Make yourself useless

The best thing that could happen to your team is you disappearing for three months.

I spent the first fifteen years of my career sleeping with my phone in my hand. I managed the technical infrastructure for hotel booking platforms in Paris. Three people: one running the business, one handling sales, me running the technology.

The servers crashed often and I was the only person who could fix them.

I was indispensable, and with time I realized that was a critical failure.

I had become the bottleneck, so I decided to change the system: I moved the servers to the United States, hired designers in South America and developers in India. I built a distributed team.

I worked to make myself replaceable.

We link our value to our indispensability, but we MUST remember that it is a trap.

Everyone is replaceable.

Accepting this brings initial anxiety, because it shrinks the ego.

But accepting your replaceability is also the foundation for building something that actually scales. You cannot scale an architecture with a single point of failure at its center.

Automattic turned this into a policy. We have a three month sabbatical every five years.

Of course it’s a retention benefit, but it also functions as a stress test: when you’re gone, someone else must be able to manage your responsibilities.

The company must survive your absence — including the scenario where an employee wins the lottery and never comes back (I dislike bus accident metaphors).

This redefines what good leadership looks like. A decent manager improves a team. A good manager leaves and the team holds its level. An excellent leader makes themselves useless, and the team keeps improving after they are gone.

If you’re a manager, what happens in your absence is the ultimate measure of your success.

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I also publish on paolo.blog and monochrome.blog.