My managers think I am ruining the company. Okay, that may be putting it a little too strongly. Let’s just say they think there is a better way of doing things.
The issue is hiring from within. We’re a small company with five major divisions. Our tradition is that any manager may offer any employee a job. When a job opens up, there are sometimes as many as four or five applications from inside the company competing with the inevitable blizzard of applications from outside. Managers feel an obligation—the tradition, again—to consider the inside applications first.
The problem is, this can cause disruption in the division that loses the employee. Say a first-class managing editor or a top-producing salesperson in one division applies for an opening in another division. Because our hiring procedures are so strict (multiple interviews, testing, thorough reference checking), in half the cases, the internal candidate will be more qualified than outside candidates. After all, they’ve already been vetted.
So the internal person gets hired. That, of course, leaves a big hole. So the manager who just lost one of her best employees now has to scramble to fill the newly opened position. The cycle repeats itself, like a game of musical chairs, until somebody is stuck going through the more arduous process of hiring an outsider. Meanwhile, the affected managers have to cover for the lost employee or face missed deadlines or lost sales.
A solution was proposed at our most recent manager’s meeting: No employee can be eligible for another job until they’ve worked here a year. (We’re growing so fast that nearly a third of the people here would automatically become ineligible.) Someone else proposed that Manager A (the hirer) get the permission of Manager B (the employer) before approaching the employee. Then all sorts of amendments and what-ifs to both ideas were tossed around.
Meanwhile, I was frowning. To me, the whole discussion was a good example of why I hate policies. We don’t have a vacation policy or a sick-day policy and, in fact, the only policies we do have are imposed by law. My experience is that when you hire people who are excited and committed, you don’t need policies. Hire adults, and you don’t need to treat them like teenagers. If a problem crops up, it means you hired the wrong person.
So I told the managers if they were going to impose a hiring policy, they needed to make it firm (no amendments, no exceptions). But I also said that I was against having a policy at all. Our culture of laissez-faire—roughly translated, doing whatever you need to do—had served us well. Disruption is part of a growing company. If anything, it is our tradition of giving preference to internal candidates that was the problem. New people from the outside bring new ideas, new insights, and a different business experience that reinvigorate how we do things.
It’s an old problem, and I understand how my managers feel. Humans crave order. We build civilizations because we want laws and rules and policies.
But a little publishing company operating in the midst of a chaotic media environment, where disruption is a fact of life, has to be somewhat chaotic itself. The economist Joseph Schumpeter said that the hallmark of capitalism is creative destruction. I hope we don’t go that far, but who’s to say we won’t? All I know is that we have to be flexible and open and quick.
If that means stealing the best person for the job from your own friend and colleague, that’s just playing the hand the best way you can.
It might be politic, though, to buy that person a drink before you do it.
