Category: Leadership

Rand posted last night about his thoughts on firing employees and how SEOmoz handles it. Having managed teams and left companies of my own choice, I found it to be an interesting read. On one hand though, talking about the financial, emotional, and team impacts of firing leaves the picture incomplete if you don’t look at how someone choosing to leave a company also affects everyone.

Companies and individuals are rarely transparent about the reasons people quit though, which I honestly find disturbing, but I think that too many employees are concerned about slander, libel, defamation, etc and are simply unsure about the legality around sharing information about why they left a company, so they keep their mouths shut.

I’ve never been averse to leaving a company – or any relationship for that matter – when I believed that it was the best thing. That being said, leaving a company at the first sign of disagreement or problems is counter-productive as well. It leaves you without the ability to deal with complex personal and professional conflicts, a track record that might make you look like a mercenary, and a lack of experience in being part of a company for a long period and everything that goes along with growing and changing with it.

Running away versus walking away

A former manager of mine once made a clear distinction between leaving a company because you need to get away and leaving a company because there’s something they can’t give you. He called it “running away versus walking away.” The difference between the two is this:

1. Your friend tells you he’s going to start looking for a new job because he’s unhappy at his current one.
2. Your friend tells you he was approached by a new company with a really interesting position, or really great pay, or something else enticing.

In the first case, there is a 90% chance that your friend will find he’s still not happy at his new company. Why? Because he didn’t go to the new company because of something about them – because he loved their mission or because it was always his dream to work there. Instead, he went there to get away from a problem. In the second case, there’s a 90% chance that your friend will find happiness because he’s not running away from something and is able to better decide what’s right for him, if the new company will give him what he needs to leave somewhere that he is already happy.

When an employee tells me they have a problem, this is a sign that I have a chance to fix things. If he doesn’t like working with me, I can attempt to change our relationship, have him report to someone else, or make some other change. If he doesn’t like working with certain coworkers, I can try to limit their contact or can facilitate repairing a damaged relationship. If he wants to leave after giving me a chance though, running from the company almost certainly ensures that she’s not going to find happiness, so I always recommend that you be as open and honest as possible with your management along the way, and if in the end there is still a problem, they should help ease you out of the company and into a better situation. Sadly, I believe that most people do not feel they can trust their management enough to be open with them and this is one reason that so many go running from rather than walking from or running toward.

I have in the past sent job openings at other companies to my own staff members when I knew they could make more money somewhere else, they would be happier there, or they would get something they needed that I/we could not provide. I have also introduced them to hiring managers and recruiters looking for their skills. Being able to be open, honest, and helpful with my teams has ensured that as few gaps as possible were left when they departed and that they found what they were looking for. Unfortunately, I have also had employees leave without me having the opportunity to fix problems and/or support them in their search, and sadly in every case, I’ve found out later that that next job they took wasn’t right either.

Guidelines for employees before quitting

• Talk to your boss or her boss if you’re not comfortable with your boss. This can make you feel very vulnerable. I know. I’ve been through. “What happens if he tells my boss? Are they going to talk? Can I trust him? If I tell him I hate working for my boss, they’ll probably just get rid of me, right?” Honestly in most companies, firing a good employee that just has a few problems is greatly frowned upon. Not only is it bad for the manager’s and company’s reputations, it’s also terrible for morale. Managers know this, and if you tell them that you have a legitimate problem, they will do their best to address it.
• Make sure you’re safe if the worst happens. It’s rare, but it does happen that you’re open and you get fired, so before you speak to someone that you’re not sure you can trust, make sure you have your finances in order and know what you would do for work if you were to suddenly lose your job. This could be reaching out to contacts and saying that you’re looking to consult, getting your resume out to prospective employers, or simply checking that your bank account has 6 months of expenses to get you through a period of unemployment.
• Put in the time to fix the problems. It’s not enough to talk to someone. You have to work on yourself to make things better. I remember listening to an audiobook a while back in which the author stated that only 6% of relationships that become condescending ever get turned back around, and while you can think that’s a sign that it’s not worth working through problems, I interpret it as the exact opposite. I think that only 6% of condescending relationships get better because one or both parties don’t work on themselves to find the solution.
• Look elsewhere in your company for opportunities. If you’re part of a big enough company, it’s very likely that you can more from one department to another to get the pay you want, no longer report to a bad manager, or otherwise get what you need.
• Don’t be a dick when you quit. Having been on both sides of the quitting desk, I can tell you how much it sucks for the manager, the employee, and the other team members when someone quits without giving the company a chance to address the problems. Don’t tell your manager on the day you give notice, “I’m leaving because I hate that you do X, Y, and Z.” She can’t fix anything at that point. Be as open as possible, but don’t damage relationships anymore than they might already be. If you have to bite your tongue, just tell her that it’s time for you to move on or that you have an opportunity you can’t pass up.
• Keep your formal resignation simple. HR people and experienced managers know that, much like when you deal with the cops, anything you say, write, or otherwise communicate when quitting can be used against you in the future, so don’t put that you’re leaving the company because of disagreements with management if you never talked to them about the problems because they might decide to share that little tidbit of information with a potential future employer that calls to check your work history. Of course, most companies are concerned about potential defamation issues and so shy away from this, but some aren’t, and you don’t want to be their victim.

