It is somehow painful to watch how a cool, effective and fighting company rolls into a dull mediocrity and middling. In Silicon Valley, we call this “bozo explosion”. This process seems inevitable for any company that has succeeded, usually after several years after an IPO. The purpose of this article is to warn, if not prevent this process in your company.
First of all, you need to understand whether the obsession has already begun. Here are ten signs by which you can understand how everything is running:
1. The most popular words in your company are “partnership” and “strategy”, especially when they go together - “strategic partnership”. A special degree is added by the name “strategic” various meaningless and chaotic movements.
2. In order to establish effective communication in the company and create a mission for it, management dumps abroad in Ritz Carlton.
3. The mission, which was made in the previous paragraph, consists of more than twenty words, two of which are “strategic” and “partnership”.
4. Above the controller is the controller, which is controlled by another controller.
5. The biorhythms of your parking lot look something like this:
8.00 - 10.00 - beggarly Korean foreign cars more than pathetic German wheelbarrows.
10 a.m. - 17.00 - steep German wheelbarrows more than rogue Korean foreign cars.
17.00 - 22.00 - again beggarly Korean foreign cars more.
6. Your pigs require an MBA even from candidates for cleaners. For technologies that appeared no more than 4 years ago, they require experience from 5 to 10 years.
7. Time is now considered more important than money, so you have your own cafe, fitness club and hairdresser for dogs in your company. The first things that show guests in your company are a cafe, a fitness club and a hairdresser for dogs.
8. Zemfira sings at your New Year's corporate party.
9. Someone gets paid only for blogging.
10. The success of competitors enrage you more than the loss of a client.
(If you have any more signs of “ripening,” leave them in the comments, I will add them)
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11. Do you have a layer of middle managers who previously worked in well-known companies (such as Pyaterochka) who like to convene meetings with or without help, as well as appoint “project leaders”. (First-hand).
12. You hire a very renowned consulting firm that gives you an MBA with a year of experience restructuring your entire company’s strategy.
13. The girls at the reception are more beautiful, pathos and dumber.
14. Your CEO and CFO hang out more on the air than in the office.
Seems very familiar? Do not be alarmed, you are not alone. Here's what you can try to do in this situation:
Insist that managers hire better managers than themselves:
For example, a team leader should hire a programmer better than she, certainly not worse. Incidentally, the same principle should be observed from the stage of CEO search for a company by the board of directors.
Eradicate arrogance and snobbery
Arrogance is manifested in two fundamental issues: firstly, when your employees call competitors “near-by,” “clowns,” or simply “idiots.” The second is when your employees begin to believe in "Great Destination" - that your company is destined to win total dominance in the market. It is unlikely that your competitors are idiots and trees usually do not grow up to the sky.
Do not hire with excess
Hire fewer people than you think you need for exponential growth, which you certainly think you will achieve. When you open many vacancies in response to rapid expansion, you make mistakes. Unfortunately, many companies follow the practice of "let's hire more, but we'll figure it out already."
Don't swell
This is the flip side of the last clause on hiring restrictions. I would suggest intentional containment of sales. Staying small and effective is a perfectly acceptable management strategy. Well, or at least consider whether you really need to hire additional staff to open a new direction, close a specific transaction or merger.
Look at a person, not just a resume
The purpose of recruiting is to create a team of excellent employees. One of the signs of a good employee is an appropriate education and / or work experience. However, the presence of this does not guarantee the skill and competence of the candidate. Hiring a "clown" with a cool resume can pull down other, normal workers, and increases the likelihood of hiring other "clowns." Failure to an excellent candidate because he does not have such a cool resume, maybe not so critical, but also a mistake.
Make a difference
Some companies look like dolly paddocks, as if all the workers were cloned. For example, everyone has a doctorate. Or everyone grew up in a middle-class family. Or went to one section of judo. Or everyone studied at the Ivy League. In the end, we get some kind of clone army. When this happens, it means that the form prevails over the content, and people are valued not for their actions and actions, but for how much they correspond to the form. This road leads deep down.
Cut and Combine
You must take corrective action and fire people, if necessary, as problems arise. You may be thinking, “Well, let's wait, maybe it will be corrected, our statistics are still not bad.” But this is unfair to all other participants in the process. If there is a problem - you need to solve it, if you cannot solve it, then make it someone else's problem - get rid of it. Exemplaryness should be the corporate standard.