You might think your title protects you but it doesn’t.
You may think how long you’ve been with a company or organization will protect you but it won’t.
You may have done everything right and had the best of intentions along the way, but that won’t protect you either.
The only thing that protects you in life, the marketplace, or even more specifically the workplace is LEVERAGE.
The people that last, the ones that don’t get restructured out of a job, are the assets. They’ve found a way to consistently evolve and grow in such a way that it actually costs more to be without them than to pay them whatever is that they’re asking for.
In simple terms they posses or have control over something that others depend on.
“Too Big To Fail”
You’ve heard the phrase too big to fail. Well it wasn’t about morality and it definitely wasn’t about fairness.
It was about friction.
The cost of letting something fail was higher than the cost of keeping it alive. You should take that very same logic and apply it to yourself.
If replacing you would require:
months of onboarding
lost institutional knowledge
broken relationships
operational slowdowns
multiple people to do what you do alone
…or simply put, getting accustomed to life without you is simply not worth the cost of continuing with you, then you become more than just an employee, an acquaintance, or a convenience. You are a necessity. You are an infrastructure.
When the friction of replacing you is higher than the friction of compensating you well, you win.
What Actually Makes You Hard to Replace
Hard to replace usually means you own some version of one (or more) of these:
Knowledge
You understand systems, history, edge cases, and nuance others don’t.Systems
You build processes that scale, reduce chaos, or save real time and money.Relationships
Clients, partners, or internal and external teams trust you specifically, not just the logo.
In essence, you either know, you create, or you relate. This is leverage.
Now those in and of themselves aren’t the be all and end all. The key to actually applying this concept in real life aligns with a major tenet in OGM Principles. That principle is growth.
If and when you do achieve the status of “too big to fail,” it’s not something that you keep forever. Remember that. There needs to be constant evolution and optimization. In other words you have to keep progressing.
The moment you believe you have it figured out, is the moment you indeed become very much replaceable.
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