Growing the Number of People Employed in Your Venture

Our guest lecturer last week spent some time discussing the organizational structure of their social venture. He put up a slide depicting employees' positions within the organization, showing those with more power within an inner circle and those with less outside. He also spoke about how it takes time for new employees to gain trust and decision making availability within the venture. One problem he cited is the desire, especially of young people such as college students, to use the concept of working for a social venture to improve their resume and boost their appeal to other companies which they would like to be employed at. This discussion raised some questions in my mind about who you can really trust and who should be hired when expanding your social venture.

To me the biggest issue in expanding your infrastructure is aligning goals between the founders and those who became involved later. Since founders typically are emotionally, and financially, invested in the organization, they will have a larger stake in the potential success or failure of the venture. Meanwhile, newer employees could potentially care less about the goal of the venture leading to possible shirking of responsibilities and similar behavior. While I would like to believe in the good will of humanity, the chance that you hire people who potentially don't have the same goals as you is bound to happen and thus it is important that you know how to grow your organization in a smart fashion and continually improve the infrastructure.

An interesting article I found not only touching on this topic but also expanding on many issues we have covered this semester was written in the Harvard Business Review by Amar Bhide titled The Questions Every Entrepreneur Must Answer. In the later pages of the article, Amar gives helpful tips as to how to expand your organization. On page 128, the grey box specifically focuses on Investing in Organizational Infrastructure of your venture along the lines of delegating and specializing task of employees. Meanwhile page 129, begins a segment on the importance of articulating the organizational norms of your organization to employees. Another informative section I found extremely relevant was the changing role of the founder. Citing the example of Bill Gates, Amar talks about a piece by Michael Roberts which suggests that, "entrepreneur's role should evolve from doing the work, to prescribing desired results, and eventually to managing the overall context in which the work is done."

While this article has answered some of the initial questions that came to my mind after last weeks guest lecturer, I still worry about the process of aligning goals between founders and new employees. I would love any input people have on this matter.

The link to the article is below.

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~aandrea/Emrich%20Visioning/Questions_Every_Entrepreneur_Should_Ask.pdf