Your first 1000 Employees - Hire Right or Fire Fight

The number in my title, ‘1000’ is a placeholder for the sake of this article, as you could take it to be your first ‘significant’ number of employees that would go on to dictate the success & growth trajectory of your company. While a large established conglomerate or giant might quote it as their first 10,000 employees, a smaller company might take it to mean their first 500 employees & a spanking, brand new startup might take it to refer to their very first 50 employees. Now that we’ve established that, lets find out what difference the right hiring could make when it comes to hiring that top squad of yours! I'm going to refer to them as Team Alpha hereon.

Checklist of actionables almost immediately expected of awesome Team Alpha:

• Strategy formation & planning
• Hustler’s attitude of getting things done
• Being hands on as both team managers & individual contributors.
• Team building / Hiring
• Laying the foundation of shared goals & values
• Upholding those very values & reiterating on them to reinforce them (Very imp)
• Micro & macro problem solving (with or without past wins/fails to fall back upon)
• Delivering within deadlines & resource crunches / bootstrapping if required in all senses of the word.
• Getting management buy ins regularly
• Pivoting & expansion

Although one could add many more areas to this list, the writing on the wall is pretty clear for early core teams.

You are setting the tone

The Tone for internal teams, the tone for your customers, the tone for your business partners & most importantly – You are setting the tone for all your future hires that would follow.

Passing the baton: Since these very teams would pass on the crucial knowledge essential for the success of the current & future teams, & the company in the short & long term, they’re passing on a multitude of things. Knowledge transfer, legacy items, cultural values, operating best practices, teams themselves, etc but most importantly they pass on the Baton & even the trophies of a high performance work place. At least the absolute winning teams do. Since unadulterated & complete transfer of this knowledge would ensure the successs formulae being replicated time & again…it is of utmost importance to ensure that the first hand transfer of this knowledge is done perfectly. Now to enable the percolation of this very knowledge to all future teams in a company ensuring the successful continuity of the company, let’s look at some thoughts around how we approach hiring these very teams.

Core Team Building: Amongst the many colourful & vibrant festivals in India, is one in particular that tests the solid grit & ambition of its flag bearers. An event dedicated to hundreds of years of culture & storytelling about the life & times of a God who would through strategy, planning & collaboration try & reach for an elusive pot of gold at the end of the proverbial rainbow. Only this was a pot of curd/butter & this was no tame strategist.

‘Janmashtami’ this very festival, celebrates the birthday of Lord Krishna & as an ode to him, till date, hundreds of young men & women strategize & build teams all year long that would form a human pyramid reaching far above the ground, even upto almost 9 tiers (almost 15-20 metres above ground level?) in emulation of Lord Krishna’s efforts of breaking the Dahi Handi or Pot of Curd for significant prize money, cheers from onlookers & sometimes plain devotion & enthusiasm for the culture.

Moving on from the culture tidbit, lets dive into the team building aspect of this mammoth event.

The Govindas, or volunteers who form this pyramid are selected strategically & with a lot of forethought. Often by plain logic – Strongest of the lot at the bottom, supporting immense weight & movement on the top, to the lighter ones climbing above to scale the pyramid to sometimes intensive strategy for the competing champions for whom every additional tier over another competitor could mean more glory & prize money. Here the planning process could move from basic strategy to literally per individual strategy, placing importance on aspects like individual strengths & weaknesses & pairing them with others who complement to form larger strengths & eliminate/drastically reduce weaker aspects. A few aspects that are poignant in the selection criteria are:

• High levels of shared passion/shared values/enthusiasm/respect for the whole event. Right from the planning stage to collecting the prize, everyone functions as one team.
• An eye on the prize is also an important focusing tool that keeps everyone on their toes. Pun intended. :)
• Mutual support & collaboration ensures the teams being able to work their way up on reliable shoulders.,the collaboration allows for sharing of strengths as & when needed.
• Using diverse talent – allocated to the right areas (As I mentioned above, the Dahi Handi allows for the strongest as well as the most light weight contenders to be a part of the winning pyramid.) It serves better than having a unidirectional hiring strategy/mindset but creating winning teams using selective strengths.
• Structural integrity (many a times due to obstacles like water being thrown on them from surrounding buildings or rain pouring down or people losing balance, etc well planned pyramids still have damage control mechanisms to ensure their goal & keep standing strong.)
  

Core teams done right

Over their lifetimes, companies employ two kinds of employees – ones who are senior due to their longevity in the company & second those who come in directly on actual peer or senior ranks. While all new hires go through rigorous interview rounds to ensure requisite skill & culture fits, it is the old hands who usually carry with them a lot of the company history & retrospective perspective on company values/problem solving/culture, etc. Which has been the crux of our discussion today. When hiring/building these very core teams, the idea is to form the main tier of employees who build the first reservoir of knowledge sharing/shared values/standard operating procedures/culture, etc that would percolate down to future hires. This would ensure the integrity of the message being passed & the company values/vision/mission being preserved as needed. These core teams become the Banner men of culture/ethos/best practices/structure. As mentioned above, it is not necessary to hire people similar in skills/attitudes/expertise/cultural fitment but to form a team that complements each other, hence forming for an invincible 1st Tier of employees - or as I have fondly come to call them, Team Alpha. :)

To avoid the flip-side of getting the hiring of this team wrong, focus on the below areas would definitely help:

• Hire for integrity self explanatory :)
• Hire for loyalty (to teams, to the company, to a cause, to your values, what you deem fit to deserve loyalty, etc)
• Hire for collaborative ability (goes out of his/her way to collaborate & not only does it as a last resort.)
• Hire for a high EQ High IQ is widely available, the ability to work & lead with the right attitude, with fairness, with a human touch is still high on most lists.
• Hire a High Autonomy, High Accountability person: If high autonomy would make someone even more accountable - that's your guy. Or gal.
• Hire Hustlers: By definition, they hustle. You need more hustle.
• Hire for manners: I know this wasn't expected on this list, but people who say a lot of thank yous & please automatically get a lot of their work done. Genuinely, ofcourse. :)
• Hire for appetite People who have a genuine appetite for excellence are always great to rally behind any cause. Is your hire hungry? Good.