How to Grow Your Business: Getting the right people onto the bus into the right seats.

How to Grow Your Business

Getting the right people onto the bus into the right seats.

Since a few years ago, when I became the COO (i was the most inexperienced COO ever probably when I started out since I didn’t even have any theoretical management background aside from the Engineering Management class from Stevens and just have a few leadership positions during co-curricular activities), I always try to understand my staffs – their strengths, weaknesses, interests, beliefs, family background, career plans, etc.

Since there were not many staffs when I first became COO and we did not have the financial capability yet at that time to hire many staffs, we designed our internship program to make it a win-win situation – we managed to get things done and the interns get real world experience.

This is where I learned to interview people (mind you, we had many interns that really underperformed when I started my first rounds of interviews and hiring interns – my interview skills sucked), I learned to manage bad performers (take note, bad performers CAN get the whole company down as the negative things can spread like disease especially in small companies!), how to train employees to get the best out of them and how to retain the good employes and more.

The most important things that I discovered is:
– When you interview, the academic background means very little (unless you are looking for very technical people), but the most important things are:

1. whether the candidate is really interested in the position and would enjoy doing the work (instead of just wanting to be employed so that they are not unemployed. or just interested in the salary offered if you’re offering higher salary – if he/she jumps to more than 3 or 4 companies in less than 2 years, that is a concern that you should address)

2. potential of the candidate (can he grow and take up more responsibilities in the future?)

3. does he/she fits in your team (does he/she have the core values of the company)

4. high interest to contribute to your company (are they proactive to contribute to the company’s growth instead of they’re expecting the company to contribute to them?).

– I usually don’t look at CGPA unless it is tooooo low (like less than 2.5). High CGPA usually shows they are good at studying and learning (good if the position requires them to learn a lot of new things is a short time) but doesn’t mean that he/she is good at working. People can excel very well when they are put into the right seats – right type of work that they enjoy.

I am Nisa. I am still learning – I love reading – I love Googling and I am doing my best to grow Authentic Venture Sdn Bhd to be the leading cloud-based solution provider of enterprise solutions in the ASEAN region.

P/S: I have an awesome team now and I love them very much!

 

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