If there’s one thing that’ll keep your successful small business from growing into a successful medium or big business, it’s you. I’m sorry to just blurt it out like that, but a fact’s a fact. Your small business – and by small, I mean anything south of $25 Million – is going to be a reflection, indeed an extension, of you. This, I’m afraid, is not always going to be a good thing.
When your business grows, one of the first things you have to do is create or expand your team. You need to hire people. Most often, the team you hire to help you get things done will usually combine to form a magnified version of you. Not a mini-you. A biggie-you. Biggie-You can scale the business. Get more done in a day. Serve more customers. Build more widgets, write more code.
Let’s do the math. If it’s just you, there are 8 or 10 hours in a work day. Now, let’s imagine that Biggie-You is made up of 4 people. You, plus 3. Now, you’ve got 40 hours a day to get things done. Just think of all the awesome things you’ll accomplish in your 40 day. All that creativity, salesmanship, vision, energy, and talent multiplied by four. Or or 10, or one hundred and ten! Clearly, obviously, the key to growing your business is to multiply your strengths as many times as you can.
But here’s the thing. Biggie-You is just that; a big version of you. So, if You sometimes make mistakes, Biggie-You will too, and at the same ratio. What you need is a team to amplify your strengths and cover for your weaknesses. What you don’t need is a team to amplify you. Perhaps then, the Biggie-You approach to growing your team isn’t the best one.
Find people who can pick up where you leave off. If you’re great at sales and not so great at account management, hire an account manager. If you’re good at tech support and not so good at coding, hire a coder.
A good way to know where to start – where you leave off and your team begins – is with a Behavioral Assessment that gives you an objective look at the kinds of things you’re likely to be good at. DISC is my personal favorite because it’s simple, it’s widely used, and for my money, it’s a rock solid predictor of who’s going to do great at their job, and who’s not. So, the first thing is Behavioral Assessments for you and your team.
Another obstacle you’re bound to wrestle with when growing your team is what I like to call First Date Syndrome. The analogy may be inappropriate to a conversation about a human resources issue, but let’s go with it anyway. Part of the problem with human resources rules and regulations (which I truly believe must be strictly observed at all times for reasons both ethical and practical) is that while your human resources are entirely at liberty to actually be human, you as an employer, really are not. But, that’s another issue. For now, let’s reminisce about our first date.
Do you remember that first kiss after that first date? Man, that was nice. For the whole drive home, you were filled with hope for the future and pure joy. Falling in love is wonderful because it’s a zero gravity event. It’s the pure exhilaration of skydiving. Being in love, however, comes after the fall. In the best of circumstances, being in love happens in regular gravity. 1G, baby, all day every day. That’s why most of us have quite a few first dates, quite a few skydives, before we settle in for the long haul with that special someone. I don’t (didn’t) want to beat the metaphor to death, but I did want to get you thinking along those lines.
Now, let’s switch gears to the job interview. As businesspeople, we interview people as an absolute last resort. It takes time to find people to interview, it interferes with our normal routine, it forces us to be on our best behavior, and worst of all, it’s more of a crap shoot than anybody cares to admit.
In my experience, the best thing that can happen in a job interview is that you find out the applicant isn’t right for the job. The minute – and I mean the very minute – you get even a sneaking suspicion that you’re not talking to the right person, stand up, thank them for their time, and move on. It never gets better than the First Date. Not. Ever.
After a wonderfully successful series of interviews comes the job offer and the first day. Always, and I mean always, make it clear that your new hire is on probation from day one until day whatever-you-think-is-reasonable-and-your-advisers-tell-you-is-legal. I like 90 days, and so does most of the rest of the world.
Probation is designed to give your new hire an opportunity to get to know you, and you to get to know them. It’s possible that you or your new employee, or both of you, were maybe a little too well behaved during the interview process. After all, you were trying to find the right person, and they were trying to find a job! Who wouldn’t hope for the best and work for the desired outcome in that situation? We can all fake it for a date, or even a few dates. But when the day to day comes into the equation, it’s far more likely you’re going to get to know the real them, and they’re going to get to know the real you.
In my experience, the best thing that can happen during a probabion period for a new employee is that you find out they aren’t the person you thought they were. Maybe they don’t have the skills, talents, or experience you thought they did. Maybe they don’t like you as a boss. As you start to get that sinking feeling about your probationary employee, it’s highly likely that you’re going to flash back to a moment during the interview process where you had a doubt, and ignored it. If you haven’t read Blink by Gladwell, I strongly recommend it. Human people are incredibly intuitive. We know things in seconds, and then spend hours, days, or even years finding the so-called objective data to justify. You know when a new hire isn’t going to work out. If your business is small, you cannot afford to have the wrong person for the right role. This is where you need to be brave.
Maybe brave isn’t exactly the right word. I’ll tell you what I mean and you decide. When you finally know – or even mostly finally know – that you’ve made a hiring mistake, you need to come clean. You need to admit to yourself or your boss or your partner that you hired the wrong person. You then need to admit it to the wrong person. Chances are, they’ll know they’re the wrong person, and they’ll probably figure you’re a bit wrong as well. It’s embarrassing, it’s painful, and by the time you learn enough to really know this stuff, its likely to be a bit personal too. But if you’re running a small business and you want it to get big, you simply can’t afford the luxury of hiding, protecting, or justifying a hiring mistake. The whole idea of probation is to allow you a chance to save your business from a hiring mistake. Yeah. Brave is the right word. Be brave enough to admit your hiring mistakes. The cost of living with them is too high for everyone.
So, the two take aways from all this are that you should use Behavioral Analysis Tools like DISC to predict not only the talents of your team, but to assess your own as well. Then, hire people who compliment your skills. Always Compliment, rarely Amplify.
Next, is to be Brave in admitting – and correcting – your hiring mistakes. We all make ‘em, I promise. It’s always sad and disappointing. But if you want to sit in the big chair, you’re got to do the hard things sometimes. Hire slowly, fire quickly.
Same goes for employees, by the way. The minute you realize your boss is a jerk and he’s never going to change, quit! Find a job doing something you’d do for free. Time is the only thing you can’t get more of. Don’t waste it doing something you’re not in love with, and for goodness sake, don’t waste it with people you don’t like.
