March 31, 2014 at 16:02Why do companies give up the best employees?
In the spring of 2006, Kevin Systrom was standing behind a coffee machine in the Caffé del Doge cafe in Palo Alto, when Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg approached the counter. A year earlier, Zuckerberg was already having dinner with Systrom - he invited him to leave Stanford's last year to develop a photo service for Facebook. Kevin then refused. Staying at Stanford, Systrom developed the Instagram application, which Zuckerberg recently acquired for $ 1 billion. (The amount is amazing, especially if you know that the startup has not only revenue, but also a model for its receipt. In Instagram, whose age has not yet reached two years , still only 14 employees.) In the end, Zuckerberg still captured Kevin in the Facebook army, and congratulations on this.
If in the story with Sistrom Zuckerberg made bets and did not lose, then with WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton, everything turned out differently. In 2009, he was not hired by Facebook, and in 2014 the company buys WhatsApp for $ 16 billion. How does it happen that large and innovative companies abandon promising employees (we will call them gurus or "stars"), for whom in the future will race at triple speed, offering just crazy money? Focus on metrics, not results.
When a company has a large number of people (a large one is when the bosses do not know all the employees by name or by name), then the organizational model resembles a large vertical. It is practically impossible to control this vertical without any statistical metrics. Thus, the company unifies the recruitment process, as well as evaluating their performance. This is both good and bad.
Good - because you can always say which department is working poorly or you can compare your performance with that of other employees. This, in turn, helps to manage the level of salaries and social benefits for employees.
The problem is that key employees rarely give in to formal assessment. Studies confirm that the productivity of “key” and “ordinary” employees can vary by 10-100 times. It is clear that one cannot put in place a scale for assessing the productivity of employees based on the productivity of the most productive people, since they do not have clear boundaries of utility and productivity.
For example, in one of the companies that we happened to encounter, one of the measures of the effectiveness of testers was the number of bugs found. In turn, the effectiveness of programmers was estimated in the number of closed bugs. Very quickly, from the race for product quality, this development process grew into an agreement between testers and programmers: the first put everything into the bug tracker, and the programmers quickly fixed it all. Such is bugs driven development.
In addition to the fact that it is impossible to evaluate key and ordinary employees according to one system, it is also necessary to remember that motivation of key employees rarely coincides with generally accepted norms, which can greatly distort the cause-effect relationship “experience / productivity - result”.
A good example is Microsoft and its employee rating system.
The journalist Kurt Eichenwald, who last year published a large investigation into the company’s work system in Vanity Fair, described the consequences of using such a system at Microsoft (we will provide a translation from slon.ru):
“At the center of this problematic corporate culture was a management system called stack ranking. All former and current Microsoft employees with whom I spoke, literally everyone, called this system the most destructive internal process at Microsoft, which expelled an incredible number of employees from the company. The system, also called the “performance model,” the “Gaussian curve,” or simply “employee assessment,” worked (with some variations) like this: each unit was required to designate a certain proportion of employees as the strongest, strongest, average, lower than average, and weakest.
“If there were ten people in your team, then on the first day you understood that no matter how cool all the team members worked, two of them would be highly rated, seven would be mediocre and one terrible,” said the former programmer. “This leads to the fact that employees are focused on competition with each other, and not with other companies.”
If Microsoft could hire the leading leaders in the world of high technology before they even became famous, Steve Jobs from Apple, Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook, Larry Page from Google, Larry Ellison from Oracle and Jeff Bezos from Amazon, then, irrespective of their results, during one of the evaluation rounds, two of them would receive lower-than-average ratings, and one would be considered simply a shame.
For this reason, managers said, many superstars at Microsoft did their best not to get on the same team with other brilliant developers, out of fear that it would damage their place in the ranking. And this assessment had real consequences: ranking leaders received bonuses and promotions, and those who were down did not receive anything, or they were pointed at the door. »The
company abandoned this system only recently.
Thus, if there is a suspicion that you have a (future) “star”, you do not need to conduct template interviews, and having hired, do not evaluate the employee using generally accepted metrics.
The requirements for key employees are always high and this is understandable. Higher education, a prestigious university, a master's or Ph.D. degree, extensive experience, softskills and impeccable knowledge of your subject - this is what an ideal candidate usually looks like in the eyes of companies. But practice shows that “stars” often turn out to be “white crows” or “black swans”. Someone does not have an education, someone even has basic communication skills, and some people are generally strange in life. These personalities are united by only one thing - manic perfectionism and ideological motivation.
By the way, any “star” in the team is a potential risk for the team and a very probable source of conflict (the “stars” are often arrogant, suffer from increased ChSV and snobbery, or, conversely, do not fit into the generally accepted picture of the behavior of most people). Therefore, companies should clearly be aware that standard management practices are unlikely to work with such people. As one of the options, the “star” can generally be isolated from the outside world and other employees, so as not to endanger the usual rules of danger.
