Stop—What If…It’s Your People?
When you started, everyone was excited and work was fun. But now, people are such a nuisance. You get good people and they quit; you get seemingly great people who quote the rule book at you and spend more time on vacations, maternity or paternity leave, sick and unavoidable domestic emergencies than they ever do working for you. In fact, looking around your business today, does anyone actually give a damn about anything, apart from you?
When you started, there was a small gang of you, dedicated to the company’s goals. You all did everything or whatever was most expeditious at the time, and on the subject of time, no one was counting the extreme hours being put in, far less totaling them up as a basis to claim—heaven forbid—overtime from the business.
The chances are, given it is you reading this, that as the business has grown, you have grown with it—a seeming necessity—whilst the others have not kept up, fallen by the wayside, or fallen off the company bandwagon altogether. This necessarily created a void, and it is in filling that void and other voids in a like vein that you’ve created the monstrous problem your people now represent.
So where do we start with the complexity of people?
Legacy People
Do you have people on your payroll, acquired historically, but now retained just in case (JIC) or simply through inertia? Are these the people who prove to be most inflexible when you want to attempt something new and different? Steve Jobs has been quoted as saying,
What an average person could accomplish and what the best person could accomplish was 50 or 100 to 1. . .A small team of A+ players can run circles around a giant team of B and C players. . . In business the only viable strategy is to recruit good people, develop them and retain as many of the stars as possible.
Do a little mental spot check. Think about each one of your employees in turn, both good and bad, and ask yourself two things: One, what do they really do for the business on a day to day basis—and we mean really do, not what their job description or title says; second, what effect would it have on the company if any one of them unfortunately found themselves under the wheels of a truck later today?
The latter is probably far more significant than the former. Are they the unique holder of keys (think computer passwords as well as physical lock turners), knowledge experts for specialist processes, or are they your only link to an important third party? It is clearly time (long overdue) you got all of this documented or duplicated as appropriate, as your business is at risk if you don’t. You mustn’t have any indispensable people—oh yes, and by the way, that includes you.
Wow! That was quick—perhaps the single most important point in this book (so far), breezed over in a paragraph. Please halt just for a second to wake up to the criticality of having key people and whether their failure (including you) would mark the death of the business?
We suggest you go to the back of this book, and make a note to yourself of any action you wish to take on this.
But on the plus side, if you have documented and duplicated your “keys”—then by re-purposing the JIC staff—you might have the wherewithal to re-engineer the people side of the business and take the legacy element out by a switch to other more productive work. Or sorry to say, a redundancy program and showing the surplus individuals the joys of the other side of the revolving door of employment. Hopefully done in a nice manner, so as to help them in the next phase of their careers even if, right now, they don’t seem to be helping yours.
In larger organizations you are likely to have all manner of inward facing people. Accountants are usually the first of those through the door. As one of the authors happens to be one, we shouldn’t rain on our parade—but we will. Typical accountants like to sit in their ivory tower, with an in-tray, a work area, and an out-tray. They’ll say “good morning” to the bringer of the post and may grunt at another staff member in the kitchen whilst getting themselves coffee—if they haven’t organized an underling for that— but aside from those interactions they prefer their own company to anyone else’s. So a word to the wise, don’t hire any such accountant. If your proposed accountant recruit isn’t one that actively wants to go out with your sales force and win business (and secure the resultant cash in your bank thereafter) and volunteers this approach of his/her own volition at interview, don’t hire him/her. If cash is king, then the accountants—and everyone else in your organization for that matter—is part of your rainmaking team—and the rainmaking process occurs all the way to cash in bank!
