Who’s got your back?
I have been very fortunate in my 15 years of recruitment to work with some great people but in all honesty it took me 12 years to realise that. At the time I often found myself wanting to run before I could walk and I wanted an army at my back with a plan to conquer the recruitment world.
However in my haste I would often look around and wonder who had my back and found more times than not these people were few and far between.
So at the time I blamed them!!!
I thought they were not “as committed”, “as driven”, “as hungry”, or “as motivated” as me but in reality it should have been me who took the blame. It’s easy to blame others when in fact a lot of the time we need to look in rather than out.
What was I doing to encourage them to run with me rather than walk behind me, what was I doing to develop their career rather than just mine. What was I doing to engage them in my crusade!!
It’s easy to say they get paid to do a job but as its states it’s “a job”, most likely it’s not their passion, not their life style, it’s simply “just a job”. So I had to think about what I did as a company owner and what I could do for them so in return what they would / could do for me.
Now as a smaller company this is fairly easy, get to know them, speak with them, listen to them and relate with them. Involve them in the bigger picture and show them ways to develop themselves as part of the business, simple really, well most of the time it is.
But how do you do that when you employ 50 people, 500 people, 5,000 people, or even half a million people. Well the principal is the same, but the practice becomes a lot, lot harder. Build relationships with employees, engage, encourage and develop, look to build a people brand and reputation, work on this as hard as you work on your clients relationships and the company will grow. If you want that 5 employees will soon becomes 50 and so on.
People run your business, they are your eyes and your ears and as my Father once said, good people often take away your fears.
