How to become irreplaceable in your organization?

Becoming The Linchpin

The old economy awarded employees who showed up, followed instructions, stayed loyal and remained a replaceable cog in the ‘factory’.

Nowadays, this is not the case anymore. The attendance based compensation system is history.
Great jobs no longer tell you in detail what is required and what to do. Simple tasks are being automated and outsourced. Hence, to move forward in our career, we have to be the ‘new player of the game’: A Linchpin.

These people invent, lead, connect others, make things happen, and create order out of chaos. They figure out what to do when there’s no rule book.

You don’t become indispensable merely because you are different. But the only way to be indispensable is to be different. That’s because if you are the same, so are plenty of other people.

The only way to get what you’re worth is to stand out, to exert emotional labor, to be seen as indispensable, and to produce interactions that organizations and people care deeply about.

The linchpins among us are not the ones born with a magical talent. No, they are people who have decided that a new kind of work is important, and trained themselves to do it.

Linchpins are able to embrace the lack of structure and find a new path, one that works.
They don’t need a map to follow. A linchpin creates opportunity and vision without a manual.

In organizations, they are close to being irreplaceable.

from “the Linchpin”