A. One of the biggest ones I’ve learned, from working at Microsoft, was that failure is O.K. because of the lessons you learn. I think it’s O.K. for people to swing hard for the fences as long as there’s brutal honesty and no cover-up. I encourage it among my employees — to test things, to try things, but to not make the same mistakes twice. I don’t like cover-up.
Q. What about influences of your parents?
A. It was their work ethic. My parents were tireless volunteers. My father was a doctor and my mom was a schoolteacher. I don’t recall my dad ever not going to work, or even being sick. My mom was tireless as well. She’s a strong woman. She sticks up for what she believes in. It was just having a role model of someone who takes initiative. We have a joke in our family: you need to put your hand in your lap at some point, and stop raising it to volunteer for things.
Q. When you’re hiring people, what qualities are you looking for?
A. I’m looking for a can-do attitude. We’re growing fast, things change, and they don’t exactly happen the way they’re supposed to every single day. It’s about adaptability. It’s about being happy. It’s about finding people who are happy and bringing them into your culture. I think that’s very important.
Q. What questions do you ask people?
A. I like to know what they’re passionate about, what interests them, what kind of books they like to read — just, over all, what does their life look like? I’m looking for balanced people who have a sense of pleasure in their lives, and that it’s not just all work. I hate hearing, “My weakness is that I’m a workaholic.”
Q. Tell me your thoughts on culture.
A. I think we’re at this evolutionary time in business where it’s all about people. We have to embrace that and embrace people’s purpose and their souls to be successful in business. Because if they’re just coming to work to be a body and they’re on a treadmill all day, then you won’t have a happy culture if you don’t tap into what is really meaningful for them in life. So I’m very focused on that.
Q. You’ve got how many employees now?
A. About 75.
Q. Talk about some of the challenges you’ve faced as you’ve grown, in terms of culture and leadership.
A. When you start out, it’s kind of a family. It was important for us to hold on to the culture that we started with, which was very fun and energetic and entrepreneurial. We could get things done so fast, and there wasn’t a lot of bureaucracy. That’s what a start-up looks like; everyone’s wearing a hundred hats. Then things start to need focus and depth, and that’s when that first inflection point of H.R. really hits — when you need specialists who go deep and know how to manage people and can build a team around a particular discipline, whether it’s merchandising or sourcing. That’s when you see a transition in your culture.
Q. How many employees did you have when you sensed the need for that shift?
A. Around 30 to 35.
Q. What started you thinking that a change was necessary?
A. Just that the org chart needed some recalibration, as we called it. It needed to be cleaned up — processes and clarity of roles needed a lot of fine-tuning. When you go from people wearing a hundred hats to people wearing one, it’s a big leap. It takes time. And it’s hard to start taking roles away from people that they’ve owned for the last two years without them feeling like they’ve failed, or without them feeling insecure about it. I think you could create a class in business school about the process around this.
Q. So how do you do that?
A. You have to really manage it from the beginning. You don’t give out titles so early on, unless a person deserves a title based on where they came from. There are a lot of lessons. I can see why a lot of investors particularly like to invest in second-time entrepreneurs.
You always need entrepreneurial people who can wear a hundred hats forever. It’s just finding the right positions for them, because they’re fantastic. They make stuff happen. And then you bring in process-oriented people who have deep backgrounds in a particular area of the business. You need that balance of both those types to build your organization. But you have to be careful, because the more process you get, the slower and more bureaucratic and less nimble you get. Things can get bogged down. You want to start a new initiative, and then there are 15 people in a room discussing it. I think keeping that entrepreneurial ability alive in a company is really important.
Q. What’s your approach?
A. We go rogue. We tell people that if there’s an innovative project we’re working on, it’s going to be a small team. You need to be disruptive. I think entrepreneurial people can be very troublesome to certain organizations if they’re constantly disrupting processes. Of course, you need process. You need people knowing exactly what they’re doing every day to deliver the plan. So it’s important that when you do have disruptive, innovative projects, they should literally not be happening inside the organization, so that the current state of the organization is not turned upside down because of it.
Q. What’s the right number of people to have on a project team?
A. Ideally no more than four. It depends on the project, but somebody’s got to own it. Two to four people on an innovative project is more than plenty. After all, how many companies get started with more than that? Small working groups are very efficient. It’s about making sure people understand where decisions lie.
Q. Your advice for college graduates?
A. I learned a lot working for other companies before I started my own. There’s such value in working for different-size companies — having the experience of working for a large company, and then working inside a small company. The best people I have today have done both.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/business/lily-kanter-on-working-in-small-entrepreneurial-groups.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
Speak Your Mind
You must be logged in to post a comment.