I am sure you folks have realized that I’ve been “off air” for awhile. The combination of helping out Daily Grommet and joining Pixability has shriveled my capacity for writing to zero. But, I am getting back on the horse and definitely have a lot of material from the “startup trenches” to share.
So that all said, today I want to focus on some of the missteps many of us take in managing our most precious resource – people. I want to point out three major ones I have seen lately in the entrepreneurial community…
I recently had a conversation with a friend about the importance of building a diverse team. It is a subject I spend a lot of time on, since my own personal experience and countless research articles have shown that a diverse teams deliver better product and increased efficiency. If you are interested in this research, follow professor Vivek Wadhwa on Twitter. He usually has links to it that do not require journal subscribtion.
Introduction by Apolinaras “Apollo” Sinkevicius: this guest post by Paul Morgan might have the language directed at mid to larger size companies, but the vast majority of principles mentioned are highly applicable to the world of technology startups. Yes, according to my personal experience and widely available statistics, most of you will not make it past the team of 10 and this may not help you. But a good number will and strong technical teams will become a huge issue. Having had a chance to grow companies past the 100-employee mark, I know growing pains show up much earlier than expected.
I feel like I correct perceptions about what operations professionals are and are not at least 2-3 times per week. Most folks, especially from organizations in technology-heavy industries, automatically assume “operations” is purely systems management. While an operations person may really just be a senior network administrator in some organizations, the true responsibilities of a (business) operations manager/leader are much broader. Unless one specifies they are referring to technology operations, people should always assume they are talking about business operations.
Apolinaras is a business operations leader with 12-year track record of helping companies manage growth, build diverse teams, harness technology, and get a lot more profitable.