Make yourself irrelevant.

This best summarizes my experience of growing from an individual contributor to management and leadership roles in the last 10+ years.

The way to make yourself irrelevant will differ depending on the stage of your career.

Individual contributor (IC)#

The way to make yourself irrelevant is to automate your current task.

• Responsible for developing particular services? Improve the design and refactor code to reduce the time needed to add new features and debug.
• Customer support? Find new tools and integrations to automate the repetitive part.
• Sales? Find ways to automate lead generation.

How to measure if you are doing a good job as IC?#

If the work you were doing a year ago takes lesser resources now for the same or higher quality, then you are doing a good job.

Manager#

Making yourself irrelevant as a manager is kind of simple. Find and grow managers in your team so that, you don't have to manage.

How to measure if you are doing a good job as a manager?#

As yourself, how well your team function when you are not around? If they are stuck when you take a leave, then there is still scope for improvement.

Leader#

I believe the way to make yourself irrelevant here is to communicate, a lot of it. As a leader you have access to lots of information, make it available to the team with the right abstraction and details. Create and communicate values that are to be used for making decisions.

How to measure if you are doing a good job as a leader?#

If everyone in the company knows what they are doing? Why they are doing that? How there work is impacting the customers? Are people using the company values and principles to find solutions to ambiguous and difficult problems? If the answer to any of these is No, then there is scope for improvement.