Hiring Friends And Family

Evaluate your Hiring Policies

Ideally you should hire the best person for the job. But a lot of times, when making the decision to hire a friend or family member, the individual involved is often NOT the best person for the job. How do you deal with that knowledge? Is this really the BIG business problem it’s made out to be? No matter what stage in your business you are, just starting or three years down the line, you will find yourself confronted with this question. I’m of the opinion that it is perfectly normal and even human nature to want to protect the people that matter to you. You want to ensure they have fulfillment and income. So as long as you are conscious of their deficiencies when you hire them, I think you can let go of the immense guilt that comes with this decision. Here are some other things to keep in mind. Who Do You Serve? I’m a big believer in keeping business decisions, purely business. This gets complicated when the friends and family are in the mix. You have to work really hard to keep the main thing the MAIN thing. It’s a continuous struggle, but your business decisions must serve to improve your business. Discipline …To give honest feedback I say go for it if you are disciplined to give honest feedback no matter how hard or uncomfortable the decision. But you can’t simply ‘believe’ you have this discipline. Before you comfortably hire a friend or family member, you need to be able to point out to specific examples where you’ve ‘confronted’ someone with a truth that you know is difficult for them to hear. …To end it if necessary You can’t study a problem to death. So how then do you know it’s time to let that friend or family friend go? I always ask myself, ‘of the most painful problems I am solving right now, is this person at the root cause? Have I tried to encourage them to correct their deficiencies? If the answers are yes then it’s important to be decisive. Have a Thick Skin for the Backlash People are going to have some things to say if things get messy, which they sometimes do. It might be hard right now to conceive of the many ways this could twist and turn. But believe me, the possibilities are endless. Just be ready. There’s a lot of grey in this kind of decision-making, but time has shown me that the real work of business is people. People are the work. So yes this issue of friends and family presents itself as a unique problem, it’s really another people problem (although sometimes with more personal consequences). If you’re continuously working hard at being a good manager of people, then you’ll be well prepared to deal with this dilemma if it comes your way.

Wonuola Okoye

Principal Coach

Big Startup