For me, the one quality that gets anyone hired, liked, nurtured, feted and even championed is indispensability.
You can make a persuasive case for your hire if you cultivate this quality. Whatever your profession, employment or job.
To be indispensable is to be essential, necessary, and integral to something. Being indispensable is to be part of the nucleus. It is commonly associated with salutary qualities such as reliability, sensibility, competency, credibility, loyalty, motivation and initiative.
Where legal practice is concerned, no matter what your station in the legal pyramid – intern, pupil, lawyer – you can be indispensable to an organization. It takes work. Both hard and smart. Indispensability is not something you persuade others by way of argument.
The persuasion lies in action.
There are many paths to indispensability.
The quickest way to become indispensable is to do what others don’t want to do or like to do. Most likely, you may not want to or like to do it, given the choice. But the gains from taking that on immediately make you valuable to those who don’t need or want to do it. You immediately have allies. It is now in their interest to ensure you remain so they don’t have to do it.
Furthermore, if you can persuade yourself to like or find a reason to be interested in whatever it is others don’t like and be good at it, you could discover your niche in the firm, organization or area of law. That heightens your indispensability. It’s better if you have a natural intrinsic interest in it.
Another way is to attend to the frills. To willingly anticipate and attend to whatever legal or reasonable though trivial requests without fuss or fussing others. It is not just wrapping the present but putting a ribbon on it with a thoughtful card, then picking up a pack of cigarettes and 100Plus at the kedai runcit around the corner for the boss. Metaphorically, of course. Or not.
Now, the thing about frills is that they are not essential to your primary work. Nice to have, but not important. You must already carry out the duty you were tasked with to a high degree of competency before attending to frills. If you are not, you best focus on your work instead of wrapping them presents or picking a ribbon.
Those are just a couple of things we could do to become indispensable to something, someone, or some cause.
Indispensibility comprises seven qualities. I call them the Se7eyez(TM). Kidding. But I have taken the trouble to describe those qualities with only words that begin with the first letter ‘I’ for memorability. Seven Eyes is far easier to remember than DLWUZIQ, for example.
The first is Interest. This is the starting point. If you have no intrinsic interest, affection or curiosity about something, someone or whatever, you cannot enjoy or find solace in whatever you do about it.
The work feels heavier than it should because you are swimming against the current. The wage begins to feel hollow. A yearning for something meaningful truly awakens. When you daily dread the work you are paid to do, that’s rock bottom.
If you do not possess a natural curiosity about things, it will be difficult to sustain your interest over the long term. Extrinsic incentives lose their lustre after a while.
If you have no interest or respect for the person you are serving, every interaction will feel challenging and a draining experience. Walking barefoot on broken glass eggshells is enervating.
The second is Initiative. This is about anticipation. Physical, psychological, or emotional. To have initiative is to have an idea of what you want to do or what needs to be done, a rough idea of how you intend to go about it and do it without waiting for anyone to tell you to do it. A person with no initiative has no interest.
The third is Industry. Industry is effort. There needs to be an effort to achieve anything. There also needs to be consistency and intensity to our efforts. If not, the sum of our efforts dissipates. An initiative is the starting point for industry.
The fourth is Intelligence. Intelligence is vital to ensure that our industry to ensure is properly channelled, used and profited from. Intelligence is necessary to deal with the complexities of a situation or task. With the appropriate application of intelligence, you are likely to be efficient, orderly, and competent. Intelligence should inform our efforts, initiative and interest.
The fifth is Independence. Independence means freedom of thought and action to think, feel or do as you please. It is the natural autonomy about ourselves that we drape in chains. You consider the thoughts and actions of others, but you do not feel compelled to agree or follow. And when you are compelled to think, feel or act in a particular way, you resist. Intelligence makes independence more formidable.
To be independent is to think for ourselves. It is to see, experience, or feel things for ourselves. And then it is to speak how we think as honestly and plainly as we can.
The sixth is Intrepidity. Courage, basically. Docility, passivity and acquiescence is not a virtue. Maybe elsewhere, but not at work and not in our relation to the world at large. Where lawyers are concerned, being fearful is inconsistent with our practice and etiquette rules, particularly Rule 16:
An advocate and solicitor shall while acting with all due courtesy to the tribunal before which he is appearing, fearlessly uphold the interest of his client, the interest of justice and dignity of the profession without regard to any unpleasant consequences either to himself or to any other person.
Rule 16, Legal Profession (Practice and Etiquette) Rules 1978
The seventh and most important of all is Integrity. Are you truthful? Are you honest in your work? Do you own up when you err? Can we trust you to do the right thing? Do you leave alone what is not yours? Can you turn down something you really want? Do you take what you know you do not deserve? Integrity is all about trust, whether others can trust what you say or do.
If you cannot trust a person, you should not work with them. You cannot be constantly wondering whether you can trust what that person or organization says or says they did. You waste energy, time and effort on verification instead of development.
Although I discuss integrity last, it is the first quality to being indispensable. The rest solidify that quality. If you don’t have integrity, you are dispensable.
It is just a question of time.
And for those that lack integrity, they are a waste of everyone’s time.
Postscript: I hate the title. I hate titles like that. Clickbaity. But Headline Analyzer likes this one. It’s the highest-rated title title I have ever written (83/100). Since I usually suck at titles, according to Headline Analyzer, I thought I’d go with it this one time.
1 thought on “The Seven Qualities of Indispensability”
Nice sharing, I love the last part when you mentioned about integrity. One needs to be honest and not to be afraid admitting her/his weakness and work on it. You will never stop learning <3
All those 7 qualities are well described in a very beautiful way to make the reader understand and digest. Looking forward for another writing!