less humans, more robots

In most of the hiring interviews, i hear smart candidates asking the same smartest questions to understand more about the firm, the opportunity and the role.

The most common questions are:

What resources do I control to accomplish my tasks?
What measures will be used to evaluate my performance?
Who do I need to interact with and influence to achieve my goals?
How much can I expect when I reach out to others to help?

I’m sure you all asked almost the same set of questions to your hiring manager in one point of time. I’ve asked the above and more when I was looking for a change in early stages of my career. The funny side is most of the hiring managers go blank in most of the questions. The problem with them probably is lack of communication or time or effort to design jobs or simply most of the company leaders are not even aware what they expect from their associates.

If you are an entrepreneur CEO (like most of your peers), you’ll look for the smartest individuals to work towards your idea, your vision. True Rockstars!

The above questions correspond to four basic spans of a job;
1. Control - related to access of resources
2. Accountability - measures that allow trade-offs
3. Influence - interactions with firm/market data, customers, business units and staff
4. Support - from peers / associates

When your company is so big (much like Walmart, Intel, Oracle) it’s relatively tough to design these jobs with a perfect tuning or balance! The good thing is you are not that big! :)

You all know: Improving the performance of key people is often as simple - as profound - as changing the resources they control and the results for which they are accountable.

Yes, we all learned that in Harvard, Wharton and other ivy rechristened red brick buildings - sweet. Implementation?
Well, we all hire ROCKSTARS - the same bunch, like seen it all done it all type. When you and that person sat down first on the near by coffeebar discussing ‘his/her interest in joining’ the idea, its all fun, you expected sun, he promised a galaxy!

We all want entrepreneurial people to work with us, not just ‘employees’ right?
We choose members for their skills, we emphasize the individual, we focus on the ideas, we work together intensively, we work towards adressing the sophisticated customer.

When you are just a 3 member firm, it’s wonderful, easy to communicate, fight, discuss and take a common path. How about your next hire? Dude, rockstars are not so-common! or we don’t really need all-rockstars! Imagine an Army full of Generals! Oh bad!

You all know there’s a concept called “The level 5 hierarchy’
Level 5 (Executive)
Level 4 (Effective Leader)
Level 3 (Competent Manager)
Level 2 (Contributing team member)
Level 1 (Highly capable individual)

When you plan next level of your organization, the problem / fun starts - about the above four spans : control, accountability, influence and support.

Do it carefully, make a flow chart, connect it well, tune it periodically - You are creating a high performance organization!

[I’m not an expert in HR strategies. These are learning’s from my short entrepreneurial exp and basic problems faced by our portfolio firms. Please drop your feedback. Lets discuss]