Steal Your Boss’s Job
I have been telling ambitious employees for years to steal their boss’s job.
The phrase is intentionally provocative. It gets attention in a way that “take ownership of your professional development” never will. But the provocation is not the philosophy. I am not telling employees to undermine their managers, campaign for their removal, or treat work as a political contest. I am telling them to look at the job above them and ask a much more useful question than, How do I get promoted?
What separates me from being capable of doing that job?
That question gives ambition a concrete target. “Develop yourself” is vague. The job immediately above you is visible. You can observe some of the decisions, problems, knowledge, qualifications, and judgment it requires. You can begin measuring the distance between what you are capable of carrying today and what you would need to carry tomorrow.
That does not mean the person immediately above you must be your ultimate destination. Your boss may be playing checkers while the corner office requires chess. Both are played on the same board, and learning one may help prepare you for the other, but being very good at checkers does not prove that you know how to play chess. There is still value in mastering the game in front of you before trying to play the more complicated one.
That is what I have really meant by Steal Your Boss’s Job. It is a way of taking responsibility for accumulating capability before anyone promises you what that capability will eventually buy.
Start with the job you already have
There is an obvious condition attached to all of this: do your current job first.
Ambition does not excuse poor performance. If your own responsibilities are deteriorating because you are constantly volunteering for your manager’s work, you are not demonstrating readiness for greater responsibility. You are demonstrating that you have not yet learned to carry what you already own.
There is another reason this matters. If nobody else can perform any meaningful part of your current job, every additional responsibility simply gets stacked on top of the old ones. Eventually growth turns into overload. Before you can responsibly take much of the work above you, you need to begin creating capacity behind you.
Earlier in my career, I thought a great deal about making myself indispensable. I would describe the objective differently now. If your value depends on being the only person who knows how to perform a particular task, you may have protected your present position while making yourself harder to move. A better objective is to make your current responsibilities increasingly transferable while making your own capability increasingly portable.
Teach someone else what you know. Simplify work that does not need to remain complicated. Give another capable person exposure to responsibilities you currently own. Create enough room that you can learn something new without abandoning something old.
Then start looking upward.
One of the easiest mistakes an ambitious employee can make is to take over several of the boss’s tasks and conclude, I already do his job. Sometimes there is considerable truth in that statement. Sometimes there is considerably less than the employee believes.
I use a practical test with managers. If your boss takes a two-week vacation, can the automatic reply say, “Contact this person while I am away,” and have everything continue smoothly? Better yet, can things continue as well as or better than when the boss was there? If the boss returns, reviews what happened, and mostly applies signatures to decisions and work that were already completed, that tells us something meaningful about where the operating capability resides.
It does not tell us everything.
Imagine an experienced nurse who has spent years beside a surgeon. The nurse understands the procedure, anticipates what the surgeon needs, knows the equipment, and may perform a remarkable amount of the surrounding work. I still do not want the nurse performing surgery merely because she has “basically been doing everything anyway.” Those relatively few moments when the surgeon takes control may be precisely where the specialized education, experience, judgment, and credentialing justify the distinction.
Organizations have their own versions of those moments. A plant manager may appear unnecessary during ninety-nine ordinary days and earn the title on the day someone is seriously injured, a critical machine fails, a major customer suddenly changes course, or two legitimate interests collide and somebody has to make a consequential decision.
The visible workload is not necessarily the capability.
If you want to steal your boss’s job, do not merely ask what your boss does. Ask what the role requires. What do you not know? What decision have you never had to make? What judgment has never really been tested? Is there education you lack? A certification? Technical knowledge? Experience that cannot simply be picked up by watching someone else work?
Some gaps can be closed on the job. Some cannot.
Employees sometimes assume all development should be provided by the employer. I do not believe that. An employer should equip people to perform the work it requires of them. That is different from saying an employer owes every employee every investment required to become qualified for whatever job that employee wants next.
Sometimes the next capability requires school. Sometimes it requires studying at night, earning a credential, accepting an inconvenient assignment, or practicing something outside the normal boundaries of your present work. An employer may support that development because the interests of the company and employee align. When that happens, take advantage of it. But if the capability matters enough to you and the company cannot or will not provide it, you may have to decide whether you want it enough to acquire it yourself.
The company cannot do your push-ups for you.
Sometimes sideways is forward
The title says boss, but the organizational chart is not the only map.