In our opinion, the main reason companies refuse promising employees is that they do not fit into the so-called corporate culture. This is such a strange term that newcomers are afraid of on open days the people who have worked in the company for 20-30 years. So, high-class specialists will never go to work in a company just for the sake of “corporate culture”, and, moreover, will not change their style and approach to work for the sake of a new company. But this does not mean that such employees will work poorly. After all, you need to remember that it is the presence of your own approach to work in combination with experience that makes a person unique. And to force him to change his habits for the sake of corporate culture is by no means impossible.
Once the headhunters of one of the IT companies - the “market leader” - were looking for an opportunity to invite a specialist to the position of senior software developer. The specialist was not going to change the job. The entire arsenal of eychar was used to drag the applicant to an interview: a person was added to all social networks, once a week they called him to an interview, and after two months of unsuccessful attempts, they connected his closest friends who worked in this company. The applicant eventually agreed. After two formal and one technical interviews (!) The time came X: the applicant was to appear before the court of the main aichara of a foreign customer. And now 15, 30, 45 minutes of the interview, everything is fine, everyone is happy, after which the familiar question sounds painfully: "why do you want to work in our company?" The applicant politely replied that they say so and so, I didn’t look for a new job, but since the “market leader” wants to see him in his ranks, why not? The result, we think, is obvious to everyone: the applicant was denied, the reason was not in line with the corporate culture of the company.
Very often, when moving to a new company, a key employee brings members of his team with him. This is easily explained by the fact that in most cases an excellent result cannot be achieved alone (even if you are a recognized guru), but only in collaboration with a team of professionals.
Here, corporations have no doubt succeeded. Promising startups are buying up bundles, and former hipster startups are becoming part of the corporation (as was the case with the same Instagram).
But here it is very important not to destroy the established traditions of management and interaction, as well as to smooth out the fact that the team is already working for another company.
This situation is easily illustrated by the example of football players (or coaches). In one club, a football player demonstrates simply phenomenal blockability, but when he moves to another club, the performance drops significantly, and the star athlete drops to the level of an average football player. But I didn’t lose my qualifications, I did not forget how to play football and did not receive any injuries. Something similar happened during the transition of Andrei Shevchenko from Milan to Chelsea, where he never took root.
Differences in thinking, motivation, and approaches to work are distinguished by highly qualified specialists. Perhaps that is why recruitment agencies most often specialize in specific types of employees - some select only top managers, others close only "ordinary" vacancies.
Before opening another vacancy, companies must understand for themselves: they need an ordinary “screw” to strengthen the existing system, or a new biofuel capable of accelerating the car to supersonic speed. And if the answer is the second option, then you need to forget all existing metrics, standardized tests, the average temperature in the hospital and the principles of corporate culture and just look for such people, relying on intuition and experience. Indeed, one of the most important qualities of a good leader is the ability to recognize potential among rising stars.
The process of finding and attracting “stars” to work in the company should not be accompanied by the closure of vacancies. This should be a parallel process, independent of current personnel tasks. If there is a “star” ready to join your team, but there is no position for it, think up a position. Otherwise, in a couple of years you will have to spend a couple of billion to fix your mistake.
If in the story with Sistrom Zuckerberg made bets and did not lose, then with WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton, everything turned out differently. In 2009, he was not hired by Facebook, and in 2014 the company buys WhatsApp for $ 16 billion. How does it happen that large and innovative companies abandon promising employees (we will call them gurus or "stars"), for whom in the future will race at triple speed, offering just crazy money? Focus on metrics, not results.
When a company has a large number of people (a large one is when the bosses do not know all the employees by name or by name), then the organizational model resembles a large vertical. It is practically impossible to control this vertical without any statistical metrics. Thus, the company unifies the recruitment process, as well as evaluating their performance. This is both good and bad.
Good - because you can always say which department is working poorly or you can compare your performance with that of other employees. This, in turn, helps to manage the level of salaries and social benefits for employees.
The problem is that key employees rarely give in to formal assessment. Studies confirm that the productivity of “key” and “ordinary” employees can vary by 10-100 times. It is clear that one cannot put in place a scale for assessing the productivity of employees based on the productivity of the most productive people, since they do not have clear boundaries of utility and productivity.
For example, in one of the companies that we happened to encounter, one of the measures of the effectiveness of testers was the number of bugs found. In turn, the effectiveness of programmers was estimated in the number of closed bugs. Very quickly, from the race for product quality, this development process grew into an agreement between testers and programmers: the first put everything into the bug tracker, and the programmers quickly fixed it all. Such is bugs driven development.
In addition to the fact that it is impossible to evaluate key and ordinary employees according to one system, it is also necessary to remember that motivation of key employees rarely coincides with generally accepted norms, which can greatly distort the cause-effect relationship “experience / productivity - result”.
A good example is Microsoft and its employee rating system.
The journalist Kurt Eichenwald, who last year published a large investigation into the company’s work system in Vanity Fair, described the consequences of using such a system at Microsoft (we will provide a translation from slon.ru):
“At the center of this problematic corporate culture was a management system called stack ranking. All former and current Microsoft employees with whom I spoke, literally everyone, called this system the most destructive internal process at Microsoft, which expelled an incredible number of employees from the company. The system, also called the “performance model,” the “Gaussian curve,” or simply “employee assessment,” worked (with some variations) like this: each unit was required to designate a certain proportion of employees as the strongest, strongest, average, lower than average, and weakest.
