Lemon #51. Why startups should
their people (2nd part)
While reading ‘The hard thing about hard things’ from Ben Horowitz, we learned about why startups should train their people:
- Product quality
Often founders start companies with visions of elegant, beautiful product architectures that will solve so many of the nasty issues that they were forced to deal with in their previous jobs. Then, as their company becomes successful, they find that their beautiful product architecture has turned into Frankenstein. How does that happen? As success drives the need to hire new engineers at a rapid rate, companies neglect to train the new engineers properly.
- Employee retention
I found out there were two primary reasons why people quit:
- They hated their manager: Appalled by the lack of guidance, career development, and feedback they were receiving.
- They weren’t learning anything: The company wasn’t investing resources in helping employees develop new skills.
The best place to start is with the topic that is most relevant to your employees: the knowledge and skill that they need to do their job.
This type of effort will do more to build a powerful, positive company culture than a hundred culture-building strategic off-site meetings.
The other essential component of a company’s training program is management training. Management training is the best place to start setting expectations for your management team. Do you expect them to hold regular one-on-one meetings with their employees? Do you expect them to train their people?
If you do, then you’d better tell them, because the management state of the art in technology companies is extremely poor.
Take your best people and encourage them to share their most developed skills. Training in such topics as negotiating, interviewing, and finance will enhance your company’s competency in those areas as well as improve employee morale. Teaching can also become a badge of honor for employees who achieve and elite level of competence.
Ben Horowitz @ The hard thing about hard things.
Jorge Moreno
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