Three ways to ruin your business

If you are a CEO or a manager and you want to ruin your business, do the following:

• Recruit just one mediocre person to your senior team and keep them there.
• Change your mind on a weekly basis.
• Abdicate running the business to metrics.

I listed three things that can help you become a horrible leader. They may even wreck the team entirely, as I’ve seen happen multiple times. This information is especially pertinent for heads of expansion stage software companies with smaller teams. And if you take this bad advice, venture capital investment or great business growth strategies won’t save you.

So here’s that bad advice explained a bit more:

Recruit just one mediocre person to your senior team and keep them there. Be sure to offer public praise to them, respect their views as much as those of your A-players, and pay them well. Ignore their failures, distractions, and lack of contribution relative to everyone else. If others on the team complain, either ignore them or tell them they’re all wrong for a variety of reasons. With time, the rest of your team is likely to become frustrated, demoralized, will not work as hard for you, or may even leave. The best part is, your smartest and most perceptive team members will leave first! It only takes one!

Change your mind on a weekly basis. If at all possible, push your teams in completely opposite directions and do it arbitrarily without responding to any real changes. To really stick it to your organization, don’t share your reasoning, or if you do, put it on your trusty gut. It’s important to be agile and pivot in any business, in particular when responding to changing facts (new competitors, economy cycles, etc.), but changing your mind on a regular basis in response to nothing… well that is a different story. When you arbitrarily change your mind regularly, you will frustrate your team because you’ll make them go sideways and/or backwards rather than forward. Everything they did since your last decision will feel like a great waste of time for them after the new decision. And better yet, every one of your team members will lose trust in you, because people who are constantly changing their minds don’t inspire confidence and can come across as clueless. Once again, frustration, loss of motivation, exodus.

Abdicate running the business to metrics. This one is easy to do and feel good about because you are accustomed to reading on many blogs and articles that you must use metrics to run your business, and also that running a business by responding to the ups and downs of a bunch of metrics is…well, it’s very easy, especially if you used color coding (green = good, red = bad). Make it even easier on yourself. Do not invest a huge amount of time, thought and collaboration in determining what metrics you will use and how you will use them. Do not explicitly link your metrics to your business’ actual successful outcomes and even if you do, don’t communicate that linkage to anyone. Then, don’t make sure everyone bought into the same set of metrics. Instead, apply them in a unilateral fashion because you’re the boss. Once you have the metrics, tie all compensation to them, and give out lots of “at-ta boy’s” in response to positive trends and hammer your employees in response to negative trends. Leave thoughtful discussion out of it. And once in a while, obsessively focus on just one metric, ignoring all other indicators and environment. Your team will hate you; they’ll work very hard to achieve certain metrics and ignore actually making money for your business, and the good ones will wise up and leave. Oh, if you really want to dig a hole, try to track and respond to the metrics in as close to real time as possible to create maximum noise, regardless of timing that actually maps to your business context.

I wrote about metrics before, but I need to stress it again… using metrics is not easy. At best, the right metrics will give you actionable data you need to absorb and analyze so you can apply judgment and respond appropriately. And as your company evolves, that response may signal a need to change the metrics you’re tracking. To get here, you must exercise much thought concerning the metrics you use and how you use them, which can be very difficult.

So if you want to sabotage a good team, get to it! Those great teams won’t ruin themselves.