Promote from Within or do Without.

What happens when a person from outside an organization is brought in for a higher level position, e.g. executive vice president, vice president, or first line manager?

Well, it depends…but I will say, based upon anecdotal evidence, that depending upon the level which the new hire is placed, it can be anywhere from transformative to strategic to downright disastrous.

And why? Because the lower in the food chain of an organization, the more important someone is who knows the company. Especially first line managers, since they are really “information encyclopedias” for their direct reports. That first line manager is there to help bridge that gap between company knowledge and company culture and the rep.  If you place an outside hire in position as a first line manager, then starting the position they have two tasks, not just one: they have to learn the company culture as well as learn the company knowledge. And when it comes to making those in the trenches successful, understanding where to go to get things done is invaluable to the front line. If the manager has to go and find out how things are done and then report that back to the rep(s), then there is a delay and a burp in the process of getting things done.

Let’s set up a scenario. A small manufacturing company is looking to expand, and they decide to promote the current manager into an executive role, creating a new position, and now need to fill his or her role as a first line manager.

The company has had good people work hard for them for many years, helping to build the company to get it to this point. The employees have worked hard–people who have produced products, sold them, created marketing, balanced the books, straightened up back office messes, managed crises, and led the company to prosperity.

And then, because the company believes it needs to change, they hire someone from outside because they have “experience”.

What does that mean, they have “experience”? In some instances, it means the new hire brings skills to the table which the company needs and their current employees do not have. But in usually it means they bring in someone who’s managed people before. The owner/president/decision maker decides to bring in an outside party because s/he doesn’t believe anyone on the front line is capable of “managing”.  But how did this person who is brought in gain their experience? Someone took a chance on that person, promoting them to a management position, and more than likely, from within their company. I have never seen a company hire a manager from outside a company who didn’t already have management experience.

As an example: in one company, they had gone through several marketing people. They had hired an intern who quickly proved her value, who understood social media, worked hard and had great ideas. She worked for the current VP of Marketing who had troubles not only with the fundamentals of branding and messaging, but also with the newer things like social media. Basically, the intern began to save the VP’s bacon on a regular basis. The president, realizing her worth, hired her full-time.

She then proceeded to lead their social media campaigns, e-marketing campaigns and anything else the VP didn’t understand. She continued to save his bacon and she was given a new title and a raise.

When the VP decided to leave, the president, instead of looking at who had helped the company and supported its growth–i.e. who was up and coming and understood the company’s needs–hired someone outside the company whose resume was impressive.

The new VP proved scattered and ineffective, and was replaced by another outside hire with an impeccable looking resume. Marketing foundered for several more years. And here’s where the wheels fall off the bus. The rising marketing star realized she would never be considered for the top job so she left. And suddenly there was a giant hole in the company’s marketing as all of that experience walked out the door. And not just her insights and understanding of the space, but her contacts and the relationships she had built for the company. The president, of course, groused at the lack of loyalty the ex-employee showed. That, sadly, is irony.

There are a few times when companies need to look outside their walls for talent. Ford was a good example when it admitted to itself it needed fresh eyes to look at the problems created by an insulated familial succession. But on the other hand, GM saw that hiring Mary Barra was the right move as she knew the systems and had proven herself while coming up through the ranks–which is what GM needed to straighten out the messes created by their siloed decision making.

I’m not saying “never”, as absolutes simply don’t exist in our world. But I am saying look closely at your people. Step outside of how you see them, and see how they could benefit the company. Many times building a mentoring program is a great step so that someone is prepared to step into a role that needs to be filled. In sales especially, I see this as an extremely important step, as most small companies promote the best performing sales rep to management. This will be addressed in another post, but two things here: 1) Just because a rep sells the most doesn’t mean s/he should become or is qualified to become a manager and 2) if you take your biggest producer out of the field, what have you done to your sales?

In the end, promoting from within provides continuity. It enables culture building and a sense of safety to the employees. And, ultimately, it allows for employees to grow.

If you give them the chance, they will succeed.

Thinks, Inc. is a consulting firm which specializes in Smart Sales Operations. If you’d like for us to come and assess your chaos, drop us a line at contact@thinks-inc.com

PS The Infrastructure Guy  and Smart Sales Operations are Trademarks of Thinks, Inc.

Onboarding – Smart Sales Operations

Onboarding is the set of processes companies have in place to bring on new hires. In the computer and networking world, this includes provisioning and access to necessary systems. But there is more than just getting the new hire an e-mail address. For instance, what happens when a new sales rep gets hired? Do you have a rigorous process? or do you wing it?

What happens at your company? And what happened to your new hires in the past? And after reading this, what are your plans for future hires?

Apple is famous for its user friendliness, whether it be hardware or software, and Apple receives praise for the simplicity and functionality of its designs. And because people at Apple think about how something is or will be used, a lot of problems which an end user would potentially have encountered are circumvented. Through use testing, glitches are identified and eliminated. The burrs which would blister the experience are smoothed.

One story I remember* regarding Apple was their packaging strategy for their early systems. When the end user received their new computer and opened the box, Apple led them through it using a string. Yes, a string. Once the lid was open, the top sheet had a string attached to it, and as the user pulled things out of the box, the string connected each piece sequentially so that the owner set up the monitor, the power and the CPU in proper order, and when completed, turned on a fully functioning system. Even if the end user had no idea what each part was or where things went, Apple’s system eliminated the guesswork of putting together the computer.

That string is really a kinesthetic checklist. And I’m a big believer in checklists. If you have the chance, I recommend reading Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right. It is a great guide to looking at situations where checklists can be implemented, and in many of Gawande’s examples, save lives.

So back to onboarding. Is there a checklist in place? One which describes the steps which should happen as a person is brought into a company? A series of checklists can and should be in place for all aspects of the new hire process, such as interviewing, first day, first week, first quarter and first year.

For example, interviewing:
Have they filled out an application?
Spoken to the correct people in the area which they will work?
Gotten rubber stamped by the hiring chain of command?
Been tendered an offer letter?
Have they accepted?
Set a start date?

Once they’ve set a start date, does the company have an internal checklist to get things done? Most companies think of obvious things like health benefits and payroll, but what about laptops, cell phones, and business cards? What about training? In our current era of “faster, faster”, many times companies leave out things because they believe it only takes up time, but what they are really doing is increasing the ramp up time.

How? Because they aren’t giving the new hire the tools to be successful internally. What makes someone become part of a company? Is it because they are given an employee ID? Or is it because they interact with HR, engineers, other sales people and admin.

One company where I started many years ago, I sat for three weeks without a working laptop. When I got my laptop I was told to order business cards–and I didn’t know how to do that and no one had taken time to write it down. All processes were tribal knowledge–and I wasn’t part of the tribe quite yet.

Action item for the week: look at your onboarding process and determine if you take a new hire completely through your company’s processes–with no assumptions of “they should know how to do that”–because many won’t.

You don’t want your new hire to be waiting around for three weeks to start becoming one of your team.

*I say remember because I can’t confirm it’s true–please correct me if I’m wrong!

More on onboarding later. Next week we begin Front Office v. Back Office.

Thinks, Inc. is a consulting firm which specializes in Smart Sales Operations. If you’d like for us to come and assess your chaos, drop us a line at contact@thinks-inc.com

PS The Infrastructure Guy  and Smart Sales Operations are Trademarks of Thinks, Inc.