I’ve been thinking… how many of the people on my corporate bus are still standing?

For quite some time now I have been hearing that it’s vitally important to have the right people on my corporate bus. And in last week’s blog, I pointed out that I also need people in the right seats on that bus. And this one thought generated a torrent of questions.

Does every business have the same seats and in the same number? I would imagine that bigger companies would have a great many more seats. So, how do I know what seats my bus has – or rather, how many seats it needs? And how do I know who should be sitting in those seats and does it make sense for me to design my business around my current employees?

I know that my company will have different resource needs tomorrow than it has today, and its needs will likely exist independently from the people we currently have in the company. So, perhaps my first task would be to understand its current needs and proceed from there.  This means that I need a blueprint for the roles needed for my company to do its work and to thrive – call it an organizational chart, if you will.

I think that each role – or seat on the bus – should be defined by the following:

  • A list of the responsibilities of the role
  • The aptitudes or talents required for the role
  • The learned skills necessary to do the accompanying tasks well
  • The attitudes (or values) required for the role. I think these would be role specific and be in addition to the over-arching corporate values to be embraced by all employees.

Next, I suppose I should place each employee in the appropriate seat. Would you expect me to have seats unfilled? As ours is a growing company, it seems quite likely that would be the case. We can’t afford to hire everyone that our business needs immediately.

But what about if there are empty seats and people still standing? Wouldn’t that mean there is a mismatch between a role and the person we hired?

I think the message here is that I was not strategic in my hiring practices. Maybe I was only thinking about my short-term needs and not my long-term corporate goals. I might need to revisit how I design the bus first and then fit people into the appropriate seats. I think that I still have some work to do.

What do you think?

Know Your Business is the second axiom we study in our program. We evaluate our current team so that we can design our future team and help everyone become the people that they are meant to be and the business can thrive as a result.    

Until tomorrow, GUNG Ho friends!