No Employee is Indispensable

Having had quite a few employees over the last few years and having heard from many other employers, I have become keenly aware of a certain problem that needs to be nipped in the bud; employees thinking they are invaluable.

We had a construction manager who basically thought we were done without him. The only problem was, as time went on, it got to the point where he was completely useless. He stopped doing construction himself, then started just dropping by job sites and answering questions that should have been things that the contractors could figure out themselves.

Yet in his mind, he was indispensable. 

In reality, that mindset was a joke. But he had gone way past the point of no return and the only thing left to do was to fire him, which we did.

Sometimes, employees will simply try to make themselves invaluable, often by hiding or hoarding information. We had an old bookkeeper who did this (in many ways, to mask her incompetence), but the fact we had a hard time getting information out of her, made her seem valuable.

She wasn't, and we eventually fired her too.

In such cases, the only thing to do is to fire that person, and to do it quickly. 

Even good employees can get this and have an inflated sense of self-worth. You don't need to crush their spirits, but you do need to tell them the way things are. Namely, that you are OK if the leave (and really be OK to lose such an employee). The best thing to have in a negotiation is the willingness to walk away. So it goes with employees, especially when they believe they are much more important than they are.