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I have seen this multiple time. I am now rewarding people and showing by example that you should find ways to make yourself redundant. Be able to go on vacatio

I have seen this multiple time. I am now rewarding people and showing by example that you should find ways to make yourself redundant. Be able to go on vacation for 2 weeks while not receiving any calls, etc. The only person that is allowed to not be redundant is the owner of the company. As to advice how to deal with the problem, it would very much depend on the history and combativeness of the employee. If the employee is very combative and a potential risk of doing something stupid, I would fire him immediately. The benefit of this is you reduce a chance he will do something really stupid. You also show to the rest of the company what is and what is not tolerated. If you have relatively good history and the employee is not combative and potential risk of doing something stupid, I would reassign another employee to get as much knowledge transferred. You want reassigned employee because it is already going to be hard following the guy even with the organisational knowledge. Ideally, you also want this person to be relatively high level, intelligent person that knows how to deal with ambiguity, manage problems, etc. If he isn't cooperating, I would bar him from touching anything and force him to only work through the assigned employees in training under threat of immediate dismissal. So if he cooperates and works through those employees, he benefits in being in employment for longer, potentially having more chance to find replacement job. Obviously, this will not solve the problem, it will only blunt the blow a bit. If that person had a long time to build his castle, it will be very difficult for the replacement to get the hang of it and a lot of knowledge is going to be lost forever. That's unfortunately unavoidable in this situation unless you really want to shower the person with gold to pass all that knowledge. But this is dangerous as it normalizes this type of behaviour and you really don't want your other employees' main takeaway from this to be that making themselves critical is the best way to get rewarded.

HomeDeLaPot 3y ago
If the company employs people full time or does critical work for its customers, then even the owner should be redundant to some degree! Maybe a chain of command where top employee(s) could step in and keep things running for a while.
- onetimeuse92304 3y ago
  So the owner is a special case (and I specifically used the term owner and not CEO), because he/she can do whatever they want as long as it is within the law. If they created the company just to feel important and needed then who am I to tell them they need to make themselves redundant? Obviously, there are good reasons for the owner to actually be redundant and if I was advising them, I would try to argue that the business might be healthier and their ownership less risky if there are other people who can pick up the responsibilities of the owner. For example, I have seen companies where the owner would be the only person to have access to the company account and pay out salaries. The issue with this is that sometimes he would be busy and salaries would not be paid on time but maybe a day or two late. The owner never ever lived paycheck to paycheck so had no empathy to understand what is this feeling of uncertainty doing to his people who expect and depend on the money arriving on time. Obviously this was a serious legal problem. But I argued with him that even if it wasn't he would still benefit from somebody else having access to the account and making payments on time just to avoid damaging morale of his entire crew. In this case, the owner could not stand the feeling of surrendering the access to the account to an employee. I advised that he makes two separate accounts, one where he keeps majority of funds that he and only he can access and the other which has enough of cash on it to allow his employees do day to day business without disruption. This way any damage from an employee would be limited. That placated him somewhat and in time he started to enjoy the feeling of not having to be constantly pressed for time to various payments and started keeping larger buffer.

HomeDeLaPot 3y ago

If the company employs people full time or does critical work for its customers, then even the owner should be redundant to some degree! Maybe a chain of command where top employee(s) could step in and keep things running for a while.

onetimeuse92304 3y ago
So the owner is a special case (and I specifically used the term owner and not CEO), because he/she can do whatever they want as long as it is within the law. If they created the company just to feel important and needed then who am I to tell them they need to make themselves redundant? Obviously, there are good reasons for the owner to actually be redundant and if I was advising them, I would try to argue that the business might be healthier and their ownership less risky if there are other people who can pick up the responsibilities of the owner. For example, I have seen companies where the owner would be the only person to have access to the company account and pay out salaries. The issue with this is that sometimes he would be busy and salaries would not be paid on time but maybe a day or two late. The owner never ever lived paycheck to paycheck so had no empathy to understand what is this feeling of uncertainty doing to his people who expect and depend on the money arriving on time. Obviously this was a serious legal problem. But I argued with him that even if it wasn't he would still benefit from somebody else having access to the account and making payments on time just to avoid damaging morale of his entire crew. In this case, the owner could not stand the feeling of surrendering the access to the account to an employee. I advised that he makes two separate accounts, one where he keeps majority of funds that he and only he can access and the other which has enough of cash on it to allow his employees do day to day business without disruption. This way any damage from an employee would be limited. That placated him somewhat and in time he started to enjoy the feeling of not having to be constantly pressed for time to various payments and started keeping larger buffer.