This is the third post of these series of articles y decided to write about some mistakes sometimes bosses make. In my first two posts I talked about mistaken ways to correct and the difficulty some bosses have to delegate tasks with their people. On this new post I will talk about another inconvenient that is as important as the other two I wrote about some weeks ago: making someone essential in our work team.
It is said that no one is indispensable in our life and even less in a company. Even though that is a common expression many times it is far from the reality. Many times we turn someone into an essential person because we assign to him critical tasks and we don’t teach anyone else to perform them. Sometimes we make this mistake because we think that person is the best on our team, or maybe because the rest of the people in our team have other tasks assigned, but whatever the reason, having an essential person in our work team might be dangerous.
This is a problem that we will only understand how important it is the day in which the essential person is gone. While he is in his workstation performing his critical tasks we wont even notice the danger we have in our hands. However the day that person is gone, sick, quits or we decide to terminate his services, we will understand the huge mistake we made.
The best way we have to avoid this dangerous scene is having contingence plans, and have at least two employees trained to perform those critical tasks. It might happen that in the everyday work the task is performed just by one of the employees, but the day he is gone or missing, at least one person in our team will be able to perform his job.
As you can see, it is a theme that can be critical, but that its solution is easy to implement. The important point is that you as the boss always know which tasks are critical and that you have at least a pair of employees that can perform them.
I hope that what I have just stated helps you to avoid future problems. In a week I will come back with other interesting mistake sometimes bosses make.
Image taken from Flickr.com