My own path was not straight. At Powder River, I eventually knew I wanted the corner office. That gave me direction, but it did not mean the best preparation was simply to mimic the person sitting one box above me. I spent meaningful time learning purchasing. I became involved in IT. I learned more about sales. I moved through problems and functions that did not always look like direct upward advancement.
Those experiences mattered because the corner office was where every department eventually brought its big problems. If I wanted to sit there someday and make good decisions, then learning what happened in those departments was preparation for the day their problems became mine.
I did not need to become the best purchasing professional in the company or an IT expert. I needed enough understanding of the principles, the available tools, and the resources required to fill in missing technical detail that I could ask intelligent questions and recognize when an explanation did not fit.
My crude shorthand has long been that I wanted to know enough to smell the BS. Given that Powder River made cattle-handling equipment and we regularly worked cattle as part of product development, the phrase happened to be especially appropriate.
But smelling the BS does not mean you know the answer. Sometimes it only means you know enough to ask the next question, or enough to recognize that you need someone who knows much more than you do.
That distinction matters because breadth can become its own form of arrogance. Someone who has spent a little time in several departments can begin to believe they understand everyone’s job. They usually do not.
I learned some of that lesson early. As a teenager, I set myself the goal of being able to have an intelligent conversation about almost any topic. I spent an absurd amount of effort building breadth and comparatively little building depth. College helped me see the limitations of that goal. Knowing a little about many things can make you interesting without making you particularly useful.
I never completely lost the instinct toward breadth, and I no longer think I should have. I simply understand its role differently now.
Breadth without depth makes you interesting. It doesn’t necessarily make you useful. Depth without enough breadth can make you highly useful but unable to carry responsibility beyond your specialty.
As responsibility grows, the balance changes. Early in a career, depth may be what makes you valuable at all. You need to be genuinely good at something. As you begin carrying responsibility across functions, breadth becomes increasingly important because you have to understand how those specialties interact. The goal is not to become the deepest expert in every area. It is to understand enough of the whole that you can integrate people who know far more than you do.
That is one reason sideways moves can be forward moves. If the next responsibility requires a capability your current path cannot teach you, another production line, another department, another assignment, or even another organization may be better preparation than waiting for the person above you to leave.
The boss’s job is a useful target. It is not a prison.
Make capability visible
Capability that nobody can see may still be personally valuable, but organizations have to make decisions using evidence. At some point, other people need a reason to believe you can carry more.
That does not require endless self-promotion.
At one point in my career, I volunteered to collect departmental information and assemble reports for larger presentations. It was not glamorous work. Some people jokingly referred to it as secretary work. That was part of what made it available. Nobody was fighting me for it.
At first, people gave me their numbers and I combined them. Then I needed their information on time, so I reminded them. Reminders gradually became follow-up. Over time, I developed a broader view of the operation because information from multiple departments came through the work I was doing.
In a report-out meeting, someone might ask about a particular issue and I could respond, “That’s on slide ten. The purchasing manager will cover that in a moment.”
It sounded helpful because it was helpful. But something else had happened. I increasingly knew where information lived, how one department’s assumptions affected another, which numbers conflicted, and how the separate pieces became a picture of the whole organization.
I knew what I was doing. I was strategic about taking the work.
I also have twenty more years of experience now than I did then, and I would draw some ethical boundaries more clearly today. There is a difference between integrating information because the organization needs integration and controlling information because being in the middle gives you power. Ambition does not erase that distinction.
The mature lesson I take from the experience is not to build a bureaucracy around yourself. It is that useful work other people undervalue can contain disproportionate developmental value, particularly when it gives you a view of the organization you could not otherwise obtain.
Do consequential work well enough that people experience your capability rather than merely hearing you describe it.
That eventually mattered in a very concrete way.
An unexpected plant leadership vacancy opened at Powder River. By then, people inside the organization had already watched what I could do.
I was promoted while I was on vacation.
That detail has always mattered to me. I could not campaign for the opportunity because I was not there. I could not suddenly begin appearing capable once the opening existed. The evidence had already accumulated.
I think of that as a Wally Pipp Moment.
Pipp was the established first baseman for the New York Yankees before Lou Gehrig took over the position and then stayed in the lineup for years. The familiar story says Pipp had a headache and Gehrig got his opportunity; the actual history is less tidy. The useful point is simpler: Gehrig was ready before the opening appeared.
