How to be a good employer.

I have learned a lot these last few days about how to be a good employer.  I have much to learn, and I will continue to study this topic.  This topic holds the key to leveraging my time and the key to growing any company.  This is the dream of any entrepreneur.  How do I grow a world class company that can serve thousands of people?  From what I have learned so far is that there are at least 4 very important steps to employing people. 

First, I must create and cultivate the right culture of the company.  The culture needs to include expectations that every person is vital to the success of the company and must produce the results of their job description.  It should be uncomfortable for any employee to not be pulling their share.  The culture should allow for good productive communication.  The communication should start with the companies vision and mission.  The vision must come from the top down, and everyone should know what reult they are working for. Speculation, assumptions, rumors and any negative conversations will disrupt the flow of the company.  Employees must know that they are able to communicate their concerns and those concerns should be validated and dealt with quickly.

Second, employees must clearly understand what results they are responsible for. Their tasks and job description must be clearly defined, and there must be a system for accountability that allows them to feel responsible for those results.  The accountability system should include a procedures manual that defines each of the tasks.  Management should offer help for the employees if they need the help understanding the procedures, which is covered in the the third step. An important part of this step is to have a organizational chart that breaks down each position clearly so that you can fill each position with a talented person who is good at that position. I have made the mistake many times of hiring a person because they are talented and then trying to create a job description for that person.  I must create a job description first and then find talented people with those skills to fill the position.  Paying attention to skills and personalities will help in finding the right person.

Third, adequate and appropriate training is a must.  I have prided myself in hiring team members that are able to adapt to a dynamic job discription and that are able to train themselves for the most part.  The problem with this thinking is that it leaves the team member with an ambiguous job desciption and no direct accountability for specific jobs.  It is as if the team member is responsibile for nothing and everything at the same time.  The best resutls come from talented people who have clearly defined tasks, are adequately trained to complete those tasks, and have accountability to accomplish the tasks.  I have hired and lost many highly talented people and then lost them because they were not trained well enought to produce results and these people are individuals that pride themselves on producing resutls.  Each loss, was a great loss to the company. 

Fourth, the company must have regular company meetings.  Once a month would be good, once a week would be optimal.  These meetings should be used to train, to define roles and responsibilities, to share the vision, and to allow for open and honest communication. 

I am sure that I will have many more posts on this subject.  I study the subject daily and I continue to learn more about how critical each of these steps are.

Kevin Conover

Entrepreneurial Lessons Learned

If you don't write down the lessons learned and review them, you will have to learn them again!

I have been an entrepreneur/business owner for almost 8 years and about 5 years ago I started to write a journal about the challenges, struggles, successes and victories that I experienced along the way.  As the second part of my daily journal I would review past journal entries to keep the experiences fresh in my mind.  It is amazing to me how quickly those experiences are forgotten if I don't review them.  I often find that I have to re-learn a lesson that I learned years ago, but the experience is not fresh in my mind so I have to go through a similar challenging experience in order to re-learn the lesson. Some of these lessons are pretty harsh, so I would rather not have to go through the learning process a second or third time.  My solution has been to review the past journals to remind myself what I have learned, but unless I have another opportunity to apply the solution, then the lesson gets forgotten again.  This blog is going to be the third step to my learning process.  The purpose of this blog is to share what I am learning in my business studies and my "hard knocks."  Sharing with others what I have learned always helps me to retain the information at a deeper psychological level.  Another by-product of this blog is to assist me in improving my communication skills and writing skills. So enjoy!  And please participate in the discussions.  I would love to hear from others, what experiences or knowledge they have around the various subjects. Thanks for visiting my Business Journal!