“Professional” does *Not* have to mean “Enterprise”

What does “Professional Management” mean to you? It’s not an idle question, because the answer can have significant impact on your workplace environment. Think about it this way — if your company has had any degree of success, then, at some point, it’s probably going to bring in a “grownup” to deal with the inevitable issues around growth. These may be current issues (“we need to scale our sales and marketing efforts”), or upcoming ones (“we’ll need a *real* customer support organization”), but regardless, you’ll need to bring in someone who has learned from their mistakes elsewhere .

In this situation, there are typically two different approaches that can get taken here. You can bring in someone who has cut their teeth in StartupLand,and has experience growing small companies into larger ones, and can do the same for you. Or, you can bring in someone from EnterpriseWorld, who has seen how things work at scale, and can apply those lessons to your organization. Mind you, these aren’t actually exclusive choices, there is an entire gamut in between. However, for the sake of clarity, we’ll go with these two as choices.

But first, some clarity around definitions and incentives —

• • StartupLand refer to small companies — just a handful of peoples, who know each other, with virtually no management overhead (there are a lot of titles though¹ ) and straightforward products/services in which any individual’s contribution is pretty obvious (“Alice wrote the code, Bob marketed it, Carol sold it, and David does support”).
  In this environment, the key is to deliver! Seriously, if you deliver, the company lives on to fight another day, if you don’t, well, no company, no politics .
• • EnterpriseWorld refers to really large companies — thousands of peoples, many many layers of management, and complex products/services in which any individual’s contribution is de minimus, and there is very little you can do to positively impact the company as a whole. Measuring your individual contribution as part of this goal is very, very hard.
  In this environment, the key is to not f**k up! Survival consists of making sure that you can’t be blamed for anything, and growth comes from your ability to find fault in other’s work (“clearing the field” so to speak).

You’ll find that the availability of experienced StartupWorld professionals is really quite limited, and the reason has everything to do with Supply and Demand. There are a lot of startups, and the vast majority of them fail. Which basically translates to the number of professionals in successful startups is vastly outnumbered by the number of startups that need them².
On the other hand, there is essentially an unlimited supply of professionals available from EnterpriseWorld. Thanks to multiple levels of management and huge budgets, finding someone from there who has managed large teams with multi-million dollar budgets is, well, trivial.

Which leads us back to your choice on the type of Professional Management you want to bring in. If you give in, and settle for someone from EnterpriseWorld, well, it might work, but you’re much much more likely to seriously damage your company culture, employee morale, and your prospects for success.

A culture of taking credit and deflecting blame, while essential for survival in the enterprise, can be toxic and fatal in small companies. When you next have an Outage— and make no mistake about it, you will! — what you want to be doing is blameless introspection and retrospectives. However, what you will end up doing is figuring out who to blame, and/or how best to avoid the blame! The inevitable result will be that you hemorrhage your best employees, leaving only those people behind who are best at staying under the radar and/or avoiding blame.

So yeah, don’t fall into that trap. Reflect on the type of organization you are building, and make sure that you hire in accordance with those principles!

And yes, if you’ve already brought someone in from EnterpriseWorld, you might want to check and see if things are already going south. Ask yourself the following questions

• • How often do they call out their own wins, as compared to those of others?
• • How willing are they to accept the responsibility for losses? How often do they bring up other people’s faults? Remember, these are political actors — if you hear “For Brutus is an Honorable man”, remember that it’s actually casting blame!
• • Do they make snide remarks — even if just in jest! — about others in the organization? About people from their past?
• • Are they — always — the hero of their own stories from their past?
• • What is the Ass-covering to Introspection ration?

The answers should tell you a lot about who they are, and where your company is headed!

1. 1. It’s amazing how StartupLand can simultaneously embrace egalitarianism and entitlement. Titles don’t matter to anyone, and yet, everybody is a CXO of some kind .
2. 2. Let’s not get caught up in why startups succeed, be it talent, product, luck, or whatever, and the role of professionals in it. The bottom line is that there are far far fewer professionals from successful startups than there are startups.