You do not prepare for your Wally Pipp Moment after Wally gets the headache.
Opportunity may appear suddenly. Preparation almost never does.
Preparation also does not guarantee the opportunity. Ownership still had to choose me. Someone else could have been selected. Circumstances could have unfolded differently. Steal Your Boss’s Job does not promise that if you work hard enough the universe will eventually hand you the title you deserve.
It makes a more modest claim: become capable enough that when a meaningful opportunity appears, trusting you is a reasonable bet.
When the road stops going where you are going
You may develop substantially and still discover that the opportunity is not going to come where you are.
Your boss may not want to develop you. The organization may not have another role. The culture may value something different. Your manager may believe you are not ready.
And your manager may be right.
Steal Your Boss’s Job is not permission to decide that your boss is an idiot and begin campaigning for removal. If you believe you are ready for more, ask for more. Make your capacity visible. Ask what is missing. Ask for honest feedback, and be willing to hear the answer.
If the pathway remains closed, pivot. Another part of the organization may give you a chance. Another product line may expose you to something useful. Another company may be willing to bet on you.
If nobody is willing to give you the responsibility you believe you are ready to carry, there comes a point when introspection is more useful than resentment. Repeated rejection does not prove you are incapable, but it is evidence worth examining.
Employment itself has a similar dynamic. Employer and employee do not really have identical destinations. The organization is trying to accomplish something. The employee has personal purposes, responsibilities, ambitions, and goals. For a period of time, those different interests can travel the same road remarkably well.
Eventually the paths may begin to diverge. At first the difference may be small enough to accommodate. But there can come a point where the friction required to keep two diverging paths artificially aligned takes more energy than moving forward separately.
That does not have to become betrayal or bitterness. You can look back on the miles traveled together with genuine gratitude and still recognize that you are no longer going to the same place.
When that happens, the employee still owes the employer the work that was agreed to. In a salaried leadership position, that includes the reasonable judgment, initiative, and stewardship inherent in the responsibility, not merely checking boxes on a written job description. What changes is the assumption about the future. You may stop making extraordinary developmental investments in understanding every adjacent part of that particular organization because you no longer believe your next destination lies there.
That does not mean you stop developing. You may simply redirect that investment.
The capability goes with you.
Steal Your Boss’s Job is ultimately career-development advice before it is leadership theory. The employee is the protagonist. The point is not to create a better succession plan for the company, although that can be a valuable consequence. The point is to teach ambitious people that they have far more responsibility for their own capability than many of them realize.
But the idea changes once you become the boss.
If you develop people well, one of them may eventually become capable of doing your job as well as you do—or better. That possibility is one of the consequences of taking development seriously.
I cannot spend years telling people to make themselves capable of replacing their boss and then become defensive the moment somebody succeeds.
That does not mean I owe anyone my position. It means that if I want to call myself a leader who develops people, I have to do more than recommend development in the abstract. I should tell people where the gaps really are, give them legitimate opportunities to carry more when they are ready, and help them understand how development actually happens rather than telling them to “show more initiative” and hoping they figure it out.
Their responsibility remains their own. They have to perform the current job. They have to ask for more. They have to seek the missing capability. If that capability requires education they do not want to pursue, that choice has consequences too.
A good leader cannot do the development for them. A good leader can make the path more visible.
If the philosophy is sincere, one possible outcome is uncomfortable: the person behind you may become better prepared for your job than you are. That is not necessarily a failure of leadership. It may be evidence that the development worked.
Steal what matters
So yes, steal your boss’s job. But be careful about what you think you are stealing.
Steal the knowledge, the opportunity to learn, the unwanted work that gives you a broader view, the experience, and the responsibility someone is legitimately willing to let you carry. Learn from the person above you, the person beside you, and the person who knows something you do not. Go sideways when sideways teaches you something upward cannot. Build on your employer’s resources what legitimately serves your employer, and build on your own time what primarily serves your future.
Do not confuse exposure with expertise. Do not confuse your boss’s workload with your boss’s capability. Do not confuse ambition with entitlement. And do not wait for the opening before becoming capable of walking through it.
You may eventually get your boss’s title. You may get someone else’s. You may discover that the organization you are in has no chair that fits where you are trying to go.
The outcomes are uncertain. The capability you build is yours.
The chair was never the real prize. The capability to carry what the chair represents is.
← Essays