| A successful consultant and project/department manager makes him/herself redundant by selflessly building the foundation that others will use to solve problems, operate a business and deliver results.
To be a successful, you must find ways to consistently add value to the organization (your employer, your own business or your client) you work for. For that to happen, you need to constantly challenge yourself and be innovative.
If you are a project manager, you know your deliverables and deadlines well. With a focus on delivering quality work under a tight schedule, sometimes you ended up spending too much effort micro managing every single activities that you have assigned to the respective team members. You will burn out in no time with this approach. Furthermore, your team members will not be able utilize their domain knowledge fully to help save time and cost. How about for a change, you extract yourself from the team, setup reliable processes, embed performance measurements in the processes and deploy tools that can effectively make the team less dependent on you. Your primary deliverable will be to make yourself invisible.
A consultant knows that he/she is successful when solutions delivered to the client is so effective that he/she is not required anymore. You will not be able to claim any credits because you are suppose to let your team members be the one fronting all the initiatives and be recognized for what they have done. You must be willing to sacrifice personal glory for the greater good of the organization you work for.
The good news is that by making yourself redundant, you can now handle multiple projects and businesses. This is translated to increased productivity, leaner bottom line for your organization or client. For personal growth, you have gained the experience to build sustainable business or team that delivers results.
[Added on 21 Apr] I want to address the concerns of many who seem to take it too negatively. You are not going to lose your job just because you are pursuing the course of making yourself redundant. You need to keep looking out for new opportunities to contribute and add value to the organization. By making yourself redundant, you are actually becoming more valuable to the organization. You should only be worried if you are incompetent in what you are doing and unable to challenge yourself to new heights. Keep the comments pouring in.
[Added on 16 May] Here’s something for consultants to consider: Try to be different from your competitions today by setting a goal to make yourselves redundant in the project you are working on. A project always has a start and end date. By aiming to give your everything to a project, you will be able to close the project that delivers quality end results. If you do not have this mentality, your project will fail and it will haunt you with endless support issues and follow ups. A “ghost” project haunting you is not going to make you more money. On the contrary, you will lose more on your time and effort to resolve issues that will drain you and take you away from other valuable projects.
Ask yourself this question: Are we of any value to our hiring organization if we hold back some part of our expertise just so that we can continue to receive our pay check? There are so many leeches in the organization protecting their own turf with “proprietary” knowledge and processes that no one knows what is going on. We are under the impression that if we extract such employees in the organization, we may cripple the business. Is that true? My take is that we should just take them out immediately than later. They are equivalent to cancer cells that will affect the “good” people around them. These group of employees are an open wound in the organization that if left untreated will cause major damage to the health of the business. In the financial equivalent, if banks and business can write off billions of dollars on a failed investment, in the organization context, we must strategically write off people who are sucking the company dry with their proprietary domain knowledge. Think business process re-engineering.
So, are you ready to be made redundant today? Share with us your experience here.
Maybe a silly question, but .. HOW?
In your article;
- extract yourself from the team.
- setup reliable processes.
- embed performance measurements in the processes.
- deploy tools that can effectively make the team less dependent on you.
Those are basically the consultant roles/activities. I find it hard to detach myself, especially when it deals pretty much with “behavior changes” of the clients.
Hi Kitipan
Can you share with me the situation you are stuck in? If you can’t detach yourself, then you are as good as getting them to sign you up as an employee. In a consultancy business, if we are stuck in one engagement, we will not have sufficient bandwidth to acquire new businesses and providing quality services to existing client base.
Basically, you need to define clearly what you need to achieve in this current engagement. For example, if you are setting up a new business process for the client, they should be part of the processing creation and they must be aware that at the end of the day, they own the process. Your clients may have several stakeholders who are just sitting along for the ride and only a few handful have vested interest in the end-result. This is not a good situation and you must fix that first with the help of the sponsor.
I have encountered throughout my career that newly implemented process or solutions fell apart when the consultant steps out of the door (fully paid). The consultants did a great job to bring the company to the desired state but everyone forgotten that consultants are not there to run the business for them. That is why I would prefer that as a consultant and leader, we should extract ourselves and let the owners run the show. We should be there to advise and guide them. By know the environment and the relationship of the stakeholders, you should be able to find ways to achieve redundancy.
To reiterate, you know your goal is to make yourself redundant. With that in mind, all actions that follow must be aligned to that goal.
I am willing to share my experience with you and anyone on how it is done. Feel free to give me information on your current situation and we will work out something from there.
