This is performance review time (at least in US) and I have been posting about my thoughts on these on my blog. One of the topics that I deal with regularly is the need to grow the engineers and managers reporting to me to the next level, in a way manage their career according to my company’s needs but keeping their personal needs in mind. Having been in India office for my company for 4 years, I know companies of size >100 or so try their best to hire managers who are/can be people managers and keep that an important criteria for promotion and hiring. And I have seen benefits of doing(and perils of not doing) that because that helps us grow leads and managers from within the organization and provides better succession planning at all levels.
However, I am wondering if this is a problem for companies of size 1-100. In other words, are topics like ‘performance management’, ‘succession planning’, ‘leadership development’, ‘growing from within’ pertinent for companies of this size? If they are not, is it because the effects are not visible, or is it that the size of the company allows these problems to be solved in some very different ways (town hall meetings as communication mechanism, etc)? Has anyone faced any of these problems in companies of size < 100?
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Managing people and their performance is always a bigger challenge for start ups because the lure of bigger companies and heavier pay packets are difficult for any person to resist. Added to this the problem of unscrupulous poaching by bigger companies. In fact smaller companies serve mainly as training institutions for bigger companies. It is best for them to be realistic and pack their operations with enough trainees waiting to take over. Performance management in start ups will need to be focused on project/product deliveries rather than retaining people. Retention oriented performance management is a loser’s game for start ups. This is our experience as a start up.
We are discussing environment. Rather then number of people working in company. When people are less in number they work more choatically when people are more in number they can be structured to form less percentage of freedom. In both cases the effects and output is totally different. Large clerical companies require more structured and less choatic environment. Creative companies like Ad agency, gaming or product development require choatic management to deal with creative aspect of job. But when the cases are applied vise versa the results are totally different.
I work in gaming industry, which is structuring in India currently. Almost all the companies are facing problem of converting gaming people to sterotype software professionals. Which is totally work and results are really bad of gaming department.
I think degree of freedom to performance check with limited resources give good results, which is be evaluated with empolyees willingness to work for the company other then money aspect.
Virat Khutal
Hi Mrityunjay, I have seen my organization grow from 3 to almost 90 people today, and have also interacted over this period with other organizations of similar profile. Per my personal experience, startups face different talent management challenges at different stages.
When the team size is really small, at that point succession planning, or performance management don’t hold much meaning as most of the people are playing multiple roles, and there is almost zero tolerance for below-par perfomance (and at this stage almost everyone knows how other guys are performing). However even at this stage, promoters do invest their time heavily in trying to develop leadership from within for the simple reason that its more cost-effective vis-a-vis getting someone from outside.
As organization grows and one layer of management comes in-between, formal structuring of these processes starts taking shape. One starts to identify and implement performance management criterias, career parths for key personals, identify people with potential to grow, what (very specific and critical) skills they would need to fill in someone’s elses shoes etc.
As part of my job I regularly get to interact with HR managers of large companies and get first hand idea of how these issues are tackled there. What I feel is that bigger organizations have wider pool of resources and always have certain bench strength, which gives them the capability to manage their talent requirements in a better way. Even though small organizations (<100) dont have these luxuries, they get structured as they move along, and before that happens everyone is just too occupied playing everything from sweeper to CEO to derive meaningful results from these strategies 🙂
Well, I have seen a startup (India operation) growing from 5 to 50 and eventually getting acquired by an MNC. I was the 5th member on board back in 2003. There has been various ways to tackle issues such as performance management like a notion of MBOs (Managed Business Objectives) and then, opportunities for more than one person to exercise leadership by taking lead role in their modules. Having said that, there has been time when one person was acting as a lead of one module and heading a small team of two-three AND, on the other hand he also acted as a team member on another team primarily due to the nature of working in a startup. Not only that, individuals used to organize small events once in a while for which they were amply recognized.
There used to be town halls regularly to hear from executive management when a comany wide announcements were made. However, there also were one-on-ones for tackling ut individual issues.