Today marks my first day of full-time entrepreneurship. It's definitely a bittersweet moment; I'm grateful to be in a position where I can take this leap, but still -- it's a little lonely!
I've spent most of the last decade working with members of my team, managers and individual contributors alike. Most of my days were spent in meetings, which I eventually learned to love.1 As of today though, I've just got me (and my spouse, and our new puppy). Despite being an introverted engineer, I already miss the human interactions of my day-to-day.
On this occasion of my own departure, I want to focus on one of the most unintuitive parts of being a manager -- making yourself replaceable.
If your experience is anything like mine, you probably got a whole lot of advice from well-meaning people about making sure you aren't replaceable. Between automation, globalization, and layoffs, there are plenty of good reasons for this advice; as an individual contributor, the more you can make your role catered for yourself, the more secure your position is within the organization.2
As a manager, though, this advice holds you back. Management is an influence-based role; the wider your network and stronger your connections, the more vectors you have to help drive progress, both for your team and for yourself. It's easy to think of "finding your replacement" in a zero-sum mindset, but in actuality, it's a lot closer to a win-win scenario. By finding people who can fill your shoes, you free yourself up to take on new opportunities.
I tend to follow three general steps when I'm looking to replace myself (and one step I needed to take before I could consider this journey at all). I haven't seen a lot of general discourse on best practices for replaceability, but a lot of these align with best practices of management in general, so hopefully they'll be useful regardless.
(Pre-Work) Align your motivations. When I first became a manager, my ego was not a fan of the idea that I could be replaced. It took conscious reflection (and some time) for me to realize and believe that replaceability was a good thing, both for the team I was committed to supporting and for my own growth.3 Once I reached comfort with the idea of being replaceable, I was ready to start making that transition come to life.
Start delegating. For a lot of managers (myself included), delegation is one of the trickiest parts of the role -- but also one integral to being able to replace yourself. Ideally, delegation gives you back some time, sets your team up to be recognized for taking on additional responsibilities, and still gets to the results you need. In practice, when you're just getting started delegating a task, it probably will miss in at least one (or more) aspect.4 Accounting for where delegation might need more work can make this go much more smoothly, as can frameworks like the 5 Levels of Delegation.
Elevate your direct reports. Because management is a relationship-heavy role, you'll need to make sure your team is well-connected even without you facilitating. If you have a report who's ready to step into a management role themselves, this can be very straightforward -- by promoting them into a management position, they are set up to step into the connective needs of the team. New managers aren't the only way to keep the team in the loop though; with a good understanding of your team's areas of expertise, you can often coordinate direct relationships between stakeholders and your direct reports. These relationships give your team more opportunities to shape the larger organization.
Allyship and Leadership. In my own journey towards anti-racist allyship and queer solidarity, I've found a lot of the practices of leadership translate well to activism, particularly advocating for my team to be recognized directly. I approach both management and activism largely through listening, decentering my own experiences, and raising up the voices that should be centered in the settings I have access to -- and this overlap between leadership and allyship is heavily at play when trying to build diverse, equitable, and inclusive organizations. I'll dive in deeper in a future post.
Find your next challenge. Once you've built practices around delegation and elevation, the last step to replacing yourself is finding the next spot you want to be in. This is where the win-win aspect comes in; even though you're nominally finding someone to take your place, it comes with the opportunity to take on something that you're excited about, whether that's taking on a larger team, focusing on a new product or industry, or taking a break from work altogether.5
That's okay. It's also okay if you're not very excited about any role except the one you currently have. As Kim Scott pointed out in Radical Candor, it's normal and healthy to go through cycles of ambition and contentment at work. As you start to look for new opportunities to grow though, ensuring your team is set up to succeed in your absence is one of the most powerful legacies you can leave behind.
Well, I learned to love most of them. 1-on-1's are always a joy. ↩
As an individual contributor, I encountered a book called Linchpin, which gives some practical advice around carving out your own niche. ↩
For me, the deciding factor was impact. I became a manager because I wanted to be able to have a broader impact on the organization (and the world). Through my career, replacing myself has been a path for expanding the impact I can achieve. ↩
In my experience, it's almost always more time-consuming at first to delegate a task than to take it on yourself; if you plan for it though, it very quickly becomes a time saver. ↩
Or starting a new business :-p ↩