Just as Rand says that SEOmoz’s firing process is amazingly hard, giving your company and boss a chance to rectify things, while as well working on your own responsibility and reactions in these situations, is also extremely hard, but being both an employee and a manager, I’ve found that you get so much more out of working with people to find solutions than you do out of avoiding or otherwise not addressing problems.

I wasn’t familiar The Lean Startup movement until this year, which is one reason that I didn’t push back when I once joined a company (this was before the book but after the movement had a name), and my boss told me that they didn’t want to buy me a laptop because they were “trying to do the whole Lean Startup thing.” Come to find out later that my boss wasn’t really familiar with the Lean Startup concepts either and just assumed that it meant that you should be a cheap ass.

This is the first problem with being a Lean Startup. People think that just because they understand the words in the name of the approach or idea that they understand the concept. I’ve encountered the same issue with things like The Tipping Point or Blink.

Just because you understand the words in a name does not mean that you understand the concept itself.

This is how to build a broken Lean Startup machine.

1. Don’t even bother to read the book, and assume you know the principles held within. It is 2012 after all. The book came out in 2011, so you don’t even, like I did, have to google it and read a bunch of disparate articles to figure out what it’s all about. You can get all of the information in one handy package.
2. Insist on rapid prototyping without customer feedback.
3. Ensure top-down management and decision-making.
4. Force everything to move fast… even things that take longer to develop like content or a brand.
5. Forget about testing.

It blows my mind – it really does – that people waste money and time jumping from movement to movement without ever fully embracing and learning the concepts behind them, but then, this shouldn’t be all that shocking. A retiring consultant friend of mine once told me:

If you’re at an organization that has gone through restructuring or changes in mission or vision every few years, just look at the bookshelves of the executives. You’ll notice that rudderless companies make a major change to their business every time an influential book comes out and a new movement starts.

And, I couldn’t agree more. The frustrating thing is when changing priorities are coupled with incompetence and misunderstanding. That reduces morale and turns your employees into disheartened, dispassionate workers.

This is how to build a working Lean Startup process.

Be smart. Be nimble. Give the people on the ground, doing the work, the power. Invite your customers in. A/B test smartly with a plan, and make it possible to turn on A/B tests only for a segment of your customers. Most importantly, let go of the reigns.

Whether it’s being a Lean Startup, adopting something older like Just In Time or whatever else comes next, the thing that will torpedo your business more often than not in a time period when every employee has access to social media and is approached by customers wanting help is not letting them act on your behalf and live out their passion through your brand, but rather dictating to them how things should always be done.

One of the most consistent misconceptions non-marketers have about marketing, whether in-house or through an agency, is that us marketers can “do marketing” for free. I’ve had non-marketing managers tell me, “We need to cut the marketing budget and still hit our numbers.” I’ve also had clients ask, “What can we do for free?”

“We’ve never spent a dollar on marketing.”

It seems like every time you see a successful startup founder talking about Pandora, or Pinterest, or Hit-Startup-X, they say, “We’ve never spent a dollar on marketing, and we’ve grown our business successfully.”

Yet, they have a CMO, VP of Marketing, marketing associates, an email tool, and more, don’t they? Don’t they?

But unfortunately, too many people listen to the startup folks say these things and think that marketing should be free. After all, viral is free, isn’t it? Email is free, isn’t it? Landing pages, SEO, community management, and more are free, aren’t they?

No. No, marketing is not free.

