Sachin H. Jain: This story taught me A LOT about launching a new project, product, market, team, or company

Quoting from a recent LinkedIn post by Sachin H. Jain, MD, MBA, President and CEO, SCAN Group & Health Plan:

“Years ago, I was involved in launching a new regional market for a company.

Contractually, we had to stand up our operation quickly, so the local leadership we appointed was in a rush to hire staff.

The local leaders put up a stall at a local job fair and accepted applications on-site.

Before the job fair, there were 2 people employed in market.

By the end of the job fair, there were 32.

It was a successful launch!

Not.

In the rush to hire, the team had cut corners.

They failed to ask hard questions of the recruits.

They failed to do deep reference checks.

They hired people who were running away from other jobs or were unemployed as opposed to hiring people who were running toward what we were building.

They failed to truly assess for fit.

And while we were proud to be able to have had a “successful, on-time launch.” we were in big trouble. Big, big trouble.

We had an endless parade of employee relations issues.

Staff didn’t get along at all.

People showed up late and left early.

And within months, we had major dysfunction of all kinds.

Over the next two years, the we changed out almost all of the staff in the new market, but the dysfunction persisted.

Why?

Because the culture had been set at the beginning.

Even though the worst offenders were gone early, culture was transmissible.

People were bogged down in in-fighting and dysfunction.

People rebelled against accountability.

The standards had been set and were conveyed early.

It took another year and intensive culture work and a third set of leaders to finally begin to turn the corner.

This story taught me A LOT about launching a new project, product, market, team, or company.

Some lessons:

-hire carefully upfront; do all the work; reference check, assess for fit (yes, we all think we are great judges of character and, yes, most of us are not—the best, albeit imperfect predictor of future performance is past performance); be very rigorous in your process at every turn. There can be no shortcuts. Every shortcut will burn you.

-when possible, recruit people who are happy and successsful in what they are doing and are running towards an opportunity, not running away from something else.

-don’t get overly mesmerized by a goal (like starting on time fully staffed); you may end up meeting the goal but creating all kinds of other problems for yourself over the long haul.

-culture is transmissible and set early; do the work upfront to get things right; it will be much harder to change later. Maybe even impossible. Standards are much harder to implement in retrospect.

-when change is needed, make it early. Problems mostly don’t get better with time. They just fester and sometimes metastasize into even bigger issues.

-when it really matters (like a new market or product launch), be close to it all. Because you’re unlikely to be able to really fix it later. Be in the weeds and deeply invested in getting it right at the outset.”

Source: Sachin H. Jain / LinkedIn