Personnel
Challenges Faced In A Start-up And How To Overcome Them
Ashutosh Garg
One of the biggest dilemmas I was faced with
as I built the company needed good management people but the good people were
not willing to join a startup company. I found it to be a huge challenge to get
strong professionals managers to leave large companies and join a startup. Good
managers, I realized, are generally poor risk takers and only when they see the
stability of a company and they see other professional managers making this
leap of faith do they agree to make a change.
The human resource function of any retail
company can make or break a company since retail companies are people intensive
and our people are our ambassadors and our “face” in front of our customers.
This function must have a strong leader and
must have complete support of the entrepreneur. The entrepreneur must outline
his philosophy for this function but in words and in deeds because this is what
will set the management culture of the company.
Since I am the oldest member of the
management, I used to often have to stop younger managers coming in to touch my
feet and “seek my blessings”. I would tell them that there was no need to touch
my feet at all, no matter what the culture of our country in India of
respecting older people may be. If I had allowed this to continue, other senior
managers would have expected something similar from their juniors. It has taken
me time and this practice of touching one’s feet in the work place has now been
stopped.
Similarly, I was often requested that the
company must celebrate Founder’s Day on my birthday. My response was that while
I was the founder, we should celebrate the foundation day of the company and
there was no reason to celebrate my birthday. We now celebrate 25th
August as the company anniversary where we honour our top performers.
Each time I walked into a manager’s room or I
walked down an office aisle, people would stop their work and stand up. I have
never understood how standing up and stopping work is a way to show respect to
a senior.
To me, continuing with your work when a
manager walks down the aisle is a much stronger way to show respect to the
senior individual as well as the organization. It has taken me time but the
message in the company is very clear – continue with your work when a senior
manager happens to walk past you and keep sitting at your chair if a senior
manager walks into your office to discuss some work.
Some of our guiding human resources
principles that I established very early in our development were,
1.
Guardian
would rapidly move towards professional management and that we would not build
a family run organization.
2.
We
would have professional growth based on meritocracy and not based on
relationships or patronage
3.
Any
relationships between managers would need to be disclosed at the time of hiring
and approved by the management committee of the company. We also specified that
two managers who were related would not be allowed to work in the same
department.
4.
Performance
management would be done based on agreed and quantifiable key result areas for
each manager
5.
Salary
increases would be based on achievement of results and not based on seniority.
The
author is the Chairman of Guardian Pharmacies and the author of the bestselling
books, The Corner Office and The Buck Stops Here. Twitter: @gargashutosh
http://www.businessinsider.in/Personnel-ChallengesFaced-In-A-Start-up-And-How-To-Overcome-Them/articleshow/25363127.cms
