Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

by Seth Godin

The future of your organization depends on motivated human beings selflessly contributing unasked-for gifts of emotional labor. And worse yet, the harder you work to quantify and manipulate this process, the more poorly it will work. The most senior levels in organizations have wrestled with this situation for a long time. When you hire a vice president for business development, it’s a given that he’s not going to be your errand boy. You’re not paying all this money for someone who will merely go down a checklist you’ve created and who will ask you before making any decisions. Of course not. It’s his job to innovate, to create new opportunities, to connect with hard-to-reach people, and to follow the long line on the way to success. As we go lower down the totem pole, though, management assumes that less pay=less humanity. The facts belie that assumption. From the U.S. Army to the manager at your local McDonald’s, it turns out that more humanity delivers better results. One of the most difficult tasks the military had in Iraq was to teach soldiers how to treat Iraqi civilians as potential partners, how to vary from the stated mission of the day, how to be human in the face of huge unknown danger. It’s easy to teach someone how to fire a missile, but very difficult to take risks in the face of fear. The digitization of work (measurement, Internet connection, mechanization) makes typical MBAs very happy. This is the sort of thing you can put in a spreadsheet. The challenge i...