Cut the Crap and Jargon by Shradha Sharma & T.N. Hari

Author:Shradha Sharma & T.N. Hari
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789386815965
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
Published: 2017-09-25T04:00:00+00:00

You Need to Spot Good People Proactively

You get to meet people at conferences, seminars, networking events or through simple introductions. These are the places where they let their guard down and are more natural. You need to keep your eyes and ears open for good people who may be unhappy in their current roles or are looking for a change. Most founders (especially the young ones) we have come across seem to be rather good at this, but the other leaders within a start-up who come from mature companies do not necessarily understand this well enough. You need to go out and meet people. Grab opportunities when good introductions come your way. There may or may not be a fit for an existing opening. It may or may not result in a closure. But it would have started off a relationship. Great salespeople believe in cultivating relationships much before there is a concrete sales opportunity. Hiring talent is no different. And at senior levels, you don’t always hire for an open position. It is much more flexible than that. You can always carve out a role for an extraordinary person. We have seen start-ups grow and take shape by bringing great people on board through this approach. In the worst case, if there is no concrete outcome, you would have learnt a thing or two. You can actually learn much more than a thing or two!

In our journey, we traced the root cause of several recurring as well as one-time problems in a business to a leadership issue at the level of the business unit head. If we had hired correctly, these problems could have been avoided.

The extent to which the right leader can make a difference to the business at every level is just unbelievable. If the leader does all the right things, her direct reports would slowly but surely learn to do all the right things. ‘Observe, imitate, improvise’ is a commonly accepted learning model. Over a period of time, the performance of the entire team (even three or four levels below) would be good. Recognizing and deeply understanding this takes time. And once you get it, you can actually turn average leaders into good leaders and good leaders into outstanding ones by a few simple interventions.

We have seen so many cases where a business or a region was facing a problem and upon a detailed investigation of what was going wrong, in most of the cases, it was found that the root cause was a failure of the most senior leader in the region.

In one of the scale-ups that we know, the business had been carved out into nine independent business units (BUs), each managed by a BU head. We noticed that of the nine BUs, five of them demonstrated consistently high performance on all the operating metrics. Two consistently demonstrated poor performance and one was borderline. We picked one poorly tracking metric at a time and dived deep, and each time we reached one or more

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