The post was originally published in Polish on Szymon’s LinkedIn profile. Szymon kindly agreed to republish what we think is of great value to our readers.
Forcing the hiring of new employees instead of promoting the current ones is a pathology of management. CEOs often assume that they will find someone experienced who will introduce new processes and solve all the problems of a given department. As a result, they spend a fortune on recruitment, waste a lot of time on onboarding a person, and often end up disappointed. The search is resumed, and this process isn’t cheap.
Szymon Janiak, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Czysta3.VC
A classic is when a department – whether it’s sales, marketing, or anything else – starts to grow rapidly. Of course, you need a leader. Instead of promoting someone from the people at your disposal, you look for a solution outside. It’s better to look at it differently. Because the people who built this department often:
- know it inside out,
- have domain knowledge,
- understand the habits of the people they work with, and
- have the necessary soft skills.
All they need is a little knowledge and managerial experience. The trick is that this is much easier to achieve than the points described above.
The companies in which I have invested employ hundreds of people. Where I have influence on it, I always recommend: look for talents in your own backyard first.
Instead of naively hoping to find someone who will enter the company like a knight in a shiny armor and solve all its problems, it is definitely better to invest in people with whom you’ve worked for years.
Let me repeat: it is much easier to help a current employee build new hard skills than to trust a new person. It is worth appreciating loyalty.
Give your people a chance, they can surprise you for real.
The comment section had to add:
Unfortunately, it’s not always about building new hard skills. While I mostly agree, it simply doesn’t work when it comes to soft skills, especially those that have to do with leadership. The biggest mistakes I made when working with people were when I tried to force an expert into a leader. It’s not possible with everyone and sometimes you can hurt both the organization and the person.
– Krzysztof Ryk, COO at Antologic
I saw such knights in shiny armors who rode in and explained how to manage projects or solve problems, but they could never implement their suggested solutions. They got scared then, got on their white steeds, and looked for new challenges. Currently, implementation, not lack of knowledge, is the biggest challenge.
– Łukasz Sowa, Founder at ERP Advisor
I know this method to the point of pain. I even came across one case where the management, instead of talking to employees, experienced specialists, hired a really expensive consulting company to ‘collect ideas for development and optimization.’ The consulting company met with all employees, collected all their ideas, and presented them to the board, at the same time collecting a large sum for this consulting.
– Maciej Kosela, Owner at MK Consulting
Kostiantyn is a freelance writer from Crimea but based in Lviv. He loves writing about IT and high tech because those topics are always upbeat and he’s an inherent optimist!
