Not all growth is good growth. In fact, when the pressure of growing is too great, you make compromises that can come back to hurt you.
Jeffrey ran a firm going through what he less-than-affectionately called, “growing pains.” At 16 FTEs, he didn’t want to hire a full-time HR manager, yet he needed the skillset and focused attention to handle the recruiting and orientation for new hires.
By chance, Jeffrey’s neighbor Alice was between jobs and expressed enthusiasm for helping with this area of responsibility on a part-time basis as she continued her search for a full-time position.
As the VP of Finance offered Alice some tasks to help get started learning about the firm, she asked her to create a holiday calendar for the following year to share with the staff for planning purposes. The VP even gave Alice a list of the holidays from last year.
Alice sent her version of the next year’s holiday calendar to the Jeffrey the next day, filled with surprises: dates were wrong, a holiday was misspelled, and it was terribly formatted. Jeffrey looked at it for about 5 minutes, then called the VP Finance into his office and said, “I know you didn’t see this holiday schedule for next year because you weren’t copied on the message, but it is astoundingly bad. Alice isn’t as detail-oriented as we hoped. Maybe we should find someone else.”
It’s a good thing that Jeffrey found this mistaken hire quickly and on a minor issue. All hires contain risks and costs, and it is important, as Jim Collins points out, to make sure you are bringing the right people into your company in order to grow business now.