It is a well-known thought – “A man is known by the company he keeps”. It attracts immediate attention as everybody tries to ensure that he is associated with corresponding type of personalities. What about the folks/group/company on the other side though? Would they be interested to associate with you? Do you ever think that you need to ensure proper synergy to be part of that group/company too?
Usually most of the folks take it for granted that once they belong to the group/company, they need not worry how their behaviours/actions impact the company. Now, that decides how keen the company is to be known and how seriously does it consider its reputation before associating it with anybody.
We had few such situations where in we had to take a call. We often get approached by freshers and experienced folks seeking job opportunities. We give a fair chance to all to demonstrate their capabilities. Most of the times, the freshers are too excited and promise to work hard to deliver the expectations. We were approached by a group of 4-5 freshers who were willing to join us and give a long term commitment. I had decided to give them an opportunity after evaluating them post a few weeks of training.
We started training them and giving them feedback that they were not upto mark and had to gear up quickly. We didn’t see much of the improvement. We had warned them that we may stop training if they didn’t submit the given assignments with quality. We also went to an extent of moving our office close to where they stayed as they would often cite commuting challenges reaching to our earlier office and how it was impacting their time to learn. We were losing confidence in them and had given them enough heads up to demonstrate a quick learning curve. I couldn’t take up additional projects as I didn’t believe that they would deliver it with quality and I certainly didn’t want to lose our credibility with our customers. Plus, associating such folks with us was impacting the mission and vision with which the organization was formed. I had to pull off the plug and ask them to part with the organization.
Another similar incident had taken place earlier. I had entrusted a young enthusiastic person that he would be able to deliver the projects on time. I had set the expectations and he had promised to deliver quality once we start working with customer. After taking him to the customer and following up to deliver the planned project items, I gave up and then ended up learning the new technology by working over the weekends. I had to let him go as I didn’t want to plan project deliverables based on his slow learning curve.
We are glad that our customers have frequently demonstrated that they would like to associate with us. We constantly gauge ourselves to ensure that our customers are not embarrassed to be associated with us. It is a win-win solution and turns up as mutual beneficial. If you are wondering how would we like our company to be known as? We would like to be the most sought partner/vendor to provide ITSM/BSM consultancy. Are you one of the future employees reading this? You know how to contact us:-)
