This article first appeared September 19, 2011.
Last week I attended a fabulous webinar with Julia Bickerstaff, a small business expert who has works with both start-ups (particularly in the mumpreneur space) and larger businesses who need help with strategic issues.
Julia was talking about the fact that for a fast-growing business, people are always the biggest challenge and, in some ways the biggest opportunity.
Get the right team in place and they will help you grow your company even faster.
Persist with poor performers and you’ll constantly be chasing your tail.
While improving your hiring processes and policies is important in a growing company, business owners also need to be able to make tough calls on existing staff.
Julia suggested a simple question to ask yourself: Would you enthusiastically re-hire your staff for their current jobs?
The key word here is, of course, enthusiastically. You may have team members who are perfectly competent, but don’t have the right attitude or leadership capability to help you grow. Or you may have workers with a certain set of skills, but not the set you really need.
If there are some staff that you wouldn’t enthusiastically re-hire, you need to get serious about it. They need to be re-trained, re-assigned or moved on. Growing companies cannot support passengers.
Get it done – today!