Hi Vince,
Thanks for your response Vince. In my case, I often find that the owners are not there to take the job. We often find excuses to avoid work and behavior changes. In such case, hand over takes time even longer then implementation.
Cheers,
Every engagement is a project which means it has a start and end date. As a customer, I prefer to work with consultants who tie the contractual agreement closely to the project cycle. Project closure signifies the end of contract. However, that does not mean a new contract cannot be established if the client likes your work.
Spending more time on a customer does not always translate into more money/business. If the client is not able to implement the solutions and proposals that you have crafted for them on their own, you will have to spend more time micro managing every part of the process. By being there all the time, they would expect you to do it for them (driving the change, documenting the change, changing the behavior in the organization…etc) And when you leave them, the entire structure collapse and they go back to their original way of doing things. Some of the stakeholders will start to complain that the consultant is not doing his/her work because they expect very hands-off implementation from them (which is never the case). And having even the slightest dissatisfaction will make it harder for you to get new projects from them in the future.
What I am trying to stress here is that by having the mentality to make yourself redundant, you are effectively creating more value to your clients which translates to more businesses.
We can achieve this level of independence and make juniors and process work seamlessly only once the team has fully understood the processes and domain. And the team members possess a certain level of maturity and experience.
This model is highly successful and indeed brings out the technological best, only if the foundation laid down is strong and robust.
So even if the managers give clear cut roles and responsibility areas to every individual some amount of meetings and discussions would be necessary to ensure that work is moving in the right direction and hence managers would then no longer be micromanaging their team.
Yes, the work we need to do is setup the foundation for automation to happen thus making us redundant.
The process of making ourselves redundant does not mean total hands off. We still need to measure the performance of the team and projects. We are still required to be there to guide and coach. Until the time you do not even need to do that, you are truely redundant and I am sure you will be proud to declare that to your next client or employer.
Well, you have raised a good point that a project manager should not be involved with team members in technicalities, and that he should not end up doing tasks he already has empowered to his team members. This is the essence of effective empowerment and delegation. However, I don’t think that this means the PM becomes ‘redundant’ as there are many other things that require the existence of the PM and only the PM. Keeping the harmony amongst team members to achieve goals and keeping his project balanced by integrating and balancing his projects Competing Demands are paramount roles that require a PM to play throughout the project lifecycle. That would in no means let him be ‘redundant’ in any project.
PS: My blog “The Tightrope Walker in Your Organization” elaborates more on this topic of balancing the project demands and the need for a PM to be there. (Find my blog at: http://mohammedkb.wordpress.com)
Certainly. I have made a career of this principle.
My last position I phased my role out of the company. As a manager, I had both human resources and accounting responsibilities. I automated most of these by developing teams within the organization that could provide better attention, including requiring my vendors to work directly with those teams.
By the time I left, I had hired and trained two part-time assistants and separated conflicting responsibilities between them. The solution was far less expensive and that much more effective. I was not necessarily hired for that solution, but in moving away from indispensibility, I was able to effect the solution.
The new organization may lose some of the innovation and insight I brought to the table. However, I was very generous in my training and beleive it is within them to continue the improvements. If not, they know how to reach me for consultation.
Best,
Anthony Reardon
Nascent Dynamics ( ) Modern Business for the Modern Environment
Hi Anthony,
Thanks for sharing your success story with us.
I see a trend where in the future, there will be no full time employment. Everyone will be a consultant offering their services to companies.
And companies do not appreciate professionals to hold back their contributions in order to make themselves relevant.
The market needs us more than we need the market.
I agree, aim should be “to be there” but “not there”, this balance is a win-win for both you and your team and the organization.
Good thoughts.
I blog at http://collaboratetoinnovate.blogspot.com
How true!I have worked with senior managers who believe in micro management and as a result of which oberved the impact on tehir team members.The result generally is a demotivated team and over worked PM!I work as a contract PM and its my constant endeavour to empower my team and has been success for my team and the organization.In response to the comment by Mr Barakat,I would like to add in my experience you work on individual basis while empowering a team member.Often empowering your team gradually ,sets them up for success.In the process I have discovered my role as a PM is deeper,almost a career-life coach to raise a high performing team.
If you can accomplish that, and want to accomplish it, than you better start your own business.
If you truly have the skills to setup up a team and make yourself redundant for anything which is truly significant and not just something trivial, you’ll manage fine in business while having an income.
