Is your company a bad place to work?
If you’re an entrepreneur, you may not want to admit it.
Heck, you might not even know if you’re making this mistake.
You just see the symptoms:
High turnover
Low morale
Low productivity
Unengaged employees
Constant infighting
Political maneuvering
The list goes on.
But before you can fix a problem, you have to define it. And then create a vision for what life looks like once you’ve solved it.
In fact, it’s something I’ve pondered a lot recently as I grow our team at Strategic Profits.
And to help me with this dilemma, I turn to my favorite source of wisdom:
BOOKS
For example, last weekend I came across a couple powerful passages from the legendary Ben Horowitz in his book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things.
He writes:
“In good organizations, people can focus on their work and have confidence that if they get their work done, good things will happen for both the company and them personally. It is a true pleasure to work in an organization such as this. Every person can wake up knowing that the work they do will be efficient, effective and make a difference both for the organization and themselves. These things make their jobs both motivating and fulfilling.”
And in contrast:
“In a poor organization, on the other hand, people spend much of their time fighting organizational boundaries, infighting and broken processes. They are not even clear on what their jobs are, so there is no way to know if they are getting the job done or not. In the miracle case that they work ridiculous hours and get the job done, they have no idea what it means for the company or their careers. To make it all much worse and rub salt in the wound, when they finally work up the courage to tell management how fucked up their situation is, management denies there is a problem, then defends the status quo, then ignores the problem.”
Clearly, it’s better to operate a good organization than a bad one.
But setting that goal is 100X easier than achieving it.
So what are the solutions?
That’s what we’ll discuss next week.
Till then.
Your pen pal,
Matt Rizvi