Stop Trying to Be Indispensable: Why Adaptability Is a Better Form of Career Security
Being the person nobody can manage without might feel like professional security. But real security comes from knowing your value travels with you.
For much of my career, being described as indispensable would have felt like a compliment.
In the EA profession particularly, there is a certain satisfaction in being the person who knows.
- You know why that meeting can’t move.
- You know which stakeholder needs a phone call rather than an email.
- You know the history behind the apparently straightforward decision.
- You know what your executive means when they say, “Can you just sort this?”
And, quite often, you know how to solve the problem before anyone else has realised there is one.
After more than 35 years as an EA, I understand the pride that comes with that. But I’ve started questioning whether indispensability is really the professional goal we should be aiming for.
Because if everything genuinely falls apart without you, have you created security? Or dependency?
And perhaps there is a much more powerful form of professional security available to us: Adaptability.
Being indispensable can feel reassuring
There is an emotional component to being needed that we don’t always acknowledge.
When people rely upon us, it reinforces our sense of value.
We become the safe pair of hands. The person who can be trusted. The person who gets things done.
And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to be excellent at what you do.
But excellence and indispensability aren’t the same thing.
A genuinely excellent professional should be able to go on holiday without the organisation descending into chaos.
They should be able to share knowledge, create robust processes and develop other people.
They should be able to leave a role one day without taking the organisation’s ability to function with them.
That doesn’t diminish their value.
I’d argue it demonstrates it.
The question therefore isn’t:
“How do I make sure they can’t manage without me?”
It’s:
“How do I make sure the value I’ve developed belongs to me wherever I go?”
That’s a very different career strategy.
Your most valuable skills probably aren’t on your job description
This matters particularly in the EA profession because our job descriptions have always struggled to capture what exceptional executive support actually involves.
They can list the tasks.
- Diary management.
- Meeting preparation.
- Travel.
- Events.
- Correspondence.
- Governance.
- Minutes.
Those things matter.
But they’re not usually why an executive particularly values their EA.
The difference often sits in the intangibles.
- Judgement.
- Discretion.
- Emotional intelligence.
- Context.
- Influence.
- Knowing when to challenge.
- Knowing when to intervene.
- Knowing when somebody needs five minutes before you put the next problem in front of them.
- Knowing that the apparently innocuous email you’ve just received has considerably more significance than the words on the screen suggest.
Those capabilities are difficult to reduce to bullet points.
They’re also difficult to automate.
And, crucially, they belong to the individual who developed them.
Your employer provides the environment in which you use your judgement.
They don’t own your ability to exercise it.
That distinction matters enormously when we think about career security.
AI makes this conversation more important, not less
I’m attending a two-day AI conference for EAs this month.
My employer is funding it, which I’m very grateful for.
But I found it. I asked to attend.
I wanted to understand what is changing in my profession and what that might mean for the way we work.
Not because I’m terrified that AI is coming for my job.
Because I’m curious.
Recently, when recruiting for my EA team, we received 113 applications before closing the vacancy early.
I interviewed six candidates.
Every one of those six had invested in their own professional development, whether through money, personal time or both.
And every one had experimented with AI.
That impressed me.
It also made me think.
There’s a fine line between development driven by possibility and development driven by fear.
One says: This is interesting. I want to understand it. What could I do with this?
The other says: I must keep adding things or I’ll fall behind.
From the outside, those behaviours may look identical.
Internally, they’re very different.
And I don’t believe sustainable career development should be a frantic attempt to make ourselves impossible to replace.
Nobody is irreplaceable.
Nor should we need to be.
Your Plan B doesn’t have to be another job
I’ve always had some sort of Plan B.
Some have been carefully considered.
Some have been decidedly haphazard.
A few have probably looked completely unhinged to anyone watching from the outside.
But having options has given me something valuable throughout my life:
I don’t have to feel trapped.
And I think we sometimes misunderstand what a professional Plan B looks like.
It doesn’t necessarily mean having another job lined up.
It could be:
- A skill you’re developing.
- A network you’ve nurtured.
- An additional income stream.
- A professional reputation that exists beyond your current employer.
- A qualification.
- A business.
- A body of work.
Or simply enough confidence in your own experience to know that, if circumstances changed tomorrow, you could work out what came next.
That’s why adaptability interests me far more than indispensability.
Indispensability says:
“I am secure because they need me.”
Adaptability says:
“I am secure because I trust myself.”
One locates your security externally.
The other brings it home.
The aim isn’t to become less committed
I can already hear one possible objection.
Surely this encourages people to become less loyal? Less invested? Less committed?
I don’t think so.
I love my job.
I work for an employer I respect enormously.
I care deeply about the quality of the support I provide, the team I lead and the organisation I work within.
But commitment doesn’t require dependency.
In fact, I think the healthiest professional relationships exist when both parties know they are choosing one another.
I’m here because I want to be.
You’re employing me because you value what I contribute.
Neither of us needs the other to be incapable of functioning independently for that relationship to matter.
That’s not disloyalty.
That’s professional confidence.
So perhaps we’re asking the wrong question
When we think about career security, particularly in a world being rapidly reshaped by technology, we can easily ask:
What else do I need to learn?
What qualification am I missing?
How do I make myself more valuable?
How do I stay relevant?
Those aren’t necessarily bad questions.
But perhaps there’s another one we should ask first:
If my role, title or circumstances changed tomorrow, what would still belong to me?
Your judgement.
Your experience.
Your relationships.
Your resilience.
Your curiosity.
Your reputation.
Your ability to communicate.
Your ability to learn.
Your capacity to recover when something doesn’t go according to plan.
Your knowledge of yourself.
Perhaps professional security doesn’t begin with identifying everything you still lack. Perhaps it begins with recognising everything you’ve already built.
I’m not particularly interested in making myself indispensable anymore.
I want to be excellent at what I do.
I want to keep learning.
I want to remain curious.
I want to contribute enormous value wherever I choose to work.
But ultimately?
I’d rather know that they can manage without me and that I’ll be absolutely fine without them too.
That’s not making yourself disposable.
It’s making yourself free.
A question to take away
Rather than immediately thinking about your next course, qualification or career move, take ten minutes and ask yourself:
If the role, title or circumstances I rely upon changed tomorrow, what would still belong to me?
Write down the evidence.
And resist turning the gaps into another action plan.
Start with what is already yours.
Because your Plan B may be far more developed than you realise.