Of all the things that I’ve ever done in marketing, nothing that was successful was ever free… not even close. I ran one email program for a client that generated enough revenue in two emails to cover their entire annual marketing budget, but that involved writers, designers, coders, and more. Another client spent tens of thousands of dollars every month just on analytics around their market and competitors in an effort to provide the best customer service in the industry, and guess what, they’re considered to one of the best as a result.

The best marketing involves an investment just like the best product development, manufacturing, sales, and more all involve an investment. Just hiring people and telling them to make due without any budget isn’t going to get you very far. You’d be better served by not hiring a marketer at all and spending the money on simply creating a product that begs to be talked about, that begs to be loved, and has to be shared with friends and family.

For that matter, why not just make a great product in the first place?

The best marketing is a great product, and when you have a great product, it makes not spending money on advertising, tools, writers, and more so much easier. Your marketing person can at least get by with doing their own outreach, creating their own landing pages, guest blogging, and more all with their own time and no additional expense. Even though all of that is extremely time consuming, your great product at least allows their “free” efforts to have some legs.

But, if you can’t ensure that your product is great in the first place, telling your in-house people or your agency that they need to cut their budget and still hit performance goals is just plain crazy.

I’ve left jobs I loved and jobs I hated. Leaving both types sucks, but leaving a job I love makes me feel sick. I remember coming to the decision that it was time to leave a great job for a new opportunity and really feeling pained. It got even worse when I told my boss.

The questions and self doubt:

• Am I making the right decision?
• Did I just burn my bridges?
• What happens if I’m wrong?

It’s terrible. It really is.

Being on the other side is really weird too though. I’ve had people that work for me quit and nearly quit for heaps of reasons:

1. A better opportunity came up.
2. They weren’t happy about something with their current job.
3. Something in their life changed and they couldn’t keep their job anymore.

Sometimes, you can keep people from leaving.

But, why do it? In the case that your employee found a better opportunity, it’s good for both parties to wish them well and end your working relationship on a good note. Sure, it’s flattering to them if you try to keep them, but if they decide to stay and then realize that they made a mistake, you’ve got a problem.

If your employee isn’t happy about something with their job and they gotten to the point they’re willing to quit, this shows at least one of two things and possibly both.

1. Whatever it is is so bad that you won’t be able to satisfactorily change it.
2. Your employee waited so long to bring it to your attention (or at least bring the dire nature of it) that this might show you that you don’t have a relationship where they’re willing or able to speak openly with you.

In either case, it doesn’t matter whether it’s compensation, management style, cultural fit, growth opportunities, or anything else. Your employee has chosen to leave in order to get away from something rather than to get closer to something, and trying to keep them is no guarantee that things will change no matter how hard you try.

In the third case, there are few instances when you can keep an employee that chooses to leave their job due to a life change, and the only legitimate one that I’ve ever encountered is an employee relocating for their spouse. That one was easy, “We’d love to keep you if you’re okay with working remotely.” “Yeah, that’d be great.” “Awesome. Consider it done.”

In all other cases I’ve encountered though, how can you keep a mother that wants to be homes with her children, a son that wants to take care of a sick family member, and so on from doing so without feeling bad and potentially engendering some ill will? You can’t.

My preference is to avoid the conversation altogether.

If you think your employee is considering leaving, talk to them about it. This is the time to find out if you need to let someone go or make changes to keep them. It’s too late when they’re the one to approach you.

If you’re the one leaving, talk to your boss early. Telling them about problems that you have with them, the company, or your position on the same day you say that you’re quitting is really crappy. You don’t give them any opportunity to change. If you’ve made the decision to go, make it clear to them that, while you would love to stay, your decision is for the best, and you’d like to be clear. You’re leaving.

Not being open and honest early can burn bridges and cause a lot of bad decisions down the road. Once your or your employee have made a decision to leave though, the decision has been made. There’s almost no talking to be done. Just make the parting as easy as possible.

Companies like SEOmoz and HubSpot make marketing look easy. Not only do a number of their employees blog and participate in relevant conversations on other blogs, Quora, and a number of other sites, but they also have very responsive social media outlets on Facebook and Twitter. Seeing that and then reading things like this from my friend Marcus make some of us think, “We need to do that. I could do that. Let’s do it.”

After all, if you can make everyone in your company a marketer, that will not only reduce marketing’s workload, but also give you so much more content and perspectives to work with, right? Right? Wrong.