And by this I dont mean to get some people which already have the experience and talent. It will only worth something if you make something out of nothing (well, almost nothing).
If you keep making yourself redundant, you might lose your income.
A business exist to make money. You work to make money. Conclusion: current companies systems entrench mediocrity.
That is, unless you have some superb skills of office politics which would allow you to go up the ranks.
Well, you lose your income only if you are not growing and continuously improving your professional skills.
Everyday, we should learn something new and add value to our clients and employers. If we were to sit there waiting for something to happen or being reactive all the time, then in my opinion, we are not of any use to the hiring party.
We are hired for a purpose. Definitely not to create importance in our job or securing our turf so that no one can extract us because if we are removed, the business cannot function.
If you are confident in your skills and knowledge, you are definitely gonna find a new income source. So, why worry about being redundant? Furthermore, the process of making yourself redundant does not necessary means losing your job or business. You end up having more businesses and getting a promotion because you are known to deliver results.
Politics are not evil. Politics exist even between 2 person. But playing politics to stay relevant is definitely not going to get us anywhere (that means, you will have to protect your current job with your life).
In business, as in life, there be turf grabbers and turf builders. Your brief article addresses consultants’ worst nightmare, that being made redundant by their good works. Yet, as you point out, by being a turf builder, consultants can phase out their original assignments and step into new and far more innovative assignments. And, if by chance consultants lose their position entirely by redundancy, at least, having been assured that they were going to be terminated anyway (no place to grow), they leave as a winner.
You are so right. Irrespective whether you are a staff, manager or project manager, the literal meaning of making yourself redundant doesn’t mean losing your job. Rather, creating the opportunities for yourself to move to greater challenges and bigger roles. You need to be an optimist.
I have been called Mr. Fixit. I migrated to a country for work/life balance reasons. Got a job that I was over qualified. Saw opportunities to do a great job with a small team. Delivered impressive results. Moved on to realign a team and improved their engagement. Recently, appointed to turnaround a team that has changed couple of managers in the last 2 years.
I have to be mindful of creating the next new opportunities and experience. Otherwise, my next role continue to be cleaning up someone’s else mess. I guess that’s the only set back.
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I agree and have used the principal for the last 25 years. Working with KPMG and Deloitte and other MNC, i delivered more than 100 IT Audit and IT consultancy projects to MNCs. However on some occassions, when my partner / manager realized that i am sitting in the office and my team is working, he thought i am not doing my work or i dont have anything to do and that i am not needed in the organization.
As a result when i switched the job, the partner / manager realized that i was running the show and then called my to take my position back.
While you use the principal, just ensure that your manager / partner also knows the principal and also how / what are you working. Otherwise he may the mistake the my manager / partner made.
Tariq Mahmood
I think making yourself redundant is naively worded and misses to communicate the other part of it that goes:
Make yourself redundant when you can create the new opportunity to move into. What happens when you can not? Dont tell me you never had to be in such a situation.
Oh, and dont tell me you go to another client then. That is so easy. The hard thing to do and what clients want you to do is to stick with their show and help them all the way to the end.
That other thing that everybody should be consultant and no fulltimers anymore in the future doesnt explain who are you going to coach and guide if your dreams come through!!!
Never mind the last sentence that:
The market needs us more than we need the market.
That is way too selfish. Its the same as saying that ocean needs fish more than fish need ocean.
Hi Costa,
This is a provocative article which tries to derive the experience from millions of professionals out there. It is not conclusive or ends there. So, different view points are very much appreciated. Perhaps you may have challenges in your workplace that you would like to share with us.
If we are worried about losing our jobs, we tend to be extra careful with our thoughts and creativity. Innovation creates new businesses. Being innovative will make us redundant in one area but creates new opportunities in others. The point is, are you ready to take that first step to benefit yourself and the organization you work for?
I will update the article with more thoughts as I have collected quite a few feedback on this subject matter.
Please continue to give me your input base on your real life experience.
I agree … When we empower the team to take their own decisions Manager becomes invisible. This is also a great opportunity to the Manager to grow to the next level in the organization in his/her career.
It’s nothing to do with either Full_Time/Consulting. It’s the attitude we have to choose.
A great Manager/Leader is always invisible in a Team/Organization.
William Burroughs once said:
Any man worth his salt is working to make himself obsolete.
The idea that making yourself redundant was the best way of making yourself invaluable is derived from Colin Powell’s autobigraphy, “My American Journey”. I recommend it as one of the best books I’ve ever read, and certainly the best ever autobigraphy.