How to be truly valuable

What does it mean to be truly valuable as an employee, even as a person? A lot of us throw around the word value, and the importance of being valuable, and delivering value to customers, while not actually understanding what value really is. Even less, how you as a person, or employee, can become truly valuable, even indispensable. Let’s dive into it.

First, ask yourself, why?

Ok, so, first of all, why should you make yourself valuable, even indispensable at a company? Really, that’s a question for you to ask yourself. Because it doesn’t really matter how you do it if you don’t know why you do it. So be sure to consider that before you consider how you can make it happen.

Now the main reason most people would argue for this is to have more job security, i.e. reduce the risk of being laid off. And that’s a perfectly valid reason and of course we all want job security, basically stability and predictability, in our lives. But that shouldn’t obviously be your only motivation for making yourself valuable, especially indispensable at a company. And I’ll get to that in a second, but first let’s look at how you actually make yourself valuable and even indispensable at your company.

Define value

Being valuable is simply being an employee who delivers value. However obvious that might seem, it’s so stupidly simple that it seems most of us ignore that idea when we think of how we avoid being laid off. It’s not complicated at all in fact, but what that means is that you have to figure out what value actually is at your company. It’s not just based on your role, because, for example as a software engineer, value is not as simple as delivering code, or fixing bugs. What matters is what code, which bugs, what product.

Find the biggest pain points

The best starting point, is to look at what the company is spending the most on. For example, if you’re a software engineer and you work with a lot of different vendor services for things like content management, payments etc. You can find out how much they pay for the different agreements they have based on usage and setup. You can definitely find places where you can optimize and make a setup in a CMS for example much more cost effective. Companys have so much old stuff lying around in systems that nobody knows why it even exists.

You can look at old systems that the company is being slowed down by. Might be old backup solutions that were set up 20+ years ago that can, with some time investment, be rebuilt or exchanged with a more modern, or even just a simpler and more effective, setup. It can be projects or ideas that are floating around in conversations among team members, managers or bosses about systems or solutions that could be much better.

Being the person who takes responsibility over things that nobody wants to take responsibility for, doing the things that nobody else wants to do, is what will make you really valuable. As soon as people know that you are the person that does what needs to be done, regardless of what it is, people will want to work with you and have you in their projects. Because, regardless of how many good programmers and engineers there are out there, it is not common to find people who are willing to do what nobody else does.

That, I think can have the biggest impact on how valuable or even indispensable you are at the company. The next one will really help you find out what is important at the company, which is to ask the right questions.

Asking the right questions

Asking the right questions really is about understanding the context, and what the goal is. That is not always easy, which is why asking the right questions is what will make you so valuable. Not everyone at the company knows exactly all the right questions to ask, which is why you need to come in with your experience and the perspectives you have, and ask questions only you can think of.

As you keep asking questions in different contexts, helping you understand better the bigger picture and the goal or the purpose of for example a project or initiative, you will also gain more experience and knowledge from that in itself. You can begin to see patterns in the projects you engage in which will lead you to always thinking about the things you learned in the past instances of older projects.

For example, deploying a new storefront for the company, have we thought about telemetry? What are the performance metrics we care about, and are they somehow tied to any KPI’s or real business value? Can we measure the performance metric towards any costs or cost savings?

So, being truly valuable, is also asking the right questions. But to become truly indispensable at a company, you need specific knowledge.

Being indispensable, means having specific knowledge

What I mean by specific knowledge, I mean being the person who knows more than anyone else about critical parts of the business. It can be as little as being the one who knows one single system inside and out, but a system that is critical for the company’s operations. It’s really simple, and you can probably understand why this might not just be a good thing. But it comes back to the question of value. What will make you indispensable, is having so much value, and having value that nobody else can provide.

That’s simply what that means. Make yourself uniquely qualified and experienced, and it won’t be easy, nor will they want, to get rid of you. Because you are literally an irreplaceable asset for them. You are the person they go to to ask questions about the system they know is super important and provides crucial value for them as a business, and they now want to grow so that it can provide even more value.

If you’ve ever worked for a big company with a big IT architecture, you will have seen examples of these people, but whom you might have built up a distaste for because they’ve ended up in that position simply through their own day-to-day work. They’ve been at the company long enough to be the only people who knows how a particular system works, because they are the only one’s left who were there when they first built it. They have become one of the company’s single points of failure, a vulnerability. And what do you think is more expensive for them in the short term, replacing a critical part of their system and making sure the new service is well documented and as stable as the old system, or simply paying someone to stay where they are?

This is obviously not a positive example, but there are countless just like it, and it is a problem for the organisation themselves. And this is where the question of why comes in. You have to understand why you want to be valuable, and then how. And you can be the person with this specific knowledge, while still having documented everything you know and trying to help spread the knowledge at the company. Because, as I said, not everyone will want to be the person who does what nobody else does. And that’s ok.

So, you can be indispensable, by acquiring specific knowledge and insight, through asking the right questions and understanding what the business really values. And through that knowledge, insight and understanding, in combination with your skills, help them reach their goals and provide true business value. That, in the end, is an indispensable employee.

Final words

These are my own thoughts and experiences that I speak from, which I’ve collected over the years both through work, but also through self-study and practicing what I learn through books and courses. I hope you found it insightful or in any way useful, as I have over the years.