Recruiting and teambuilding for the Start Up

Recruiting and teambuilding for the Start Up

This will be a short entry today; I have loads to get done today, which set me to thinking about recruitment and building the team for the start up. I have recruited 4 operations teams, from the technician to the director, two of the teams were more that 100 strong and two were around 30 strong, so I have had plenty of opportunity to get it wrong and get it correct.

These are a few tips I learned along the way:

Get the best candidate you can for your senior roles, make sure they are a fit to the team culture.

Spend the money, pay the top salary for the senior roles, they will be your key to building a great company, and leading your workforce

Take up references on the candidate; speak to one of there last bosses

Get the Sales candidates to do a sales pitch for you.

Make sure the benefits package is fair and equitable for the whole workforce

Attitude is more important than aptitude

You will make mistakes correct them quickly, you will know in a few weeks if you made the correct choice.

Well that’s it for today, a short week for me, on holiday Friday

Regards

Gordon

To Blame or not to Blame

To Blame or not to Blame

One of the worst cultures to have in an organization is the “blame” culture, where everyone else is looking to blame the bad outcome on someone else, covering there butts. This type of culture destroys the dynamics requires to function as a cross functional team, Engineering and Development working together, Process and Production working together. I have sat on board meetings here this is prevalent amongst the officers of the company, and look at Enron, there was a lot of it wasn’t me it was him comments flying around, trying to blame there failings on others.

Where this type of culture takes a person is they then play the victim, I can’t achieve the sale because of engineering, not because his sales strategy is crap, but because the employees know that the blame culture is allowed then they will use it as a crutch for poor performance and judgment. Where does this culture emanate from? Answer!! It is the leadership, when something has gone wrong, they instigate a witch hunt, and find someone to blame, this in turn makes everyone else say ok that is not going to happen to me, and the ass protection culture has started.

Some solutions to this culture:

Do not instigate witch hunts, when something goes wrong perform an RCA and understand what went wrong not who? And put a fix in place

When an individual uses the blame culture to protect himself (key word there), try and understand where the need for this behaviour comes from and try to help correct the behaviour, if you can’t then you are better off without them

Do not accept the victim mentality, everyone has there own destiny in there own hands, let them work it out, give support and make them feel part of the team, but never accept the victim mentality.

Reward positive behaviour and punish the negative behaviour

Well enough for today..have a good one

Slainte

Gordon