Human Resource: Don’t Tell a Cheetar to Swim Faster

Hello. This is Irino, a strategy consultant.

Today, I will explain tips on human resource strategy in Japan.

Table of Contents in Business Plan

Executive summary
Background
Management team
Organization
Vision
Product/service
Business model
Sales/Marketing
Market/Competitors
Startup phase
Growth phase
Operations
Human Resource
Financials
Fundraising
Exit
Risk management
Project management

Do’s & Don’ts for Beginners

♦ Don’t tell a cheetah to swim faster.

People in startup companies are often better than the average people in large companies. Some startup companies successfully skim the cream of the top talents.

But the problem is that talented people are not free of defect. It’s often the case where a world-class programmer is the worst team player in the world.

You will fail if you try to fix his weaknesses, however. He might lose confidence and motivation if you point out his weaknesses.

Don’t do SWOT analysis on him. Strengths are far more important than weaknesses for a startup company. When you notice weaknesses, you need to resist tempation to point out his weaknesses.

Be pacient. There’s no need to force cheetah to practice swimming.

♦ Try everything to peel off makeup.

All candidates make up during job interviews. 60 minutes or so is too short to figure out what she really is.

You need to figure out four questions:

Have you seen him under stress?
Have you worked together with him no matter small the project is?
Can you discuss delicate subjects with him?
Does he feel the same way as you do about what you think is important?

It takes long time to figure out these questions. But in reality, you don’t have the luxury of taking plenty of time.

In the short term, all you can do is:

Have dinner together after an interview.
Ask the person to do a small side job.
Read the person’s blog.
Take reference from the person’s past superiors and colleagues.

In the long term, you need to:

Attend networking meetings in relevant industries.
Accept intern students for more than 20 days.
Outsource a job to the candidate’s company, ordering him by name.

If you make a mistake in recruiting, it will cost you too much money on firing, and it will have negative impact on your corporate culture. Those risks are too big for a startup.

Probably you cannot spend much money in reruiting. Then, you should spend time and man-months.

Do’s & Don’ts for Intermediate Entrepreneurs

♦ Don’t hire people with a high ability but no likability.

Startup companies need skilled employees. But ability is not enough. You need employees with likability, i.e. a likable charactor.

That is because small startup companies can grow by getting help from people outside your own. In excellent venture companies, an employee has three or four supporters on average. In a sense, a person without likability has less than one-third or one-fourth of ability.

♦ Don’t do biannual HR meetings.

You may be doing HR performance review every six months. But it does not work in many startups.

The reason is because:

Business speed is very fast in venture business. No one can forecast what’s going on a half-year later.
When reviewing past performance, many of subordinates do not remember what he did, or he only remembers the good side of the same story.

It is important to give a feedback quickly on the spot, not biannually or quaterly.

Take every opportunitity like:

In elevators right after a meeting
In smoking room
In trains between meetings

Successful startups don’t do HR as a special event. They do it everyday.

Do’s & Don’ts for the Master Class Entrepreneurs

♦ Let them teach.

You may have a young employee whom you want to build up her skills. But outside seminars or on-the-job-trainings are ineffective.

Don’t teach her. Let her teach. Ask her to hold an internal seminar or make a brief presentation in a daily meeting.

Teaching is different from being taught in terms of the level of skills and commitment required. When preparing, she will acquire skills. After leading the seminar, she will build a confidence.

♦ Over-communicate

Successful companies communicate a lot by:

requiring everyone to attend daily meetings
securing a space and time to have chat
drinking together
going for company trips
spending weekends together in playing futsal

Even cool and stylish IT startups spend a lot of time on these low-tech way of communication.

The key success factor here is not the uniqueness of your personnel-system. It’s just that management teams have more opportunitities to understand their employees by spending more time with them.

♦ Hire better people than you.

It’s a manager’s dream to have exellenct people work for you. For instance, the founder of Recruit Inc, Mr. Ezoe transferred best people to the HR department. And he said nothing but this: “Hire people better than you.”

The best people in his company kept hiring better people than them. His company soon became full of the best. It’s a very simple strategy, but it works.

Editor’s Postscript: a letter in handwriting