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Founders: Hire Right

by | December 21, 2019 | Entrepreneurship

Most entrepreneurs lack training in hiring employees. Hiring the wrong employees can be a major stressor and a liability to a founder with limited resources and strict deadlines for getting their startup up and running. Here is a primer for hiring right:

1) It is important to hire for skill, but remember that trustworthiness and loyalty to the organization is equally important. Evidence of trust includes visible loyalty, honest collaboration with all members of the team, transparent communication, respectful conflict and staff retention.

2) Don’t suffer a poor fit. As a favor to you, your team and the employee in question, if he or she is not a good cultural fit and continues to buck the system despite reasonable efforts to help them fit in, let them go. Do a post mortem and learn from that failed hiring experience.

3) The company handbook is not enough of a guide for an employee’s success. In a face-to-face conversation clearly define your vision of success to new hires. Point out the company’s core values and your expectations of the role to potential candidates.

Trust is the basis of successful teamwork. Let me give your team the tools for building trust. Contact me at Rebecca@MindfulCommunication.com

Managing the Diva, the Aberrant Genius or the High Performing Disrupter: Part One

by | May 13, 2019 | Blog, Entrepreneurship

Lynn G. writes: In my quest for a creative project manager, one that could jump start my team and create a little “healthy competition,” I may have made a mistake by hiring Tina (name changed). She is highly productive, but abrasive. In the wake of her accomplishments, Tina is slowly eroding the morale of the team. How do I keep Tina’s behavior in check without losing good staff ?   

This is one of the biggest challenges for a young startup. Careful vetting, a preventative measure, is often cut short when you need better numbers fast. Identifying gaps or dysfunction in your existing team is another option to employ before hiring a diva to save the day. Have you clarified your team’s performance expectations and offered clear paths to achieving those expectations? Have you made clear in the hiring process, what behaviors will not be tolerated?  In a founder’s haste to please investors and increase sales, it is often common to overlook the weak links in one’s management skills. Since Lynn did not specify behaviors unacceptable to the company from the start, I advised her to spell them out for future hires.

At this point, however, Lynn needs to determine if Tina’s downsides exceed her considerable contributions. Aberrant behavior can tolerated if the behaviors are seen as those in service of the company; it is often a high performer who saves staff jobs.

For now, what is Tina doing that is disruptive enough to justify a warning or an opportunity to change? Does Tina break team communications? Interrupt others? Does she lie, attack, harass or mistreat staff? Does she make people afraid to talk? Do you spend too much time correcting her and making excuses to staff?

Lynn answered “yes” to most of these questions. Lynn’s next steps? A warning? Dismissal? Or is Tina coachable? In the next CE post, I’ll share the qualities that make an employee coachable and some ways for doing so.

Need help in coaching up your diva or aberrant genius? I can help. Contact me at Rebecca@MindfulCommunication.com