Good marketing requires planning and coordination.

The thing that you don’t think about when you read social media books and blogs about new marketing is that the central leadership role of the CMO, CCO, VPM, or even just community manager is more important than ever. Without standards and guidelines and then a quality filter (ie. your head of marketing), blog posts go out that have bad formatting, terrible writing, and are off message; emails get sent that don’t align with your strategy; and updates get posted to Twitter and Facebook that ultimately make you look bad.

I won’t link to any examples because there’s no need to shame anyone, but have you ever seen something from a company in social media, email, on a blog, etc and thought, “That’s a little weird coming from them”? There’s a good chance that company tried to make someone a marketer, when they really weren’t, and didn’t put the proper planning and coordination in place to ensure that their content aligned with the business’ goals.

Sadly, the marketing problem is often the CEO.

I’ve seen too many organizations where the CEO charged in with passion, which is great, and promptly messed everything up, which is not great.

Making everyone a marketer doesn’t mean there should no longer be internal controls, guidelines, filters, or a gatekeeper. Just because your CEO calls the shots doesn’t mean that your lowly community manager doesn’t know better how your blog subscribers will react to his writing, so when you do try to make everyone a marketer, your CEO might have to slow down and be forced to take a No or simply just guidance from the real marketers.

Get yourself a schedule, a gatekeeper, some training, and the power to tell people No.

It’s so easy to avoid this problem too. As long as your CEO recognizes the need for quality and consistency, she should be willing to stick to a plan. Once you have the CEO on board, you can make everyone a marketer and still ensure that you don’t have those embarrassing things happen.

If not though, all bets are off.

Last year at TED, Eli Pariser gave a talk on how Google, Facebook, and other internet-based services are increasingly filtering the web to only show up things that we generally agree with and are interested in.

 

In a world increasingly concerned with happiness and relevancy and speed, how do you learn something new if information is constantly being filtered for you?

You look like the sum of your actions.

I’m a married, middle class, liberal, educated, white guy, marketer that runs, rides bikes, and plays guitar now and then, so what types of things do you think I Google? Here are a few examples from the last few months:

• Change a rear derailleur cable
• New Balance Minimus
• Stratocaster history
• Obama’s staff
• Average MBA age
• Twitter press releases
• etc etc etc

And, what kind of people do you think I friend on Facebook and what type of statuses do I tend to like, share, or comment on more than others?

So, you can see that, even if I wanted information outside of my comfort zone, Google and Facebook would be unlikely to give it to me because they want to keep me happy with their services and therefore try to keep them as relevant as possible by showing me what they think makes me happy. Let’s say that my colleague implores me to learn more about the Republican presidential candidates because he believes I should be more open minded, so I google them. More than likely, Daily Kos will outrank Fox News in my search results even if Fox News has the overall better page for my search. Why? Because, Google thinks I’d be happier with their service if I get a search result that suits my interests.

So, maybe I avoid Google and post a Facebook status, “Can someone please tell me about some good ideas the Republican presidential candidates have?” Which of my friends are more likely to see my status and even be able to respond? The ones that have the most in common with me, which Facebook judges based on whom I interact with most frequently, and if my conservative friends aren’t as likely to see my question, I’m not likely to get the best possible answer, but I’ll never know that because I don’t know what I don’t know. I can’t see the missing information. I only know that, when I get an answer, I get an answer – not whether or not it is THE BEST answer.

Let your thoughts be your actions.

Most of us spend 8+ hours every day in front of a computer screen. If we sleep an average of 8 hours every night, that leaves at most 8 hours for commuting, eating, exercising, spending time with family, and everything else, so if we’re really lucky, we might get one or two hours every day where our information sources are not being actively filtered – one or two hours every day when we can see billboards, commercials, magazine articles, friends, and more that bring us new or conflicting ideas. But, do we go out of our way to find competing opinions and ideas, to introduce ourselves to something outside of our comfort zone? No.

Yet, we ask ourselves questions about other’s politics, their religious beliefs, their sexuality, their cultures, and more. We’re just too busy and not really interested enough in spending the time to learn about them, and this leads our information gateways – Google and Facebook – to increasingly believe that we are what we do and not what we think, but we can change that.

Try this exercise for one day – just one day.

