Her name was Ratna and she was full of energy, bubbly, cheerful and very friendly with children. Just the kind of person we were looking for to manage the first store of ‘The Colour Factory’. We had launched the first Colour Factory (TCF) store in Gurgaon about a couple of months previously and had been struggling to find the right person to be the store manager. And what’s more, she came recommended by the store manager of a kid’s apparel store in the same mall.
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| Vikas Verma |
Ratna’s first few days on the job with everything looking good and customers feeling happy filled us with a lot of hope.
Hire for Attitude rather than Aptitude
The hope though, was rather short lived. And therein, lay the biggest challenge that we faced as a start-up company, and so do perhaps a number of other companies in a similar situation. Putting together a management team full of passion, committed & sharply focused on aligned goals, with commonality of vision and purpose is perhaps one of the bigger challenges facing entrepreneurs.
For us, the “Ratna” episode was a real gem of a learning opportunity. It started innocuously enough with Ratna missing a couple of days work, coming in late to work or going missing during part of the day and slowly built up into not managing customers’ demands well, or taking an initiative to innovate either to serve customer needs or ways to upgrade sales. In short, she had the aptitude but was woefully short on attitude. Soon, we were spending more time at the store along with Ratna to save the fragile and as yet evolving relationships with our customers.
The lesson here is rather simple and obvious. I can build aptitude, skills and ability through specific training regimen, even in the short term but building attitude hardened by contrary behavior over the years is a much much tougher nut to crack. So, if you have a choice to make go for attitude any day over aptitude.
Clarity of Job role & skills matching
We thought we were very clear on the job profile for the position of the store manager while recruiting Ratna, but it was immediately clear to us thereafter, that we had not detailed out the profile requirements enough.
Processes apart, entrepreneurs often eschew the use of psychometric and profiling tools for recruitment purposes. In the hands of experts, these tools can be quite effective in matching skills to a specific job profile. The most effective way to use these assessment tools is to list out in detail the qualities required for the position as also the activities that would be required to be done by the incumbent. These two lists would also help in creating clarity for the job profile as well.
Multi-skilling and not just multi-tasking
A beneficial fall-out of the “Ratna” episode was that we had to go back to the drawing board for recruitment. In the meantime, word that we had spread amongst our retail network, led Bhaichung to walk in through the doors of the Gurgaon TCF one evening. He had been referred to us by one of my colleagues from an earlier company. (And that, by the way, is a great way to recruit people.
Half hour into the conversation with Bhaichung and I could intuitively tell that he was our man. His steady presence at each stage of TCF’s journey over the last few years bears testimony to the accuracy of my intuition that evening. Lesson learnt – at times intuition works better than the most sophisticated assessment and recruitment tools, so don’t discount it.
Bhaichung brought a rare ability to not just multi-task but also multi-skill that energized all around him and helped us meet another challenge that entrepreneurs face routinely in the start up phase. There are always more roles and jobs to do in the organization than you have the salary budget to hire people for all those roles. So, you had Bhaichung looking after not just the customers at the store, but also creating marketing promos, developing new product ideas, sales training of newer staff and even interacting with vendors for supplies apart from managing events and corporate activity. In short, Bhaichung treats the company as his own business and brings in a rare fresh zeal of intrapreneurship.
And believe me, this kind of attitude can be quite contagious – and spread it did to Sandeep, the Operations Manager and even to our accountant Arun, who both began to actively seek additional work and responsibility outside their domains.
Create Entrepreneurs like yourself – Why have employees when you can have partners?
Obvious, isn’t it? And yet so many of us miss it! An employee will go home and thoughts about the company and work would normally be left behind at the office but a partner or an owner of the business will continue working and thinking about the business long after the clock has struck 5. Will an employee lie awake in bed thinking about the ways in which to recover service levels with lapsed or dissatisfied customers? Probably not. It’s a rare employee who will be “paranoid” about the business as Andy Grove of Intel put it, and who will therefore pursue the path to perfection relentlessly.
Bhaichung is one such employee-partner who is always paranoid about the health of the business. He is one such person who has never drawn boundaries at work in regard to what is his responsibility and what is not. If something to be done is in the best interests of the company then he considers it his responsibility and gets right down to it.
Where does Bhaichung’s sense of ownership come from? Bhaichung has never owned a single share in the company. The source of an employee’s sense of ownership is never derived from the ESOPs that he gets, necessary though they may be. This sense of ownership can only derive itself from the empowering environment that the entrepreneur is able to create within the organization, his ability to ignite the passion and gain deep commitment of his employee-partners.
So, what does an entrepreneur have to do to find more Bhaichungs than Ratnas? Well simply put, he needs to identify and then hire for the right attitude, create HR processes and have a clear and well defined job description in place, and keep that aside the moment a Bhaichung comes on board. Foster an enabling and empowering culture that allows employees to chart their path, take responsibility for scripting their growth path and ownership for success of their initiatives. Executed with an optimum balance of the head and the heart, this is sure to help the entrepreneur create a passionate committed team of Bhaichungs, who have clarity of vision and commonality of purpose and willingness to meet all challenges that an entrepreneurial start up venture must face in its initial journey.
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