into makeshift leadership training without preparation, and why having a well-prepared team to step up is non-negotiable. We discuss the pitfalls of hoarding knowledge for job security and flip the script on traditional views of irreplaceability. If you're in a managerial role or aspire to be, this conversation is packed with insights on how sharing knowledge and empowering your colleagues can make you an invaluable asset to any organization. Join us and reimagine what it means to lead from every chair in the room.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:32

Good morning. So today I just want to touch on the topic of proactive employment. I know it's a little atypical because lately it's been about the student closing, but this week my interim GM is out and it's funny to see like it's just funny to see how people structure themselves. And so this week the interim GM is, and so it's now all of the shift leads that are doing like part-time work that are on site, and so folks are now asking like hey, uh, with with interim GM out, where's the list of people doing the program again? How do we run a report for who's bought things? How do we text people again? And so just the fact that you have to assume the most valuable employees assume that they will not be around and they need to delegate their role to somebody else. The reason why that's valuable for you is you know how to duplicate executive capable people. If everybody had the authority, the proactiveness, the confidence and the capability to run the business as the CEO. But they're not getting paid CEO wages. Of course, those people will absolutely be retained for the long term.

Speaker 1: 1:45

People complain like oh, ceos, they make $30 million a year. Those scumbags, how dare they make so much money? Those trashy people that are able to run companies. They're despicable and disgusting. They're overpaid, okay? Well, let's pretend this. Let's pretend you are a fry cook and you're making 20 bucks an hour. But you have the skills, the knowledge and capability to run the entire mcdonald's restaurant. But you're making 20 bucks an hour. But you can. But you have the ability and the training to work like, to operate, as if you were making like a hundred grand a year, but you're making 40 grand a year. Whoever trained you and equipped you with a hundred thousand dollar capacity on a $40,000 salary? Absolutely. Whoever trained you and equipped you and upskilled everyone internally? Absolutely I am paying them top dollar If you're able to have your staff be far more valuable than what they're getting paid Now. If your staff is like I don't wanna know squat, I just wanna sit here and flip burgers and fries, I'm gonna work hard doing low skill labor and I don't want to know nothing, of course, yeah, you're probably going to stay stuck in your career forever. That's on you.

Speaker 1: 3:00

But, that being said, if you're getting back into the manager leadership hat, if you're going to bottleneck and hold all of that knowledge internally to yourself because you want to be a valuable member, you want to have job security, you want to make sure no one ever fires you and you're going to withhold training and information. No, I am not going to keep you for the long term. If you're going to make yourself irreplaceable, I will replace you and I will find someone that wants to train and upskill everybody else. If you're elevating everyone's skill around you, heck. No, I am never getting rid of you Because 99% of the population I'm making that number up, 99% of the population wants to be irreplaceable by withholding, closing off and preventing others from having your knowledge. If you're going to be different and upskill and train everybody else to be more valuable than what they're getting paid, absolutely I am retaining you like crazy, because you're able to elevate value far more than even you're getting paid.

Speaker 1: 4:00

So all that to say my interim GM sitting out. He's like hey, by the way, um, this person needs to get trained on this, this person needs to get trained on that. And now they're dumping that responsibility onto me to train the staff, and I'm willing to do it, but I don't have the time to do it, and so now I'm crabby about it because I don't want to be doing it, because I have 14 other things on my to-do list today, and your job is to make sure people are trained. So I'm venting, yes. And so now I'm having to teach people. Hey, here's how to log onto the company business page. Here's the software to go text people. Here's how to follow up and tell people price. Here's how to schedule someone in the calendar. And now I'm having to do your job because you want it to be extra valuable.

Speaker 1: 4:41

And yet all I'm thinking about is I'm crabby at you for not training people. And I'm not thinking oh, I'm so glad you withheld information, so now you're a valuable interim GM. Oh, absolutely no. I am crabby about you and I'm thinking about how you don't train people. So, anyhow, maybe I'm the weird person, maybe I'm the one who should not be thinking that it's valuable to train people. I don't think so. I am probably wrong, but I don't think I am.

Speaker 1: 5:08

So all that to say train people to be more valuable than even you. And management will not let that go unnoticed. They will realize oh my goodness, let's just go to a typical company setup. Last example If you already get it, then just skip to the next episode. Let's say that you're a manager at a tech company and you're making $150,000 a year. Your people are making $100,000 a year. Your people are making a hundred grand a year, but we'll just pretend that.

Speaker 1: 5:33

But as a manager, trainer, team lead, whatever, if you can train your people how to do your job, how to run presentations, how to run analytics, how to document data pipeline, data pipelines and you know how to do all that and you train all of your $100,000 staff to do your $150,000 job, I can guarantee you they're not going to do your job. No one's going to know. The de facto person says oh, I'm not, you can't pay me enough to run, you don't pay me enough to go lead a team, I'm not going to do the work unless I get the paycheck. So I guarantee no one's going to do it. No one's going to operate and execute the game plan. But they're going to have the know-how and the capability so that if you were to get canned or die or whatever, they're able to operate without you.

Speaker 1: 6:25

That is so rare and invaluable. Management will not let you go. They will keep you and they'll keep expanding you to the junior teams, to advanced teams, to teams where there's massive value but it's being locked up by self-minded staff, and so they will keep you if they see and know that's how you operate and that's your leadership style. It doesn't mean you you're lazy bones, that just means you're upskilling everybody around you to operate so that when you're on vacation, if you're sick, if you have a newborn in the house, uh, or whatever, they know that you're not going to be at the company for 50 years, maybe not even 40, not 30, not 20, maybe 10 years if you're lucky.

Speaker 1: 7:10

But a company's known, people turn, and so if you can document and duplicate yourself, they will put you in the hardest teams, the trickiest social dynamics. And if you can replicate and repeat yourself and do that over and over and over and unlock value that the company knows is there, you will be retained forever. So, anyhow, stopping right there, I now have a bunch of work to do because my interim GM is out doing something else, but they're out of the studio, and so I'm now having to train staff to do even their basic job, not the GM or manager's job, but even their frontline shift lead, basic work. And so that's how you become a more valuable employee and a manager, and that's the crack, that's the code to crack. I'm going to stop there because I've said the point too many times over. That's where we're at, that's where we're going. Let's rock and roll.