Whenever you think about anything around which you have an opinion, write in a notebook, make an evernote, send yourself a text, or somehow otherwise make note of it. Later in the day, do both of these things. Go to a search engine you never use – Bing, DuckDuckGo, Blekko, etc – and learn about an opposing opinion AND ask the most informed person you know for a 2 minute CliffsNotes version of the other side of the story.

That day won’t be too extremely shocking. It’s the next day or week that really starts to open your eyes.

The next day, skip reading your normal news or listening to your normal radio station and go back to those websites and friends that gave you answers and now read about and ask about more and different topics. Even if you don’t agree with the viewpoints you’re given, you’ll find yourself more informed and less filtered by what a machine thinks you want.

I tried this while living overseas in 2004 – though I’ll admit that personalization at that point was very minimal – and I’ve never gone back. Sure, I use Google while logged in without being too concerned, and I have largely friends like me on Facebook, but I no longer rely on the filters to bring me the best information. I now have a habit of going to websites I don’t agree with to get their point of view and asking friends I might have otherwise just dismissed or argued with to help me understand the full picture better.

Be deliberate and diligent.

In Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin and Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, both authors discuss that deliberate practice – and lots of it – is often one of the largest contributing factors to world class achievement. Much the same, the development of your mind and life – such that you are not a filtered, sheltered, and biased human being – depends on you taking the approach above and applying it every day.

Don’t like bleeding heart liberals? Fine, but how will you ever know why if you don’t stay informed (outside of your bubble) about them. Hate the Defense of Marriage movement? Fine, but have you gone outside your liberal village to find out what really drives those people? If you don’t ever do that, how can you make an informed decision about why and whether or not to hate?

This goes beyond politics.

Politics is obviously an easy example, but progressing in music, sports, your career, and other things hinges on two things:

1. Your ability to go outside your comfort zone.
2. Your ability to stick to it when everyone else gives up.

Nothing more and nothing less will ensure that you learn something new better, faster, and more effectively than anyone else around.

In September, Seth Godin wrote about Talker’s Block and how no one gets it – unlike Writer’s Block – because we’re so accustomed to speaking and having our words mean little. They rarely get recorded and come back to bite us so we don’t have to get over fears of talking and therefore never get Talker’s Block.

As a little FYI, I’m not one of those do-something-every-day-that-scares-the-shit-out-of-you guys. Those people annoy the crap out of me, but some of them don’t simply do things that scare themselves just to satisfy the edict. They actually think about the outcomes of their efforts, and for that, I won’t go so far as to say that movement is stupid.

You are a fearful thing

Whether it’s spiders, or snakes, or tigers, or something else, you are afraid of it. Yet, when was the last time you were in a situation where one of those could have actually harmed you? Similarly, if you are one of the great majority, you fear speaking in front of people more than death.

Both of these two types of fears are born into every human being. Our ancestors didn’t have guns or armor or vehicles or houses. They huddle under lean-tos for shelter and ran at the first sight or sound of danger. What else could they do? They were weak compared to the true predators surrounding them. At the same time, many cultures promoted homogenization of thought and character, so stepping out of line by saying or doing something different caused you to be shunned and socially punished, which could result in less food, attention, mating opportunities, wealth, and more.

And, these fears stay with us. Society and our own nature promote them.

How do you get over fears?

Number one – There is nothing to fear.

I spend a lot of time teaching others – speaking, training, presenting, developing my team, coaching teens, and more – and I’ve been very fortunate to not only only be skilled at a few things, but to also have had a life thus far that provides me with opportunities to try lots of things. I hope that’s not bragging. I’ve been very fortunate. I:

• moved overseas by myself with no job and found myself working on a goat milk farm.
• literally almost caused my own death skydiving.
• have been hit by a car
• impaled my abdomen on a tree branch when falling from a tree.
• fell over 50 feet from a tree a different time and walked away with only a broken wrist.
• and more.

I say all that to put into perspective that I have fears, but I get over them, and when things go wrong, I survive, and you will too. What’s to fear about approaching a celebrity or hot chick (which I don’t do because I’m married) or speaking in front of a crowd when I nearly plunged to my death from 750 feet? Why not support someone that dreams to move overseas when I’ve done it with no plan and no experience and know what it’s like? How about helping people get over fears of speaking in front of others? The people in the audience are more afraid than they are.

