How to grow in an organization
I read a story in my high school English book written by a famous Indian author (I forgot the name) – There was an old blind man who used to work in a grocery store. He was very good at mathematics. He used to sit next to the shop owner. Whenever a customer bought goods from the shop, the owner would speak out the product list. The old man would quickly calculate the total amount payable with his impeccable strong hold on mathematics. He also had a good memory and knew the prices of all the products. One day when he came to the shop, he came to know that the owner had bought a new device called a calculator. The calculator could do all the maths and much faster! Slowly the old man became obsolete. The owner had not asked him to leave but he felt he was not doing much at the shop and became restless.
One day when he was sitting next to the owner as usual, with the owner doing all the maths on the calculator, the owner wanted to know the price of a product. The old man of course had this information handy through years of working in the shop. In fact he also knew how much quantity of that product was in the shop. From that day his role changed, he would advice the owner on inventory management, cost price and selling price of each product.
A few days later on being asked by someone what was he still doing in the shop, when the owner now had the calculator, the old man said that he had been promoted to be a manager!
The morale of the story is simple. To grow in an organization, make yourself replaceable. Grow your fellow employees to take your place. Growing your team should be the higher objective, and you’ll see that your own growth was a natural consequence.
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Comments
how can we identify the areas where we need to grow so that we can be replaceable? The knowledge about all the products, inventory etc that old man in the story had made him replaceable but all this knowledge came from his past experience. The best part is his expertise and interest in his work, things like how much quantity of that product was in the shop, etc… shows his interest in his work. The expertise which came through his interest and pride he has show towards his work made him replaceable.
If we can identify such key areas and expertise in such areas than we are ready to get replaced.
In true sense when one works on replacing oneself he/she is not replacing himself/herself, but the job. Once you work towards replacing yourself, all you are doing is replacing/enhancing the job you are currently doing. This can be done at every level. Let’s say you are a Java developer. Currently you are doing job of pure development, ie, someone defines the project for you and architecture and you go ahead code it as per the spec. As you try to replace that coding job, you think what else can you do? In the process of coding, you have learnt a lot about the domain itself, how the work flow happens, how the messages are handled, etc. Why not make a jump and start your own design and start comparing your design with the design your manager/lead gave you and start the dialog and keep growing. Now the job of a pure developer has become not just developer, but of a mini-architect. You can also look around and see where are the pain points of the project/organization are, like communications, HL7, DICOM, EDI, XML etc. This you will know if you participate in project status meeting (many people think this is a waste full thing to do) and start developing those skills as they pertain to your job and start growing….
how true… this happens always. As organizations grow they change, so the roles of everyone also change. If employees don’t change and grow as the organization grows, they become pretty soon dispensable. You can only be indispensable if you grow out of your job and move to more value added job. This is true of any organization. Growing your career by jumping ship is the most risky path, once you get stuck in this jumping game, there is no safety net, you fall very badly. Grow naturally by learning you will have a healthy growth and you will enjoy the growth.