How making myself REDUNDANT was the best thing to happen to my career? – Learn the TPP formula

Everything gets boring after a while. The new iPhone for which you stood in line for over 10 hours. Six months later, does it excite you the same way? Or that new Gucci handbag which you bought after saving six months of your salary. Does it hold the same excitement after six months?

That’s the truth, isn’t it? Even if we love what we do right now, that doesn’t mean we will like it forever. Every job gets boring after a while. My understanding is that when people become bored with their jobs, the easiest option is to shift companies. Go to a new office. Meet new people. Get new challenges and use the same skillset that we have to provide value.

But then, that’s a quick fix. You will get bored. Because one thing I have learned over time is that it’s not the challenges that you get bored off, but the application of your same skillset to the same type of challenges. It may be a different company, but if you go for the type of challenges where you apply the same skillset you currently have, you will get bored. So before I go into this article, If you are looking to change jobs because you feel bored in your current job, always ask this question which my Dad asks me to yourself:

If you move jobs right now, other than the monetary benefit what are the other ten things (Hard skill/Soft Skill) you will learn. Can you write it down? – Dad

So moving jobs is not the answer to getting bored. Instead, we need to look inwards and see whether it is the job that makes me bored or certain aspects of the job which make me bored.

Now, let me share another conundrum. Most of us have started moving up the corporate ladder esp. in startups or Small enterprises, numbering a few hundred employees. Face this peculiar problem whether you are an individual contributor in a project or a manager managing sales, marketing, or project teams.

“I can’t learn anything new in this current role/ I am spending way too much time doing Non-Value Add Activities. I want to do something different. I want to add more value. But then, there is no one to take over my current set of activities.” – You at some point in your professional life

That’s where this title comes into play. I put forward this hypothesis:

You can move up in your career/life only if you have made yourself redundant in your current stage of life/career.

Take this example:

If you are a parent of a newborn healthy baby, you need to take care of them in all aspects. But as time goes on, the baby starts learning from you and its surroundings and starts needing you less and less. The needs of a 10-year-old are different from a 10-month-old. You no longer need to push them around in a stroller, for instance. They can walk on their own. Of course, the challenges of parenting a 10-year old are different from that of a 10-month old. But without teaching the kid to eat, walk and do the basic hygiene activities on their own, you can’t raise to manage the needs of a 10-year old. You make yourself redundant to the needs by teaching the kid what you know, and that exactly is what we should be doing in our career as well.

(Yes, I am simplifying the amount of work the parents put in the first 10 months to 3-4 basic tasks. But this is just for the sake of explaining the hypothesis and does not in any way demean what parents go through in their day to day life)

So, what does making myself REDUNDANT in my career mean?

I’ll first tell you what it doesn’t mean?

• It does not mean you lose your job because it got automated
• It does not mean you lose your job because cheaper resources have been found

Instead, this term “making yourself redundant” hopes to achieve the exact opposite. Instead of losing your job, by making yourself redundant, you are in control, and you push your career down the fast track.

So what does the term ” Making yourself REDUNDANT” mean?

Making onself REDUNDANT means that you setup the technology, process and people in place to do our current activities so that we can move on to do higher value added activities

The higher value adds might mean different things depending on the context. For example, making yourself REDUNDANT doesn’t necessarily mean that you are looking for a new role. It can also mean freeing up time in your current role to do higher value add activities. Given below are some examples:

• You might be spending much time doing tactical activities like filling up excel sheets. If you could find a way to automate that activity, you can spend more time analyzing data rather than filling in data. By doing this, you are making yourself redundant from the job role of filling in data. Tech has replaced it.
• You have a set of documents that you have to create and distribute to the necessary stakeholders on-demand. The on-demand distribution part does not give you any value add in your job, and you want to be more focused on content creation. You can make yourself redundant in the distribution part by creating a self-service portal. You have made yourself redundant by tech.

The above was some of the examples I have seen where people had used technology to make the less value add parts of their job redundant to add more value to both their careers and the enterprise they operate in. But the above examples were mostly for Individual contributors. What about Managers? They have two extra weapons in their arsenal.

The best way to add more value is by getting more time in your hands as a manager. More time means more time to think through and work on improvements. That can only be done if you free up time from the current set of day-to-day operational activities you have. To free up time, you have to use the twin weapons of Process and People to make yourself redundant in the day-to-day scheme of things so that you can focus on the bigger picture.

• Process: Once you have understood the list of activities within your span of control, you need to document it. For example, as a marketing manager, you could have created a methodology for running highly effective marketing campaigns. Once that’s done, you need to document the process. Finally, once Documentation is done, you need to focus on the next weapon in your arsenal.
• People: Once you have the process documented clearly, you need to choose the right set of people in your team and train them on these processes. Here you accomplish two tasks: One, you make yourself redundant from less value-added activities; Second, you teach your team members a new skill. In this way, not only you but your team and your enterprise will improve as you have institutionalized knowledge that was just in your head before this time.

That’s the secret, folks. To get ahead in your career fast, you need to make yourself redundant. To do so, you need to follow the TPP formula. So the next time you feel your job is boring and you can do more, ask yourself the following questions:

• Can I use Technology to automate some parts of my job? – This can be as simple as using Macros in Excel or no-code platforms to create basic apps for content sharing. I recommend Microsoft PowerApps for this activity.
• Can I use Process to make myself redundant for some parts of my job? Take the ambiguous parts of your job and write them down. All activities in an enterprise have some form of process. If it is ambiguous, then it means no one has written down the process yet. Please write it down, and enforce it.
• Can I use People to do part of my job? Once the processes are documented, can I train my team to do these sets of activities?

Also, keep asking yourself these questions even when you are not bored. This allows you to be proactive in being a highly effective resource that keeps on increasing the value add they provide the enterprise over time.

P.S: The best part of the TPP formula is searching for answers; you also increase your knowledge of hard skills. In my case, I learned Macros in Excel, Microsoft Powerapps, and basic data scrapping techniques from webpages.