Wednesday, October 04, 2006

Training day

what a shitty film. The last hour is like just a bunch of speeches made by Denzel Washington back to back to back. At 4 pm on tuesday I got informed I was booked into training toay and tomorrow. And trainings really good, infact since I been sitting down thinking about how to design my company of tomorrow, this training session was an insight.
People naturally being stupid, paranoid and self interested beings tend to build empires when it comes to their career. That is the intuitive and natural thing to do is to horde your knowledge in order to increase your value to the company.
It's one of those laws of nature though that is counter-intuitive. The worst thing anyone can ever do for their career is build an empire. That is make themselves irreplacable. What you want to do is doing things but effectively redundant at the drop of a hat.
People want to feel validated and worthwhile so naturally you try and accumulate expertise (which is good) however expertise is no good to you unless you can put someone over a barrel ad assfuck them for all their worth.
That normally isn't the case.
Hold up I'm going to try and draw a diagram so I can explain this better...
...
Okay a company employs you for a new position because they need something done. There is an initial period where you learn how to fulfill those needs and so you create value. At this point people pat themselves on the back, job secured, very busy, very successful. As long as the compny needs this done they need you right? so there you go, done deal. A manager quits suddenly the company needs someone to fulfill this manager role. A manager is a position that in nomena must exist but in phenomena should not as they are just people who tell people what they should be doing which shouldn't be necessary if people could be trusted to lead themselves.
So you apply for this position, they need to fill it, they know you, do you get it?

No.

I mean you might, but you shouldn't not if your boss is worth their salt, not if your company is going places. Because they still need you to do the same shit you've been doing. You haven't trained anyone to replace you so you can't go anywhere. You have only managed to trap yourself.
The other thing that needs to be considered is even if you do get the position the company loses which means you lose. You only get the position through a sense of responsibility, like they think they owe it to you. They really don't. For two reasons that should be clear:
a) by not training anyone to replace you, you really won't have learnt the ins and outs of your role, you won't have been questioned and questioned what it is you do and so you probably are doing it less efficiently than someone who has wasting the companies time and money.
b) if you haven't shown an interest in teaching anyone thus far, it is unlikely that you will take the time to properly train a replacement when you move up the heirarchy. So you leave a black hole behind you and someone has to come in and reinvent the wheel and inefficiently and inexpertly train themselves.

I know because that's what I had to do, I came in and inherited a bunch of processes, had no documentation and very little training. But after two months I endeavored to automate everything I did, document everything I built and explain how I did it and also actively learnt how to do my managers job. Which exceeded all expectations so I got promoted after 8 months, so did my manager, now the only person who seems interested and capable of learning how to replace me is my new manager. But I'll take it.
So getting trainied up is super smart for the company too, it's tax deductable, is a perk that can help retain employees and improves (hopefully) the employees efficiency and capacities. More than that it helps your employee step towards independance, if more companies set up satellite programs like Semco then economies would be counter intuitively much stronger.
Wealth needs to be shared around.
With my access training, I can automate even more of what it is that I do, meaning I'll be ripe for either getting a new job or going on my merry way to offer the same value to a new employer that needs it. So my job security isn't a worry, in fact if I wanted to keep my job I'd already be a strategic advisor that gets to hang out on my own tabacco plantation wandering the fields with labradors all day whilst occasionally crafting pieces of art with my own two hands.
As it stands I don't want to keep my job, I want a better one. So I do what I can to make myself redundant and as quickly as possible. It's the only way I'll be allowed to move.

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