If your business is succeeding and you are hiring more employees than you expected—that is a wonderful problem to have. It means that your product or service is being well received by your constituents and you will have a need to delegate many of the tasks that you’ve previously handled by yourself.

I have some observations as a person who has both reported to others and have had others report to me. Common sense should be the order of the day as you take on new personnel in your organization in order to hire and maintain loyal employees.

Hire for the task at hand.

I once heard a professional speaker say, “We ask the wrong question. Too often we ask, ‘How smart are you?’ when the real question needs to be, ‘How are you smart?’” His point was that your best salesperson may be awful at keeping records, dotting ‘i’s and crossing ‘t’s so surround him/her with someone can do those tasks at a much smaller wage. Don’t lose a natural salesperson who can sell ice cubes to an Eskimo because of his/her tendency to get bored with small stuff. On the other hand, don’t hire someone to sell who cannot look a prospect squarely in the eye or make a presentation with authority and self-confidence. Knowing your product is not enough. That can be learned. Great salespeople are rare diamonds that should be treated as such.

There should never be a surprise at an annual review.

The person to whom I reported in one job put me in a terrible position when he informed me a week before I was to review an administrative assistant on her job performance. She had been with us for almost five years and did an above average job at the tasks assigned to her. However, she did not fit the image of the person my boss (who came on board two years after she was hired) wanted so he instructed me to give her little or no raise based on her secretarial skills. Frankly, the fact that she was not a skilled letter writer had no bearing on what we needed her for. I was put in the very uncomfortable position of springing on her that we were dissatisfied with her work and she had 90-days to improve dramatically or lose her job. I would have had no problem doing it if we had included it in the job description or if we informed her well in advance that her lack of secretarial skills had become an issue. She had been hired on a different premise and the review discussion was awkward to say the least.

Pay at or above the norm to get and keep the right people.

Times they are a changing! Young people do not expect to stay at the same job for a lifetime; they  move around with much more ease than those of us with gray hair or no hair. If they sense that the remuneration does not align with their value and skill-sets—they’re gone in a heart beat.

It’s more than just the money.

It has always intrigued me how chintzy some business owners are with compliments and words of encouragement when they cost nothing and can do so much. At one time in my working life I was a disk jockey/announcer at a small radio station in Fort Dodge, Iowa. The manager was a good guy but had a mannerism that one of my colleagues pointed out to me and became very obvious after a few months on the job. The ONLY time he would come into the studio to visit was if there was a problem. Not one time in my three-year stint did he poke his head in to say hello or comment on an effective newscast. When he did come in, it was always uncomfortable for him because he tried to make a little small talk followed by, “Say, did you miss a tag on that political commercial?” or “Are you giving the time and temperature as often as you should be?” These types of critique were perfectly valid but would have been so much easier to digest if there was an occasional pat on the back. Fortunately, he was an equal opportunity complainer so none of us took it personally, but I’ve never forgotten how much more pleasant it is for an employee to get an occasional ‘atta boy or atta girl.’

So, good for you. I hope your business continues to grow by leaps and bounds. One sure way of making that happen is to treat the people who represent you and your company with respect and dignity. By doing so, you not only are building loyalty to your organization but in addition are modeling to them how they should treat your prospects and customers.

Bill Sheridan—‘Sheridan Writes’ See my bio under Guest Authors

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