Your fears of almost everything are born into you. You fear speaking up for yourself in a meeting because your conditioning tells you not to. You fear approaching the A-lister because you’re worried about being judged. You shrink from the spider in your apartment, but can’t explain why. But, the consequences of those things are nothing nowadays. What happens if you speak up for yourself? Your case is heard. What happens if the A-lister rejects you? Nothing. They’re not in your circle and they don’t influence your friends. What’s that spider going to do? Bite you? You can squish it.

Number two – Act on your fears.

If you’ve ever worked with kids, you know what it’s like to say, “There’s nothing to be afraid of.” Yet, you still fear. Heck, I still fear, but one big difference between the winners and the losers is that winners don’t let fear hold them back. Losers do. You don’t have to “do something that scares the shit out of you every day,” but you have to train yourself to recognize the reality of your fear.

Irrational or inconsequential fear should be acted upon immediately. The longer you let yourself not talk to that person because you’re afraid, the harder it becomes, but the sooner you say something to them, the sooner you know whether or not it was a good idea. And, if you’re successful, you gain more confidence for the next time. If you’re not successful, you have more information to improve the next time.

What do you get if you don’t act? NOTHING.

Above, I listed a number of the bad things that have happened to me, but seriously, am I still here? Am a smart and confident person? Yes, and you are too when you act on your fears.

What do you have to lose if you try to get over your fears?

Neither of us are stupid. We’re not going to put ourselves in harm’s way without being reasonably certain that the likelihood of something going terribly wrong is miniscule.

Knowing that, what’s stopping you?

“Whatever you say, boss.”

Okay, they don’t have to be those exact words, but you know that, as a manager, you have problems as soon as you start to hear anything like that.

Which of your conversations are crucial?

I read a great book not long ago on the topic of crucial conversations. One of the big things that stuck with me was the idea of Fight or Flight.

When we have personal conflicts that we are not willing to discuss or deal with, the most frequent responses are Fight and Flight. In Fight, we try to justify, tell the other person why they’re wrong, and otherwise make a disagreement worse by being aggressive, uncooperative, or attacking. In Flight, we don’t deal with the problem. Instead, we ignore it or just give in.

If you can’t think of a time when you’ve experienced Flight, just recall anytime that you didn’t agree with someone’s choice, and when things went badly, you said, “Hey, I didn’t make that decision.” If you just let the person make the decision without talking with them about your thoughts. You were in Flight mode. If you tried to talk to them, but ended up arguing instead of really communicating, you were in Fight mode.

Building a cohesive team

For years, you’ve been told about the importance of building a strong team with a unique culture and people that share a vision. The thing that baffles me is the headstrong managers that think this means just getting everyone to go along with their vision. It’s like some of us tell ourselves, “If everyone says yes, I’ve done my job.”

In most cases, no. No, you haven’t.

Getting people to agree with you has little to do with them saying yes and a lot to do with them feeling yes. Think about it. How many times have you disagreed with someone and eventually said, “Alright, whatever you want. Do it your way”? That is flight, and that kills teams.

Your people are not unthinking objects.

I read once that people with autism have a difficult time viewing others as more than objects in their environment – no different from a pen or a door. If the other person does not explicitly say what they are thinking or what they want, the man (or woman) with autism can’t interpret what is left unsaid, and stay with me here, this is where managers go wrong. The worst managers in this respect are high energy and high passion. They do a bad job reading their people because they are so busy and so fast moving that they don’t take the time to notice what their employees are really saying when they say, “Whatever you say, boss.”

So, while high energy and passion work well on the individual level, they can often be team killers.

Often, consensus is not necessary, but when you say you value it and that it’s important to your team moving forward, don’t be stupid and just stop at yes. You have to know that your team actually believes in the direction you move them. Otherwise, you end up with a lot of yesses and little, to no, actual support. Going down that path leads you to a team of disheartened, unthinking, uncaring employees lead by a clueless leader with a false sense of Team.

The answer

Every time you communicate with your people from today onward get to a shared yes, and don’t force agreement. Teams don’t succeed as a result of one person, but they do fail as a result of one person – You, the boss. So, if you can’t get to a shared yes when it’s necessary, step back and begin a conversation. Don’t force your views. Don’t justify. Don’t argue, and don’t deal with any of that from your people.

Require and expect genuine, thoughtful conversation, and accept that while you won’t always get it, you are also not always right – whether your people say, “Whatever you say, boss,” or not.

