The following was narrated to me over the weekend by a professor of finance and a former finance industry executive with experience in well-known multinationals.
Upon asking his supervisor about his not being promoted even after performing well at his job and being recognised for it as well, he was told that he was asking the wrong question. His supervisor told him ?You?re asking the wrong question! You should ask?what should I do to get promoted?? Quite naturally, this confused the finance executive and now professor all the more. Upon enquiring, he was told by his supervisor that he was undoubtedly very good at his job but hadn?t demonstrated leadership by developing a competent second rung of leadership. ?You should make yourself redundant by growing out of your job to be promoted? was the message from the supervisor; else, upon promotion, who would do the executive?s job at least as well as it was being done?
The executive took the message to heart. In the next two years, he was promoted over four times!
Is the same promotion philosophy applicable in a start-up as well? I believe it is.
A group of energetic, passionate and talented people comes together to create a start-up to realise their dreams. In the early days of the start-up, when there?s ambiguity and amorphousness about the company?s structure, roles and responsibilities, it is understandable when the founders and early team members do everything and anything possible to get the job done right, on time. After a while, as the start-up grows, a more formal structure comes into being. Roles, responsibilities, authority and reporting relationships come into being. More formal functions get created, eg. finance, vendor management, engineering, product marketing, sales, marketing, human resources, IT and so on. Each of these departments needs dedicated attention within the overall canvas of the company?s charter. Each of these functions in turn grows in complexity commensurate with the company?s growth?sub-departments get formed (eg marketing might get sub-divided into functions such as product marketing, product management, online marketing, brand management, channel marketing, alliances and partnerships and so on); in addition, operations might get further sub-divided into geography, sector and function focused structures.
Each of these functions will need to be ?owned? by competent and capable teams. The initial founding team will need to create space for talent to come in and flower. This requires an honest appraisal of the capabilities of the team. Insecurity and egos can come in the way of allowing this to happen. Can the person single-handedly responsible, in the early days of the start-up, for generating the sales of, say, Rs 1 crore be made responsible for creating and managing, say, Rs 50 crore in sales? Can he be made responsible for an all-India sales team dealing with multiple sales channels funnelling multiple products and catering to different classes of customers?
In 1969, Laurence J Peter and Raymond Hull wrote in their book The Peter Principle: ?In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.? The humorously written book goes on to state that sooner or later, employees are promoted to a position at which they are no longer competent (their ?level of incompetence?), and there they remain, being unable to earn further promotions.
One way that organisations attempt to avoid this effect is to refrain from promoting a worker until he shows the skills and work habits needed to succeed at the next higher job. Employees should, therefore, not be promoted for their efforts, but given pay raises. Training is to be imparted to employees to make them suitable for position. In India, it is hard to find experienced and affordable top-class talent for start-ups and so, training of existing employees is more important. Therefore, the onus, unfortunately, is on the leadership to discover those individuals with poor managerial capabilities before they?re promoted. It is also important to keep in mind that many technical people may be very valuable for their skills, but poor managers and so, allowing a good technical person to acquire pay and status reserved for management requires the creation of a parallel career path.
So, let?s work hard to make ourselves redundant in our current roles!
What do you think?
Sanjay Anandaram is a passionate advocate of entrepreneurship in India; He brings close to two decades of experience as an entrepreneur, corporate executive, venture investor, faculty member, advisor and mentor. He?s involved with Nasscom, TiE, IIM-Bangalore, and INSEAD business school in driving entrepreneurship. He can be reached at sanjay@jumpstartup.net. These are his personal views