So You Think You're Indispensable

It might be the most expensive thing you believe about yourself.

For three years before I left Morgan Stanley, I sat on the fortieth floor with a big title and responsibility for the firm’s risk. I had spent the prior five years in India building things I could see and touch. Now…I was managing, and I kept asking myself what exactly we were managing. Five proposals I authored were voted down by my own boss. I was closer to the politics than to the work, jockeying for standing among people doing the same. For the first time in my career, I felt like a fish out of water, and a good part of what I was doing was protecting what I had already earned.

I hear my own younger voice when a senior leader tells me, with some pride, that it took twenty-two years to build their position and everything they do now is to protect it. I understand the instinct. I also know where it leads, because I have been there. When protection becomes the goal, you stop reaching, and the reaching was the thing that built you.

What the leaders I coach are really guarding

The senior people I work with at IT services and technology consulting firms are rarely hurting for money. What they are guarding is standing, the corner seat and the sense that their judgment is not up for question. AI is pressing on exactly that. It is asking every senior person to show, again, what they bring, and the protective stance reads from the outside as a leader who has stopped growing.

The one who cannot be replaced does not get to move

There is a version of this that affects the best people. You become the one who fixes what nobody else can. The hard call comes to you, the trouble client comes to you, and you take real pride in being the person the firm cannot do without. That feels like security. In practice it welds you to the work. A leader welded to the delivery cannot be handed the bigger seat, because the work wobbles the moment they step away. The way out is to build people who can carry what only you carry now, so that moving up does not leave a hole behind you. Your strongest move in this next stretch may be making yourself replaceable on the very things that made you indispensable.

One honest test

So here is the question. The last time you played it safe, were you moving toward something you wanted, or just guarding what you already have? If you cannot name one thing you are building this year, you already have your answer.

Guarding the position can cost you the one thing that earned it, your willingness to keep becoming.

Where to look next

If you want an honest read on where you stand, in yourself or across your leadership team, start with the Leadership Bottleneck Diagnostic. Three minutes, fifteen questions: an honest look at what you are building versus what you are defending.

It asks the question a good year lets you put off.

Raju Panjwani
Founder of Live Masterminds | Former Managing Director at Morgan Stanley. He works with senior leaders in IT services and technology consulting, helping them see themselves more clearly and lead through what comes next.