Redundancy is a necessity for creating fail-safe, fool-proof systems. And it has become a necessity even in modern-day organization structures. With the ongoing war for talent, with organizations ready to out-spend the other, leaders have to create people redundancies. But let us look at what we mean by redundancy here first:

“In engineering, redundancy is the duplication of critical components or functions of a system with the intention of increasing reliability of the system, usually in the form of a backup or fail-safe, or to improve actual system performance, such as in the case of GNSS receivers, or multi-threaded computer processing.”

Source: Wikipedia

NOTE: In this blog post, redundancy does not refer to the negative situation when an employer lets go off an employee because the organization does not require that organizational position anymore. It is being used in the positive way engineering solutions provider use it.

Case Study

Damon is a top performer working in a construction company. He joined the organization as a trainee. He was groomed to be an exceptional site engineer, and he is a senior site engineer now with immense knowledge about project and construction management in the field. His level of expertise and rapport with the workmen is such that he can work even from his home now by giving instruction over the phone.

It has been 5 years now and he wants to get into the planning and strategy side of the business. His bosses do not want to lose an exceptional site engineer because there are so few technically sound people willing to work in the site these days. They turn a deaf ear to his career expectations.

Damon starts hunting for a job soon and gets an offer from a civil engineering consultancy firm. He gets a salary hike of 80% and the profile he wanted. His previous organization loses a great talent, finds it hard to replace him and their leadership pipeline is weakened. So, we see a stark contrast here: Damon’s win-win versus the organization’s lose-lose.

Who is to blame? 

Damon’s bosses blamed it on Damon and justified why he left the organization. They blamed it on Damon’s replacement when she could not perform as well as Damon. Of course, they avoided the entire topic of succession planning, transfer of responsibilities and tacit knowledge.

Damon reviewed his previous organization on GlassDoor. He said that it was a great place to start your career in but not one where one should ideally stagnate in. His review was not the only one. It was one of the many. This discouraged the best from applying or even if they applied and became a part of the organization, they came with a time frame of 2-3 years in mind – learn and exit.

Damon’s previous organization had become a training ground where they prepared talent for their competitors to poach. They also poached talent from their competitors but every one of them was sure not to spend more than 5 years there, because there was zero job-rotation and pure stagnation after a few years. No doubt the solid citizens remained.

But was that enough!