Last week we discussed about how should energetic startup employees carve their way for leadership positions in a startup. This week let’s talk about the remaining three important traits that are generally lacking in fresh college recruits but can developed within a startup: Corporate Professionalism: Fresh college graduates typically are amazing at delivering the work.
However what most of them are not exposed to is the work environment. They don’t know how to work in teams, how to respond to clients and sometimes as basic as drafting a professional email. They may feel shy when facing a camera and might have miscommunications with media folks (divulge confidential inf o rmation) .
I remember in our initial days, one of the freshers had the habit of sharing every single thing with his friends which meant insider information on our sales of comics, marketing strategies, partnerships etc. and worst of all, he didn’t feel anything was wrong with that. If you have new folks joining the team, make sure you give them proper orientation where you tell the basic ground rules on professionalism, communication and confidentiality.
Experience in handling difficult situations: An advantage that experienced folks have over freshers is that they themselves would have experienced so many tough situations, that they would know the techniques to manage minor difficulties as well as disasters. For example, what should be your response if a client threatens or bullies you to do something that was not initially promised. Freshers often, due to lack of experience, keep coming back to the founders for advice on most issues. The solution? The startup employees must get a session with the founding team on the different kind of situations that potentially could arise and how to tackle them.
And use that to solve the issues once they come. They should also learn how to look at downside of certain situations and not to bother the founding team if the issue at hand can be tackled at their level. Network: In a lot of big companies, you might see that the head of a department of one company just dials up the CEO of some other company and partnership happens between the two. It isn’t so easy for startups because the employees do not have a network yet.
One big advantage that startup employees get over corporate employees is that since the team size at startup is very small, all the important meetings and conferences are attended by startup employees directly. And thus when a startup employee visits such conferences it would open him immense opportunity to network with top VPs and directors of corporates. So try attending as many conferences as possible. Mail different companies. Ask meetings from different corporate leaders. (If you have any queries, write to Rajeev@TBSPlanet.com)
Rajeev Tamhankar
Twitter@rajeevtamhankar
The writer is IIT-R Alumnus, Entrepreneur of The Year’17 (Print Business) and the Founder of TBS
Planet Comics