In 2010, Seth Godin wrote about hourly work versus linchpin work. Essentially, his thesis is that you should pay someone a fair hourly rate when there are substitutes for what they do – his example being when you need to see a podiatrists and there happen to be 6 good ones in town – and that you should pay someone for the value (to you) of the work being done when there are no substitutes regardless of how much time it takes them to do the work.

The problem that you and many others encounter is that you never know whether there are really substitutes because you typically outsource work that you do not know how to do yourself – coding, design, copywriting, accounting, etc. If you don’t know a lot about how to do the work, how do you determine whether or not there are really substitutes? If you for example need a website designed for your suede shoe company, can you hire any good web designer or do you need someone that has specific experience in your vertical?

Find an outsourcer marketplace

If you don’t know what something is worth and whether or not there are substitutes, find comparables by going to a marketplace. If you need a design, visit 99 designs and search for your type of business and the deliverable you need. If you need articles written, go to Textbroker or any number of other places where writers of all levels spend their time. Find people in your industry there and ask them what their experience was. Doing this will save you a lot of heartache as you might be able to avoid their missteps.

Business people love fixed costs

Entrepreneurs especially love knowing they’re getting something for a certain amount regardless of whether it’s a fair price or not, and often, they’re way too high or way too low, which results in either wasted budget or such low quality work that you end up having to have someone else redo it or you yourself spend hours and hours making up for the crap you just paid someone to serve you.

My experience with an outsourced website

At one point in my past, I had to create a website for a business. None existed before this. Unfortunately, the person that held the purse strings had a very specific idea of how he wanted things done. Design, coding, and implementation were to be split up, and we couldn’t spend more than $2,000 on design. Coding and implementation would be figured out later.

I begged, and I pleaded. Having developed websites myself and managed people that did the same, I knew that having a combined team – or even individual – of designer, coder, and implementer would be best as it would keep costs down and ensure that we had no transitional problems, no finger pointing with one person saying the previous person did bad work, and so on. Alas, I lost that battle. I also made my case for a larger design budget because I had been through similar website development projects and knew that this business needed a design that would top $2,000 by quite a bit. You can guess how that argument, I mean discussion, went.

Not being the ultimate decision maker, I found a designer that fit the budget and spent hours upon hours upon hours explaining and re-explaining what we needed and why the designs weren’t quite right. One thing you’ll also find when you pick the wrong type of worker – on the low end – is that you often end up questioning why they did not make the changes you made explicit… no matter how many times you state them. The additional $1,000 or $2,000 that I would have liked to have spent on a better fitting designer was easily spent on my salary for the time I had to devote to the project.

You know what happened in the end with the design? It was just okay, and who took the bullet for not having a spectacular design?

You guessed it. I did.

Then came time for someone to code the website, and again, my budget was $2,000, but this time around, I got lucky and found someone that was a good fit for both the budget and the job needed, but when it got to implementation, things went south again. Due to frustrations over the design and the fact that I had maxed my budget, implementation was brought in house and would be done by people that had almost no experience with website development or server management.

It was at this time that I started to want to shoot myself. When the coder handed over the site, everything worked perfectly. For weeks and then months after that time, the site proceeded to break every time we tried something new just in the testing phase, and our guy – not knowing much about website development – couldn’t tell us if it was him, our coder, or a ghost in the machine.

In the end, we spent $4,000 on outsourced labor, used at least160 hours of my time, and dedicated another person to the project for well over 300 hours… all because we made bad decisions about the value of what we needed and whether or not there were substitutes.

If I could do it over

I would have made a stronger case for the special needs that we had. It as a unique company in a vertical that was accustomed to world class website design – not $2,000 design. I knew we needed a great designer and that we needed a team or an individual that could do the project end-to-end to ensure quality, but I didn’t do my research to the extent that I could show data, which is what I needed. There’s no guarantee that things would have been any better if I had made a stronger case, but looking back on this, I know that it was my mistake to not visit a marketplace, gather numbers, and get supporting evidence. Unfortunately, my lack of foresight on the project led us all to waste hundreds of hours in order to save a few thousands and only in the end come out with a mediocre product.

Should you pay outsourced workers hourly or by deliverable?

Do your research. Get your data. And, make your decision based on the needs of your own project and circumstances – not based on budget or preconceived notions from people that don’t know anything about what you’re working on.