“If there were ten people in your team, then on the first day you understood that no matter how cool all the team members worked, two of them would be highly rated, seven would be mediocre and one terrible,” said the former programmer. “This leads to the fact that employees are focused on competition with each other, and not with other companies.”
If Microsoft could hire the leading leaders in the world of high technology before they even became famous, Steve Jobs from Apple, Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook, Larry Page from Google, Larry Ellison from Oracle and Jeff Bezos from Amazon, then, irrespective of their results, during one of the evaluation rounds, two of them would receive lower-than-average ratings, and one would be considered simply a shame.
For this reason, managers said, many superstars at Microsoft did their best not to get on the same team with other brilliant developers, out of fear that it would damage their place in the ranking. And this assessment had real consequences: ranking leaders received bonuses and promotions, and those who were down did not receive anything, or they were pointed at the door. »The
company abandoned this system only recently.
Thus, if there is a suspicion that you have a (future) “star”, you do not need to conduct template interviews, and having hired, do not evaluate the employee using generally accepted metrics.
Selection Criteria and Corporate Culture
The requirements for key employees are always high and this is understandable. Higher education, a prestigious university, a master's or Ph.D. degree, extensive experience, softskills and impeccable knowledge of your subject - this is what an ideal candidate usually looks like in the eyes of companies. But practice shows that “stars” often turn out to be “white crows” or “black swans”. Someone does not have an education, someone even has basic communication skills, and some people are generally strange in life. These personalities are united by only one thing - manic perfectionism and ideological motivation.
By the way, any “star” in the team is a potential risk for the team and a very probable source of conflict (the “stars” are often arrogant, suffer from increased ChSV and snobbery, or, conversely, do not fit into the generally accepted picture of the behavior of most people). Therefore, companies should clearly be aware that standard management practices are unlikely to work with such people. As one of the options, the “star” can generally be isolated from the outside world and other employees, so as not to endanger the usual rules of danger.
In our opinion, the main reason companies refuse promising employees is that they do not fit into the so-called corporate culture. This is such a strange term that newcomers are afraid of on open days the people who have worked in the company for 20-30 years. So, high-class specialists will never go to work in a company just for the sake of “corporate culture”, and, moreover, will not change their style and approach to work for the sake of a new company. But this does not mean that such employees will work poorly. After all, you need to remember that it is the presence of your own approach to work in combination with experience that makes a person unique. And to force him to change his habits for the sake of corporate culture is by no means impossible.
Once the headhunters of one of the IT companies - the “market leader” - were looking for an opportunity to invite a specialist to the position of senior software developer. The specialist was not going to change the job. The entire arsenal of eychar was used to drag the applicant to an interview: a person was added to all social networks, once a week they called him to an interview, and after two months of unsuccessful attempts, they connected his closest friends who worked in this company. The applicant eventually agreed. After two formal and one technical interviews (!) The time came X: the applicant was to appear before the court of the main aichara of a foreign customer. And now 15, 30, 45 minutes of the interview, everything is fine, everyone is happy, after which the familiar question sounds painfully: "why do you want to work in our company?" The applicant politely replied that they say so and so, I didn’t look for a new job, but since the “market leader” wants to see him in his ranks, why not? The result, we think, is obvious to everyone: the applicant was denied, the reason was not in line with the corporate culture of the company.
Command
Very often, when moving to a new company, a key employee brings members of his team with him. This is easily explained by the fact that in most cases an excellent result cannot be achieved alone (even if you are a recognized guru), but only in collaboration with a team of professionals.
Here, corporations have no doubt succeeded. Promising startups are buying up bundles, and former hipster startups are becoming part of the corporation (as was the case with the same Instagram).
But here it is very important not to destroy the established traditions of management and interaction, as well as to smooth out the fact that the team is already working for another company.
This situation is easily illustrated by the example of football players (or coaches). In one club, a football player demonstrates simply phenomenal blockability, but when he moves to another club, the performance drops significantly, and the star athlete drops to the level of an average football player. But I didn’t lose my qualifications, I did not forget how to play football and did not receive any injuries. Something similar happened during the transition of Andrei Shevchenko from Milan to Chelsea, where he never took root.
conclusions
Differences in thinking, motivation, and approaches to work are distinguished by highly qualified specialists. Perhaps that is why recruitment agencies most often specialize in specific types of employees - some select only top managers, others close only "ordinary" vacancies.
Before opening another vacancy, companies must understand for themselves: they need an ordinary “screw” to strengthen the existing system, or a new biofuel capable of accelerating the car to supersonic speed. And if the answer is the second option, then you need to forget all existing metrics, standardized tests, the average temperature in the hospital and the principles of corporate culture and just look for such people, relying on intuition and experience. Indeed, one of the most important qualities of a good leader is the ability to recognize potential among rising stars.
The process of finding and attracting “stars” to work in the company should not be accompanied by the closure of vacancies. This should be a parallel process, independent of current personnel tasks. If there is a “star” ready to join your team, but there is no position for it, think up a position. Otherwise, in a couple of years you will have to spend a couple of billion to fix your mistake.