Email Jim at jim.thompson@ipulpmedia.com

I was charged with building a professional office of one hundred plus people in the late 1980's. My boss and my intent was to do it quickly with the best we could find. Our starting point was less than half dozen long-term employees. I knew we were going to rock their world as we went from a small office to a moderately sized operation.

The first person I hired was the human resources manager. I wanted someone who I knew would be competent and whom I could trust to help us hire outstanding professionals. More importantly, I wanted someone who was not afraid to tell me when I was screwing up. I hired someone who had worked for me nearly a decade before, many states away from where we were building this office.

This person had never been a human resources manager before. He did have a degree in criminal justice and had worked as an operations manager as well as an investigator in the civilian world as well as the Marines.

He was absolutely loyal to me. The most valuable skill he had was to wander the halls, sit down with all the employees on a regular (to us, not to them) but informal basis and see what their problems were. This was an engineering company, and it is important in such an environment to keep things running smoothly. Personal grudges and love triangles can destroy the business.

About once a week, he would come in my office, close the door and tell me what I was doing wrong, based on the feedback he was getting. We would agree on the adjustments we would make to our management system then implement it. Occasionally, someone needed to be asked to leave.

Sometimes these implementations were public, sometimes they were subtle. We did not try to hide what we were doing, but we did not make any announcements about these matters, either.

Later on, we bought another company with two offices in far flung places. I sent him to these offices to reconnoiter what was happening there in the same manner we had in the home office.

When, sometime later, I got crossways of the company's owners and they demanded my head, this HR manager negotiated my severance package and fired me.

In a couple of years, I hired him into another venture. When work got slow, I had to let him go. Even later, when he joined a public company, he recommended and got me placed on their board of directors.

We are still friends, although he has chosen to retire, and I have not. The very first time I hired him was in October of 1978. This is what a long-term business relationship looks like--it is built on trust. Oh, and one time he sold me a motorcycle, a very good one at a very fair price.

Be safe and we will talk next week.

If you would like to dig a little deeper [click here].

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