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Attracting and Retaining Great People
If you guessed a raise and a promotion, you're only partially right. The only two things your employees really want are to to feel valued and and to create value. Virgin and Johnson & Johnson have developed company cultures that put employees above shareholders. In his book "Losing My Virginity", Richard Bronson, Founder and CEO of Virgin, states "Convention dictates that a company looks after its shareholders first, its customers next and last of all worries about its employees. Virgin does the opposite. If you start off with a happy, well-motivated workforce, you're far more likely to have happy customers. In due course the resulting profits will make shareholders happy." Johnson & Johnson's 60 year old Credo places employees second after customers, but before community and shareholders. Both companies recognize that their employees are their most valuable assets and thus create organizational cultures that allow employees to demonstrate their value.
1. To Feel Valued
Company culture is central to an employee's sense of value. Culture gets ingrained in a new team member during the on-boarding process and perhaps even earlier. Your company culture may have caused some talented people to self-select out before or during the interview process. Culture is 20% explicit and 80% unstated. In other words, there are a few underlying principles that are explicitly stated within the company that inform millions of possible individual and organizational decisions about how employees relate to one another on a daily basis. The company's principles shape the culture and it is the CEO's responsibility to foster a healthy culture to spur innovation and growth. Principles determine how success is measured internally and externally. Raises, promotions, hiring and firing decisions should be made in alignment with organization's principles.
2. To Create Value
Everyone secretly wants be a super hero or at least feel like they are changing the world in some way. They want to be able to point to something and say "I did that." Imagine that there was an off-boarding process where each employee that was leaving had to make a final presentation to the entire organization. Would your employees have anything to brag about or would they simply just restate the bullet-points on their initial job descriptions? When you give your employees opportunities to create value, they will also feel valued, invested, and invested in. If leadership trusts in its employees and leads instead of manages, the employees will naturally energize innovate, taking the company to new heights that even the CEO's vision could not have imagined.
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Attracting and Retaining Great People
The Vision:
Commitment to the vision has the highest form of commitment because the vision rarely changes. Every company is trying to solve some problem that will make life easier for someone. If they aren't, then won't be in business that long. Even if the team or technology changes over time, a person committed to the vision will still be dedicated because their goal is to realize the vision by any means necessary.
The Team:
Commitment to the team is important and required, however teams change. Great people love to work with other great people. However, if someone is only committed to a particular person or people on a team, as soon as they leave, then that person's commitment to the vision and the rest of the team starts to fade and they become less valuable to the vision.
The Technology:
Commitment to the technology is important, but technology is always evolving and the current technical solution is only one of many ways to potentially achieve the overall vision. At some point, the company may adopt a new strategy that obviates the current technology. If that is the case, then the person who was only on board to exercise their passion for that particular technology will fall off.
If you can find talented people that are committed to the vision first, team second, and technology third, you will have built a team with the right motivation. Someone committed to all three is priceless. You may want to double-check the motivations of your current team on these three areas as well.
This article was syndicated by Downtobusiness.com
Before the business plan, the pitch deck, the company name, the logo, and the business cards, the most powerful thing you have as an entrepreneur is a vision that people can believe in. A powerful vision will attract the right people, opportunities, and ideas.
One of the myths about visionary companies revealed by James Collins and Jerry Porras in "Built To Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies" is that it doesn't take a great idea to start a great company. The reality is that few of the visionary companies the research began with a great idea. Several began without any idea at all. Most just began with a few people dedicated to realizing a singular vision.
Your product will evolve over time, but your vision should remain constant. Your first product may fail, but if you're truly committed to the vision, then you will go back to the drawing board to try to find another way to achieve it.
People want to feel like they are changing the world everyday they come to work. The challenge of actualizing the company's vision ignites their fire more so than the product itself. The product is a manifestation of the vision, not the other way around. Trying to blindly build a product without a vision may bring you some financing, a niche market, and some PR, but in the long-run it may cost you valuable team members, your integrity, and most importantly, your life.
The last thing you want to do is spend ten years building something that made lots of money but failed to achieve your initial vision. You could have got a job for that.
In addition to reading "Built To Last" (click here for summary), I also recommend that you read Randy Komisar's "Monk & The Riddle". It documents the journey of a technology entrepreneur and his struggle to create value for the world as his vision gets clouded by profit, prestige, and people.
Godspeed!
This article was syndicated by Downtobusiness.com