Likewise, the next most likely inward Herbert through the door is going to be HR. You will have got fed up with all the nonsense and quite frankly just the noise that comes from having staff and have decided to pass it all over to someone who can do these things properly for you. This will lead you to look for an HR person. Unfortunately, HR people—and yes, another derogatory gross generalization—are not good at taking this stuff away from you so much as becoming a conduit for it, back to you. Hire a freelancer, on a part-time basis or monthly retainer, instead. That way they are accessible to you and also to your staff when a problem arises, but they are not there to listen to, react to, and stoke the minutiae of tittle-tattle, on a daily basis. At interview, impress on them—and hold them to the fact after engagement—that you want early deliverables like up-to-date contracts of employment for everyone laying down the house rules clearly. You are not employing them to receive and report the next piece of gossip from the shop floor. Unless, of course, the information is material and important. But sorting the wheat from the chaff is what you hire them to do, not to make it your problem.
Up-to-date contract requires it to be not only current in terms of law, but also to recognize that this world now does most business via mobile phones and e-mail. Also that Facebook and friends are lurking out there and for all these you should have company policies, as much as the rules we are all familiar with in old contracts about making or otherwise of personal telephone calls during work time. Only then can they be allowed to organize personnel records and listen to the odd complaint, or start sifting through resumes for vacancies you might have.
To be fair to the wider HR community, the HR folk we have referred to in the above two paragraphs are transactionally focused HR people—as opposed to the other HR tribe who specialize in change management. We certainly like good, high-caliber change agents. They can be a huge ally and are to be welcomed with open arms, if you are too busy as we suspect you are.
So if you can outsource HR—which is what hiring a freelancer is— and you outsource your office cleaning, then for every role that isn’t customer facing, isn’t involved in production, or isn’t critical to your asset identified earlier, always consider the outsource option. But never lose sight of the fact that customer service is customer facing—they represent your customers—so resist giving the duty of providing support for them to anyone else. It doesn’t matter if all the customers want to do is complain—you need to know and listen, if you are going to ever do something about it. And of course if you don’t, we wouldn’t want to bet on your business’s future.
Doing versus Managing
Finally, in position fillers, look at the top of each tree. Does your sales director have a sales quota of his/her own or do you allow him/her to sit in their office and simply manage the team? The authors found themselves advising a company with such a position filled by the company’s hitherto best salesman and sales were dropping. After asking good questions it became clear that the sales director was making a complete hash of managing his subordinates, damaging their own quota achievement in the process. The solution was to demote the director, restore his sales quota, and have the CEO take over the people managing role. It worked, and everyone was happy, with the demoted director quickly out-earning his former self with commissions.
On the topic of sales quotas, CEOs should stop needing to have their own sales quota once sales people are hired. Because by default the accumulated sales quotas for all the sales people will add up to the company target whilst the CEO’s focus should be on making the sales people as effective as possible.
Beyond sales, ask the same question for pretty much all of your people who have people reporting to them—are they productive themselves or merely staff captains? And is this what the business expects and needs? Sure, managing takes a little time, sure recruiting and inducting new starters deserves space in the schedule, but there’s a good chance they have been promoted to the role because they were good at what they did and the question is: Is this particular talented individual being wasted in his current role? As a supplemental question, in a world of e-mail and direct responses, do these managers have PAs or other administrative support— whose main job now is simply fetching coffee?
Let’s not lose sight of the moaners and complainers. They too are a dead anchor for your business and either need an attitude lobotomy or shown the route to the exit.
All this might be getting you ready to be thinking of a revolution— but we’ll leave that for the Change section.
DIY?
When you started your business, you probably did many more activities than you were skilled to do. Do-It-Yourself (DIY) is normal when you are starting/running an infant or juvenile business. So when you have ideas for doing a new project, whether it’s a little bit of additional marketing, or that extra piece of social marketing, for example, the chances are you probably taught yourself how to do it and tried your best to pursue that by yourself, in between all the hundreds of other projects you manage. And to be fair, that is the right strategy. Always take on a new project and do it yourself, for a while to really understand the role and how it fits into your organization, and then when you have sufficient insights you will know better how to hire the right person to make the most of that role.
