I'll be damned if I'm going to be the single reason a team can't move without me.
I've been made redundant twice. A crypto market that turned and a company that had overspent. Funding that couldn't land when the work was ready to go. Both times the role was gone, and both times I had the next thing lined up faster than the redundancy could sting.
So when I talk about making yourself redundant, I'm not talking about that version. I'm talking about the opposite of it.
There are two kinds of redundant, and people confuse them
The first kind happens to you. The role gets cut. Market shifts, budget dries up, a restructure lands, and you're out through no decision of your own. If you've built your whole position around being the person who holds everything together, it hits like a truck.
The second kind you do to yourself, on purpose. You elevate out of the day-to-day mechanics of your role so it can run without you as the operational bottleneck. You're not deleting yourself. You're freeing yourself up to morph into something more valuable before anyone has to make a call about you.
Most people chase the wrong protection. They build a moat. They hoard the knowledge, guard the process, make themselves the single point of failure, and call it job security. It's the most fragile position you can be in. The day that role gets cut for reasons that have nothing to do with you, all you're left holding is a job that no longer exists and a skillset you never stretched.
Why didn't two redundancies set me back?
Here's the part worth sitting with. Both times, I landed the next thing without much trouble. Not because I'm special, but because of how I'd operated in the roles before.
My experience has always been objective and outcome-driven. Concise deliverables, clear results, the ability to walk into a domain and improve it. So each role branched cleanly into the next. Government to consulting to a startup to large enterprise, digital into data and back out again. Different companies, different environments, different teams.
That range is the actual asset. It's the differentiator.
I've got a lot of respect for people who've spent ten years deep in one role. There's real mastery in that. But it's a harder spot to move from when the ground shifts under you, because you've seen fewer variables. Fewer environments, fewer ways things break and get fixed. When your one role disappears, you're starting cold. the risk isn't depth, it's depth that only works in one place.
Making myself dispensable in each role is what gives me the variety. Every time I systemised my way out of the mechanics, I freed myself up to take on something new, which became one more thing I could carry forward.
What did this look like in practice?
A while back I was leading a digital delivery role. When I came in, I redid the whole way of working. Consolidated a pile of spreadsheets into one tracked Atlassian stack, rebuilt the intake and delivery lifecycle, and stripped the reporting back to the data that actually mattered.
I became the conductor, not the player. The day-to-day ran without me firefighting it. I was there for the bigger calls: releases, direction, stepping in when it genuinely needed me, instead of being switched on all day just to keep my head above water.
Then a restructure hit.
My role could have been impacted. But because I'd already systemised everything, I was lucky enough to have options instead of a panic. I could continue in digital, move into data, or take on a new program leadership role running a full technology stack rollout across Digital & Marketing where I'd never led at that scale. I took the hardest one I'd never done. The principles carried over, and where it differed, it didn't differ enough that I couldn't figure it out with the right people and tools filling the gaps I don't have.
When a consultant came in to backfill my old role, the team ran many of the handover sessions themselves. I just filled the gaps.
Their reaction, more or less: "This isn't as complicated as we expected."
That's the whole game right there.
So what does making yourself dispensable actually mean?
It is not doing nothing and letting other people quietly cover for you. That's the lazy version, and it's obvious to everyone.
It's also not being there purely to justify your own seat. The moment you're bottlenecking everything through yourself so you feel valuable, you've stopped serving the outcome and started serving your ego. Build the thing that lets the project move faster and more reliably, then go chase a bigger problem. In practice:
- Consolidate the chaos. If the critical stuff lives in your head or scattered across email, spreadsheets, and chat, you are the bottleneck. One source of truth changes that.
- Strip out what doesn't matter. I cut reporting points nobody ever asked about again. Once they were gone, not a single question came up. If you can drop something and nobody notices, it was never needed, and it was one more thing the next person would've had to learn for no reason.
- Delegate context, not just tasks. When the team ran those handover sessions, they weren't parroting instructions. They understood the logic, because the systems made it visible.
- Automate the mundane, keep the judgment human. An organisation that wraps rigid automation around everything becomes a zombie. It does exactly what it's told inside its set parameters and slowly loses the ability to adapt when the environment shifts, and right now it's shifting fast. Automate the boring, repeatable stuff. Leave room for the work that needs to think.
The half people skip: this isn't just about you
Everything above frees you. On its own, that's almost selfish. The real shift is when the whole team starts doing it.
People only ever grow to the size of the box you put them in. If you build systems that empower people to take on bigger things, accept a bit of risk, and grow, they'll respect it and run with it. When they know they can bring you a problem and actually get heard and supported, the whole team sits in a better spot.
Then it spreads. Everyone starts optimising and simplifying the same way. They start lifting each other. It stops being your habit and becomes how the team operates. In essence, everyone starts to maximise the amount of work not done to achieve the outcome.
That's the bit you can't automate, and exactly why you shouldn't try to. There's a real difference between a leader who automates themselves out of a job and disappears, and a leader who builds a team that doesn't need them. One's a vanishing act. The other compounds.
This scales past your role, too
The same muscle works on a whole business. A business that can't run without the owner isn't an asset, it's a job with extra risk, and it sells at a discount because of it. Getting it into a managed state, systems and people that hold without you stuck in the weeds, is what lets you focus on scaling instead of just keeping the boat afloat. Every role I've made myself redundant in has been practice for exactly that. If I can do it inside someone else's company, I can do it inside my own.
Why is welding your identity to a role such a trap?
This is where it gets personal for a lot of people.
Digital Delivery Lead. Data Analyst. Product Manager. Program Lead. When your sense of self is bolted to a title and that title gets disrupted, the cost isn't just the job. It's the hit of watching the thing you built your identity on disappear overnight. I've felt the role go twice. The reason it didn't completely level me is that I never let the title be the thing.
I'm not "a digital delivery lead." I'm someone who builds systems that execute at scale and remove myself as the dependency. That skill travels. It doesn't care whether it's digital delivery, a tech migration, or a data platform rollout. The principles hold, the frameworks adapt, the people and tools around me support the rest. That's where the resilience lives. Not in the title, but in the thing you can carry into any room.
It's worth decoupling work from your identity entirely, too. Have other interests, other things you're chasing and learning. If your whole self rides on one role, you've handed something fragile a lot of power over you.
What does Week 1 look like for you?
If you've read this far and you're thinking okay, I should stop hoarding and start building, good. Here's where you start:
- Audit your time. Write down every recurring task, meeting, and decision that only goes through you. Be honest about it.
- Pick one mundane thing. Something repetitive that needs no real judgment. Build a system for it, delegate it, or automate it.
- Ask your team where you're the constraint. Not in a performance-review way. A straight "where am I slowing you down?" Then go fix that.
- Strip one thing out. Find the report, the approval gate, the review step that only exists because it always has. Remove it. See if anyone even notices.
Do that for a month. Then go again.
You're not making yourself irrelevant. You're making yourself scalable, and you're handing your team room to grow at the same time.
Redundancy is going to come for plenty of roles. Market, budget, AI, restructure, take your pick. The people who get hit hardest are the ones holding everything together with both hands, because when the role goes, they've got nothing else built up. The ones who walk into the next thing are the ones who already proved they can set something up to run without them.
That's not a threat to your job security. Realistically, it's the only version of it that holds up.
So here's the actual question. What's the one thing you're holding onto in your role right now that you could systemise, delegate, or strip away entirely, and what's really stopping you from starting this week?
Marcus Hahnheuser··9 min read