How not to get retrenched / 4
WHEN you work hard and productively for your boss, you are showing him that you are dependable, committed and caring, and that in an emergency, he can count on you.
Bosses don't like to do the dirty, hard work. They want someone else to do it. And because you demonstrate that you are always available to do it, they will think of you as indispensable to the company when what it means is that you are indispensable to them. Ever notice how in any retrenchment, the CEO does not sack his secretary?
Seriously, nobody is indispensable to the company, not even the founder. Ask Steve Jobs who founded Apple Computer and was once sacked by the board because they thought he was leading the company down the road to financial perdition.
The corporate food chain
But as long as your boss considers you indispensable to him, and he is considered indispensable to his boss, and so it goes on all the way up, everyone in this "indispensable" food chain is unlikely to get retrenched unless Saddam and SARS return.
(Of course if the whole company collapses because it has run out of money to feed the excessive number of indispensable food chains within, that's another story...)
So, you proably suspect by now, a company or any organisation is made up of human food chains. Some chains are seen as more valuable to the company; as a result people belonging to it get to eat more, paid more, enjoy more perks, and keep their jobs longer in a recession. Do you know which food chain you belong to?