In order to release some of your energy to achieve real plateau buster growth you will need to outsource these DIY activities to a specialist, even if the specialist himself or herself is a newcomer to this field. Why outsource to a newcomer, who probably can’t do it as well as you, when you are trying to save money? ‘Cause you need to release your energy for the bigger ticket growth ideas that will need your high abilities/creativity. You will also have more relatively low value-added work—which needs somebody other than you!
There is one other important people area we need to cover.
It Could Be You
Do you regularly feel that everyone is out of step with you? Do the others not recognize the priorities, they have a tendency to drop the ball at inopportune moments and come knocking off time of an evening, whatever the urgency of whatever is partly complete in front of them, they then feel can wait until tomorrow?
If you find yourself nodding to some of this, don’t you also find that the only action you can take is to sit on top of them as basically they can’t be trusted and that consequently you are fundamentally doing their work rather than any of your own?
So let’s be honest, could it be you? As an example, a software company we’ve worked with employs a core staff of about 10. By the fourth birthday of the business it was on to employee number 38. Not so much a staff turnover problem, more an open revolving door at the front of the building. This company has a robust interview process on the way in—proven by the fact that two would-be applicants had even tried to charge for the day’s attendance to do the company’s interview assessment tests. So it’s not that. Surely it can’t be the wages paid, as a new recruit wouldn’t join if the pay didn’t reflect his then view of his market worth. It cannot be the hours because those are the standard 40 per week with very few extra hours overtime worked. So what’s the problem?
It’s the boss. The staff can’t fire him, so instead they leave. Now if the boss-man ever sat down long enough to compute how many frogs he’d kissed to find a princess—or in this case how many interviewees to find a new staff member, multiplied by 38, he’d perhaps realize the truth and then take time to consider whether he ought to hire someone to do the people managing rather than him.
No, we don’t mean setting up an HR department; just have someone, perhaps promoted from the current team to be the 21st century equivalent of a foreman—and then channel everything through him or her. Maybe expand the role and let this person do the legwork on hiring as well and perhaps he or she could also be allowed to talk directly to some of the suppliers, customers, and stakeholders. Then are we shooting for someone more akin to a Chief Operating Officer with documented delegated responsibilities? Alternatively again, perhaps the boss should get out of the business from an operational perspective, completely. Hand the reins to a CEO or whatever business leaders are titled in your industry. And sit back as simply a shareholder.
Don’t agree? Let’s consider a few more symptoms that might point to you being the problem.
Do you wake up early in the morning yearning to get over those personal and household chores so that you can get to work—the source of all your pleasure? Or do you lie there in bed, not sleeping though exhausted, with your brain rattling through a never-ending loop of business issues that are all clamoring for your attention? Do you then take your insomnia to work, exist under a dark cloud, and unfortunately bark at staff and customers alike?
Then there’s vacation. Do you even remember what they are? Of course you do—they are those things that get you riled when members of your staff take them. But how about you yourself and taking a proper vacation? Have you taken one in forever? What is your favorite excuse for not taking one? And given you haven’t stopped work for any period in years, doesn’t this mean your batteries are flat and actually, you are not at the top of your game?
The authors know of a UK company owner who took a two-week break to a Thailand beach. During that time, he became part-owner of a bar there. By e-mail and telephone, he then made a number of adjustments to the UK business similar to some of those in this book and has basically not gone back to his UK business at all. He still works to support his UK business mainly by telephone with customers and, with time differences, starts early and is finished by lunch. He certainly feels the benefit of his prolonged vacation.
And then there is the famous work/life balance. Are you ducking out of family and social engagements because of work? Whilst sometimes this is a convenience, sometimes it is an assault on your conscience—or even a stream of abuse from the smitten one(s). Do these latter reactions affect how you behave toward your staff?
Pause: Did you make notes of things in the Action This Today section in the back of this book? If not, please take this opportunity to review the prior pages to identify again any thoughts and ideas you want to follow up on.