Are You a Ninja Employee or Not?
Jul 17th, 2009 by Carlos
Let’s face it: Ninjas are awesome. They can pretty much do whatever they want, whenever they want to. And they look cool doing it. But the best part about Ninjas is that they are kind of like McGyver: they can do it all. There isn’t one specific thing they do—they’re good at everything.
Think about what kind of an employee you are for a second. Do you have one specific skill set or do you do a lot of different things at work?
The reason I ask is because some good friends of mine were recently let go from their jobs and none of them were Ninjas. They were really good at what they did, but because of some restructuring, the organizations they worked for decided to let them (and their specific skill) go.
A few weeks ago, I wrote a post on Wisebread titled Getting Ahead At Work: Are You A Hammer Or A Swiss Army Knife? It’s the same idea as being a Ninja at work: if you can learn a lot of different skills and help out in a bunch of different ways, you will become more valuable to the organization you work for.
On that Wisebread post, a lot of people argued in the comments about what’s preferable between being really good at something and being pretty good at lots of different things.
I’m convinced that, while you still need to have a specific skill that you do better than others, it’s imperative that you broaden what you do for your company to as many different areas as possible.
The more you do, the more valuable you become across the board.
Image by jhritz
Hi WC,
Bravo to one of the few pieces I’ve read on any blog who salutes truly the greatest employee the universe will ever encounter. Quite honestly, if you have a ninja working for you, you should never lay them off or fire them for a few of reasons:
1. Who would you replace them with? Who could possibly be more productive than a ninja?
2. You don’t have to pay for security because no one would be foolish enough to harm your company.
3. Having a ninja in your company infinitely boosts morale and brand recognition. People love hanging out with ninjas plus they could help marketing by appearing in commercials.
4. Ask the ninja to hunt down Osama bin Laden. There is much good publicity that can be attained for fighting terrorism post-911.