> It wasn’t that I had somehow inherited dumb employees. What I was hearing was a failure of management.
Uh, if you've inherited employees that think their job as marketers is to pump out Press Releases, you certainly haven't inherited good ones.
Most people in marketing do not behave like this, any more than developers see their job as 'write lots of lines of code'.
Too many management articles (and Blank is often guilty of it) have the pattern of presenting the 'employee' as an unthinking zombie, and then present 'management' as the answer. 'See, without highly paid consultants like myself, this would all go to shit!'
Most employees would find this kind of micromanagement-in-the-name-of-onboarding intolerable because they are good employees who are capable of autonomous thought.
Also worth bearing in mind given the number of Blank's stories that start with 'I was once a VP of Marketing....'
Steve Blank was last a VP of Marketing in 1992. This should give anyone pause to think if the advice is relevant, if the story ever happened, or if Blank has another agenda in telling them.
Think about the jobs you've quit because the culture / environment made it impossible for you to get the right things done.
Even really good employees need an aligned sense of mission.
Of all the other early CEO's I've talked to (and it's a lot), none of them have ever told me "I just hire awesome people and never talk to them about what we're trying to do but it works out great because they are awesome people." Nor has anyone ever conveyed that these types of communication exercises are micromanagy. Aligning mission and understanding how your outputs are other people's inputs seems to me to be the exact opposite of micromanagement.
All of the things he suggests are incredibly obvious though.
Most marketing people I know (and I know a lot) would consider the idea that their job was to 'set up trade booths' or 'send out a Press Release and wait for things to happen' as a thinly veiled insult. Of course the purpose of trade shows is to gather and qualify leads- otherwise you're simply spraying money up the wall.
Likewise, if a marketing organization doesn't have basic targets or marketing/sales alignment in place, then it's not because of the lack of management, it's because the marketing/sales people are incompetent.
And if I think of the negative cultures I've worked in - the one thing they have in common is a 'leader figure' at the top who spends his time abasing the team and generally getting in the way of things that, left alone, the team would organize to do anyway. The job of a leader is to hire good people and get out of their way.
This is for some of the people like me to let you know you're not alone...
I too am at a startup where everyone wheres many hats. I would love to be CTO and not have to take my turn emptying the dish washer or taking out the trash but we are small so everyone has to do their part.
Our marketing team does SEO, usability testing, graphic design, copywriting... and that's just one person.
I would love to have a dedicated person to do trade shows. Heck, I'd love to be able to afford to go to a trade show.
So for all the people out there who are at startups that haven't raised enough money to do those sort of things... you are not alone.
Sounds all pretty good to me, what's not to like? Emptying the dishwasher and going to trade-shows can contribute to keeping everyone "grounded", wearing many hats is cross-fertilizing all ones skills better and reduces tunnel-eye vision.. I wish more startups were still like that, in fact I see the bulk of them today having super-defined tiny dedicated roles and that's offputting. Dev-ops? CD/CI "engineer"? Really? Back in the day we had coders and admins, with admins doing a fair bit of plumbing coding and devs doing a fair bit of administering sub-systems of an architecture or server farm. And mostly wiring together some scripts, services, and some command-line acrobatics weren't the defining portion of the "engineer" role :D
Having worked at both kinds of places, one thing I've observed is as the team size grows, the places with many-hats approach end up/or have problems with accountability. For ex: at the end of the day who's responsible for devops (automating things that can be automated, and making sure the data science team doesn't wait for 3 weeks to get a simple security group access etc..) and things like that.
For sure, there'll be problems other way around too. So there's no one-solution fits all problems.
Being part of a small startup is a bit like camping: there's a lot of small stuff you need to do, there's a lot of cooperation required, the price of failing is low, there are not many luxuries, but it sure feels like an adventure.
While I think there is a lot of good advice in there, I can't help thinking this feels like a management type modeled on the army:
Break down work in pieces that can be done independently in small groups, have the people of the small groups engaged by having them believing they're part of a greater mission. And then there is the "no excuse" culture. That seems like a great way of getting rid of people who don't follow.
I'd be interested in a anonymous feedback from their employees...
Also the end of the article really sounds self-congratulatory...
Another reason to consider growing slower and hiring considerately: it's too easy to think scaling fast and hiring a bunch of people is a panacea for success when it may ruin teamwork, morale and culture. There are situations to scale big and fast, but there is no one-sized-fits-all recipe.
I've just finished reading (finally) Ben Horowitz's Hard Thing About Hard Things. He too spends a lot of ink saying that onboarding is extremely important, and a prime management task not to be lightly passed off to subordinates. Falling into routines and losing sight of results is all too easy, even if you know it's too easy, of course.
Actually, now that I'm on to Andy Grove's book, it's there too - training is not only a management task, the only other task according to Grove is motivation.
Uh, if you've inherited employees that think their job as marketers is to pump out Press Releases, you certainly haven't inherited good ones.
Most people in marketing do not behave like this, any more than developers see their job as 'write lots of lines of code'.
Too many management articles (and Blank is often guilty of it) have the pattern of presenting the 'employee' as an unthinking zombie, and then present 'management' as the answer. 'See, without highly paid consultants like myself, this would all go to shit!'
Most employees would find this kind of micromanagement-in-the-name-of-onboarding intolerable because they are good employees who are capable of autonomous thought.