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The Company Terrorist
The Company Terrorist
Running a small business is hard even on the best of days. As entrepreneurs, each of us faces risks that most of the population would never even consider. All of us know that if Bear Stearns can fail and General Motors can hover on the brink, it would not take too much for any of us to find ourselves out of business.
I bring this up because there is a lot of ink and paper devoted to handling the risks of small business. But as far as I can tell, most of the literature out there deals with conventional problems like having sufficient capital on hand or developing a business plan or sales and marketing. Happily, many of these resources are excellent, but they all fail to address one fact that has become apparent to me from experience; the self-destructive habits of the entrepreneur don’t somehow get parked at the company’s front door. In simple terms, we all bring to work with us ALL of our issues, not just those that are purely business related.
One huge example of this is in how we pick people to be employees. We all have our biases and they are evident in how we go about hiring, and when necessary, firing. It would be nice I suppose if all we relied upon is resumes, but unless you are an automaton, you likely use your gut feelings in the hiring process and if those feelings are somewhat impaired, well, your hiring is going to produce some serious bumps.
Using myself as an example, I once hired a young woman who turned out to be the company terrorist. What I mean by this is that every single person she came in contact with, well, hated her and this created havoc and discontent. It was amazing to watch really. She had an almost uncanny ability to make herself hated, and in retrospect, she justified those feelings. Oh, she knew how to shine my apple and because of a misdirected sense of loyalty (a near fetish with me that can be both great and terrible depending upon the situation), I made excuses for her and spent a good part of my day cleaning up the mess.
In the end after having to isolate her from the other employees quite literally, she inevitably turned on me one day and that was that. After it was over, I had to take the time to reflect on why I hired her in the first place. I mean, you really can’t hide crazy and I saw the warning signs, looking back at it, in the interview. So, why did I hire her? The answer is that I have in my nature an instinct to save and protect. It is a repetitive pattern, I suppose like all of our personal psychoses.
I share this as in all the companies that I have seen and consulted upon, I have found that they all reflect for better or worse their founder’s personality. In your own world it is a good exercise to truly take stock of your own weaknesses and make sure that they are not fouling the water in your business. If left unchanged, they could easily bring you down.
Posted by Herb Kay on Thursday, August 28, 2008
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