A Good Place To Work

Friday Freebie 6: make your department and/or company “A Good Place to Work”.

Ben Horowitz’s popular book “The Hard Thing About Hard Things” - what a read. In my 20+years working, there are a lot of gems of wisdom and I recommend the book. With it you won’t be shell shocked when a company lifecycle or talent issue pops up. I liked the chapter titled “A Good Place to Work”.

Ben says, ‘In good orgs, people can focus on their work + be confident that if they get their work done, good things will happen for both the org+them personally. It’s a true pleasure to work in an org such as this. You can wake up knowing the work you do will be effective, efficient, make a difference for the org+you.” The job is motivating+fulfilling.

‘In a poor org…people spend their time fighting org boundaries, infighting, +broke processes. You aren’t clear what your job is so there is no way to know if you’re getting their job done or not.” In the miracle case the job gets done, it’ll take ridiculous hours, you’ll have no idea what it means for the company and ‘to make it worse+rub salt in the wound, if you work up the courage to tell management how f*cked up the situation is, the manager denies the problem, defends status quo, ignores the problem.”

Application: having worked at startups, small businesses, and global giants - with direct access to execs + day to day interaction in the trenches with doers - I’ve seen the booms+busts and behind the curtain- this book is spot on across so many issues. From hiring, to leadership, to layoffs, to survival, and thriving- it’s a good spin. I’ve been at good and bad places with good and bad managers, the quality of work and collaboration cannot peak in bad places, good places=good results.

Secondly, with layoffs popping off left and right - “A Good Place to Work” should remind competent value adding folks that:

(a)there is always room for improvement in the work place and in your manament and leadership;

(b) good workplaces are as or more important than salary or tilt - but you can have all 3;

(c) if you’re somewhere that doesn’t have one there is always somewhere better.

This chapter is a good reminder that good work environments result in better/easier/sustainable profits and success. Happy employees will be better with suppliers and customers (and each other). Turnover is costly. Numb and jaded folks don’t efficiently / effectively produce.

Having gone through a lot of the uncomfortable corporate stuff and bumped into some of robocop like personalities set out in this book but also the gems of leaders and developers, this book is clutch.

I hope orgs are more responsible with money+hiring in the good times, helpful / tactful during layoffs, and more creative than increasing customer costs and reducing headcount to make profits.

Conscious capitalism: Reputation is important+Relationships matter: https://lnkd.in/eD3953_V

Cheers and good luck,

B