In the past year, I have met many successful entrepreneurs and executives of large companies. They taught me how to run a company and lead a team. I feel that I still have a lot of deficiencies and needs to learn in these areas.
Some of their experiences and experiences, I will also use them in my work to constantly confirm and practice. I want to gradually summarize these experiences and make them my own.
In the past few days, I have summed up 16 words, which I think are the basic requirements that a manager must meet. Managers who can't do it are basically unqualified. But when I use this standard to measure the people in "management positions" I meet, I find that 80% of the people are probably failing. This high percentage is a bit scary.
But at the same time, I have also observed that the executives of some successful companies are often people with such qualities. Such companies tend to grow faster and can experience various ups and downs.
The sixteen words are: clear goals, clear responsibilities, clear rewards and punishments, and surpassing Bole.
A company of ten people, a company of 100 people, a company of 500 people, a company of 1000 people, and a company of 10,000 people all have completely different methods.
When there are ten people, it may only need to be ruled by man, and it can be brought well by the bond of friendship between brothers. When you reach 100 people, you must start talking about management and the legal system. In a company with 10,000 people, it is necessary to talk about corporate culture and values, otherwise the organization of the company may collapse at any time.
Many people don't understand why Ali attaches so much importance to the values. In fact, if those idealistic factors are removed, this is the biggest management tool of the enterprise.
Ali's values, mission and vision are Ali's biggest core competitiveness.
A student asked an interesting question, what is the difference between Ali and Tencent and Baidu? I told them at the time that Ali was about mission and vision, and Tencent and Baidu would not tell you that.
Once I asked an old Tencent employee, what is Tencent's mission and vision? He thought about it for a long time and still got the wrong answer, but I, an outsider, told him that Tencent's mission is to "improve the quality of human life through Internet services."
Mission and vision are definitely not casual slogans, and they play a crucial role in guiding the way at the juncture of life and death.
For example, what money should be earned and what should not be earned. When there is a disagreement, it depends on the mission and vision. This is not a slogan used to fool yourself and others.
Values, too, can guide us when we face choices.
When tens of thousands of people converge on common values to do things, there are two obvious benefits:
1. The cost of communication is reduced, and the views on an issue are basically the same;
2. It reduces management costs and makes it possible to do things from the bottom up.
Going a little further, let me tell you my sixteen-character mantra.
01
clear goals
The first is "clear goals".
This may seem like a cliché, but in fact many people set goals that are fake and not clear at all.
Objective clarity has two meanings:
1. The goals of the team should be very clear;
2. The performance goals set for employees should be very clear.
What is clarity? Energy is called clarity.
When I was working in my early years, there was a saying throughout the security industry that safe jobs seemed impossible to quantify at all. We'll do a lot, but it's still elusive when an attack will happen. In those days, we thought this was a difficult problem to solve, and the inability to quantify it also caused many of our work bosses to fail to see the effect, and it used to be very painful.
But now it seems that security efforts are quantifiable, and we must be held accountable for the end result - vulnerabilities and security incidents. With such key indicators, we drive all products, solutions, operating systems and technological innovations.
The key indicators of Alibaba's technical support department are well defined. When Zhenfei was talking to us about his work ideas, he talked about the indicator he set in the past, which is to find the most core element: when the order or transaction volume drops by 10%, the number of minutes affected (if I remember correctly, it is probably so to speak). Then use this indicator to leverage everyone and all departments to do things, including people from other departments.
All work must have the most critical place, and it must be quantifiable.
If it can't be quantified, it either means that it is not critical enough, that the key point is not grasped, or it means that it is not clear.
Likewise, I believe that most employees' performance goals are not clearly defined, and many people's goals are qualitative rather than quantitative.
For example, the goal is "what did you do", and there is no quantitative assessment standard. There are problems with this. Either there is a lot of water and you want to get away with it, or you are busy in the wrong direction and don't solve the problem in the end.
What hurts the employee the most is that in the end, he can't prove that his performance is better than others.
