Diary of a new MD #Month 1

Becoming MD of IRIS’ HR and Payroll software business is a dream come true for me.

Anyone that knows me personally will concur that I cherish the opportunity to have my own little piece of the pie.

Despite being part of a larger group, I essentially run a mid-sized business, with circa 500 staff. As such, I experience all the same challenges that most MD/businesses owners face.

Over the next few months, I’m going to share with you some warts-and-all updates on the struggles I face running the business and some of the strategies that appear to be working in my favour.

I’m hoping that these will prove useful to my network, who are no doubt grappling with a similar set of issues/blockers to growth and prosperity.

So, here’s instalment number 1.

Power to the people – 3 things I’m doing to win the talent war.

Whether you’re a John Lennon, James Brown, Public Enemy or a Rage Against the Machine fan, the phrase, ‘Power to the People’ will resonate, I’m sure.

And boy, it’s all power to the people now when it comes to recruitment. We just can’t find good staff to fill our open vacancies!

In the first month of my MD journey, like you, my business has experienced challenges finding the right people at all levels in our organisation, and we also fight to defend ourselves from competitors poaching our experienced staff with eye watering salary increases.

So, what am I doing about it right now, this minute? What things simply can’t be overlooked.

1)A palpable culture

Firstly, I’ve made it my mission to create a sense of community in my organisation, creating a personal connection between us all. A sense of family where we support each other ?through the good and the bad. Thick and thin. A place where we share the burden of failure and the joys of success.

I want the culture to be palpable. Something you can really feel.

We’re looking at everything. From recruitment and onboarding, right through to the day-to-day of what we ask people to do and how this is measured.

2)The 100m sprint

In recruitment, if we find someone we want to employ, we are going to be super agile.

Candidates are getting multiple offers.

The recruitment process in larger firms can be notoriously slow, giving smaller firms an advantage. So, we’re trusting our managers and cutting out the layers of approval and bureaucracy to ?prevent ‘hiring’ becoming a massive HR process.

This can’t be a sequential process anymore. Everything has to happen at once. The line can’t go dead at the other end.

It’s got to be personal. It’s got to ‘feel’ personal to the candidate.

We are delegating more to the hiring manager. ?They need to be able to go with their gut feel and take a risk.

I’ve asked my managers to think of recruitment as a 100m sprint. Out the blocks and done! Not something that drags and drags until everyone involved has lost enthusiasm.

3) A Professional Manager Model?

This leads me onto managers themselves. I believe that management is a career pathway, not a rite of passage. Managers are ‘born’ and not ‘made’.

Just because you are moving up the ranks, does not mean you can manage a team.

I did management science for my degree, a very long time ago! As I did then, I still believe that management is a profession in its own right; not something people do because you’ve reached the top of your subject matter specialism.

We need to make sure our managers have access to ongoing training and development to become great leaders.

I want to follow the model of the supermarkets and bring in people that have a business management qualification. I want to bring them into IRIS as graduate managers – with a fantastic training programme behind them.

These individuals are great at personalisation and connection. They’ve been trained in it.

They might be younger than the people they manage. So be it! I want those soft skills in abundance throughout the division and this is a way of achieving it.

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What’s next?

So, there you go. Instalment 1.

Of course, some of these changes will take time to put in place, and there will be bumps along the way. I’ll share those too!

Do you think these are strategies that could work for you?

Have you done similar?

If so, I’d love to hear your stories.

Until the next time, over and out….Steph