People Planning: Roles

As business owners, we want to be happy and we want our people to be happy. Happy, engaged people are way more productive in the business. That applies outside the business, too! You want community, clients, and stakeholders to be engaged, too, because that means we have alignment which equals velocity.

All of those different pieces of the puzzle are critical to the success of our companies. We need to ask ourselves as it relates to people day-in and day-out, would you “rehire” those people into your company or would you rehire that client? These are important questions that we need to be asking ourselves. If we say no, we need to determine why. Why wouldn’t we ask that client to come back? Why wouldn’t we rehire that team member? Why wouldn’t we engage again with a vendor or another stakeholder?

Let’s reference “Scaling Up” again from the last episode, and pull in some of the concepts from the people section. When we look at roles, we’ll examine dynamics, functions, and processes.

The first role we’ll look at in our company is leaders. Our leaders are required over time to grow and evolve in their skillset and maturity. As the business grows, we need to grow, too. There are three key leadership roles:

• Accountability. Accountability is really the one person who is tracking and in charge of progress. There can only be one accountable.
• Responsibility. Responsibility is anyone who has the ability to respond in support of something. You can have more than one person responsible.
• Authority. Authority means final decision making power. You don’t want to be accountable without authority.

With the chart below, you can take inventory of all the functions in your company. Go through, list all of those, and then attach names to those functions. Then, attach KPIs or measurements you are going to hold each function accountable for. How do you measure performance? Then, list the results and outcomes.

Once you have all those items completed, scan the list. Is there more than one person in a seat?  Or are there empty seats? Would you enthusiastically “rehire” each one of those people? This is one quick tool you can use to evaluate your company’s functions and the people in them.

The second idea we’ll explore is team. You need a great team of people to provide the level of output, service, and production you require. Hiring the wrong people is a waste of time, energy, and money, so it’s important to get that right. You hire for cultural fit, will, values, results, and skills, in that order.

The third idea we’ll explore is coaches (managers). Their job is to retain, grow, and educate our team. This will keep your team happy and engaged, and you want to make sure you’re listening to these people!

My recommendations from Verne Harnish’s “Scaling Up” in regards to team are:

• Hire fewer people, but pay them more.
• Give them recognition and show appreciation.
• Set clear expectations and give the team a clear line of sight (how do they impact the KPIs and measurements that are important to you?).
• Don’t demotivate. De-hassle the function and make it easier for them to do their jobs.
• Help people play to their strengths. This is essential to helping people play at their highest level, which will take your company to its highest level.

People Planning: Succession Planning

That entails:

• Putting job descriptions together for every role.
• Documenting what specific roles feed into and are accountable for certain processes and workflows in your organization.
• Looking at your processes and making sure you have enough support for those workflows as designed to support the delivery of your goods and/or services to your clients and customers.

Seeing all of this laid out visually, on a whiteboard or something similar, will give you the ability to see what might be missing and understand what’s actually going on.

Growth-Related People Planning

Here are a few tips:

• It begins inside of the company. It’s really building an attractive place to work that people want to come work for.
• Always be hiring. If you’re in fast growth mode, you should always have your fishing pole in the pond.
• Evaluate: what are we going to need next?
• Have job descriptions written down.

Think about the things that will attract people to the company, in terms of hard benefits, soft benefits, and compensation. Think about the recruiting tools you’ll use (like recruiters and job sites). How do you get the word out most effectively? These are all important things to take into consideration as you grow your company and face this growth-related people planning aspect.