Change Agent - Issue 40

By dramatically lowering the downside of a bad hire, the firm makes it easy to take chances, to get people in the door, and to let them prove themselves. Is it harder to get good people at first? No doubt. How many people want to tell their spouse that they are quitting their job to work in a mail room?

Start legends. One of the best ways to get people to want to come to work in your mail room is to make a big deal of the people who used to work there. There are plenty of companies that have famous CEOs but that keep their employees under wraps. Can you name three people who work for Cisco or Oracle?

By turning your employees into famed success stories, you run the risk of them leaving. But that's okay, because you make it more and more likely that dozens of other hotshots will come to take their place. It's worked for Jack Welch: Other companies raid his executive pool, and even more talent fills it back up.

All of these tips are fine, but what good are good people if you wreck them after hiring them or acquiring their company? If you're going to grow fast, that means that most of the time, the majority of the people in your company are new or are working with someone who's new. And that means new strategies.

Obsess over where people sit. Most companies allow their employees to get very comfortable with their spot in the office. It saves time and allows people to get into communication grooves. It can also ruin a fast-growing company. Here are the stories of two managers I know.

One manager took a hot, new hire and sat him inside his own cube for 60 days. That meant that every single person who came to visit the manager also met the new hire. It also meant that the manager and the new hire had plenty of time for side chats and data exchange -- a real-time indoctrination period.

The other manager took a recently acquired executive and sat her clear on the other side of the building for 60 days. He met with her four times -- about once every two weeks.

Who's more likely to catch fire? Who's going to influence the company in a hurry?

If you're hiring hundreds of people, you should be reorganizing the desks in your office every week. Create cells or covens or hives or whatever you want to call them. Intermingle people. Don't sit all of the engineers together all the time -- unless you want the marketing people to talk about "those guys in engineering."

Of course, it's not just about where people sit during the day. The company cafeteria can quickly become as segregated as the one in your old high school. Don't let all the jocks sit together. Why not offer old-timers a free lunch every time they invite a new person to eat with them?

Invite people over for dinner. How many kids does your boss's boss have? Is her husband a good cook? These are the little social cues that lead to long-term ease of communication. Knowing the people you work with helps make them feel more like family, which makes it far more likely that people are going to come to work with the attitude that you're looking for. It's way easier to lobby to have a new and challenging coworker thrown out of the company if you've never eaten a burger charred beyond recognition on his grill.

Publish a yearbook. Hire someone whose only job is to interview and profile new employees. Find out entertaining things about new employees. Brag about their past accomplishments. Take clever photographs. Turn your new hires into stars.

Distribute your findings in a book on an Internet-year basis, which for most companies is every month. And give your new hires back issues. That way, everybody has read a magazine-like profile of every single employee within a week of showing up for work. The result: People are more proud of the people they work with. The hiring process is much easier if you let prospective employees read past issues to help them decide whether to accept your job offer.

Note: If people aren't cool enough to brag about in the year-book, then don't hire them!

Send people to school. The best way to have amazing people is to help your current people grow into amazing people. And that means that everyone from the CEO on down takes two or more challenging courses a year. My favorites are the Dale Carnegie public-speaking class and Zig Ziglar's course on selling. Why? Because most employees are afraid to do one or the other. And because all employees can do better at speaking and selling -- even if they're not in sales.

Just think: If you grow your own all-stars, you can go back to hiring for the mail room.

Make everyone wear a name tag -- every day. That's my all-time favorite tactic. It's the real reason why I wrote this. Rule: If you forget your name tag, you are sent home to get it. The name tag is a powerful badge, the symbol of a fast-growing company. The name tag says that you are proud of your growth. And the name tag shows that you are serious about widespread interpersonal communication -- up and down the organization.