In fact, a simple question can determine whether the employee's performance goal setting is clear: Does the employee know that when he does something, he will "definitely" get an evaluation or promotion that "exceeds expectations"?
If you can't answer it, it means that the employee's performance goals are not set clearly enough.
The goals are not set clearly, and the strength of the team may not necessarily lead in the right direction, so I think this is the first thing managers need to do when leading the team.
02
Clear responsibilities
Let's talk about "clarity of responsibilities".
Clear responsibility means that the responsibility should be clearly defined to the person, and there should be an "accountability system".
Once I was in a meeting with Donghui, who is in charge of products at Alibaba Cloud. When Donghui talked about a problem, he said sharply, "If you know that by the end of the year, no one will be given a 3.25 rating (failed). ), you probably know who to go to.”
For anything, someone should be responsible for it, and there should be no gray areas.
This accountability must be focused, not two people, but only one person. Once there are two people responsible for it, in the end it is unclear who is responsible and there is a grey area.
This is not to say that each KPI can only be recited by one person. In practice, it is common for many people to recite the same KPI, especially after the target is decomposed. What I'm talking about here is that there must be a person who is ultimately responsible for a matter. If you want to beheaded, kill him first.
I think how the organizational structure is set up is very particular. This is not just like playing a family. If I have a good relationship with you, I will make you an official. One of the most important purposes of the organizational structure is to establish "accountability".
If you attach great importance to a matter, it should be reflected in the organizational structure, and separate departments and clear reporting relationships should be set up. This is called real attention.
Clear responsibility is to find a person who can be killed for everything. If you can't find it, it means that the responsibility is not clear enough.
03
Clear rewards and punishments
When the responsibilities are clarified, what follows is "clear rewards and punishments", and those who should be killed must be killed.
Don't think that reward and punishment are easy to do, it will be very difficult for most people. A qualified manager must at least have opened employees, and one who has never opened a person is not a qualified manager. At this point, I even sometimes feel that Ali's performance management tools are still too soft.
Guarding short is a very bad behavior.
Don't look at the very domineering behavior of the protagonist in many YY novels to protect the shortcoming, just follow the same pattern and think that your subordinates will definitely appreciate you. The consequence of protecting shortcoming is that there is no distinction between right and wrong, and it will make employees see that the company's system is unfair and cronyism.
Therefore, even if it is someone who is close to you, you will never be soft when it comes to killing (just ask if it is a brother who has been with you for many years, will you be ruthless?). On the other hand, even people who don't like them at ordinary times must be rewarded as long as they really make achievements.
A system that can do this must be transparent and must be based on "clear goals" and "clear responsibilities", and it is clear at a glance who is doing well and who is not doing well.
Once I gave a very good and hard-working employee 3.25, and I told him afterwards:
"Before you worked really hard and did a lot of things, but from the results, you didn't get the desired results, so I can only give you 3.25. You are just starting to lead the team, and you must judge by this standard in the future. your subordinate."
In a mature company, there should be no such thing as "seeing hard work without looking at credit", and everything should be result-oriented.
In the same way, you shouldn't go into small gangs, you shouldn't talk about "who is who", you can have close personal relationships, but you can't talk about friendship at work. A company is not about making anyone happy, but about getting things done.
04
Beyond Bole
In the end, things are made by people, if no one is there, don't YY want to do something great. So I put "Beyond Bole" in the last sentence of the sixteen-character mantra.
Everyone should have heard Steve Jobs's statement on "only recruit first-class talents", and everyone understands this truth. The first-class talents are here, what else can't be done?
But I would like to add that the ability to attract top talent is itself a reflection of management ability. In many cases, salary alone cannot attract first-class talents, and first-class talents can get high salaries wherever they go.
Some time ago, an old friend of mine told me that what he admires most about me is that I can always attract a group of the best people to the team at different times. , and later Ali did the same, and asked me how I did it?
I blushed with pride at first, then thought for a while, and answered him: "First I have to have a big dream, and then let others believe in this dream." This is the only answer I can think of.
Managers must be good at being a bole, know people and make good use of them, and put the right people in the right position. The blood of the team must flow, and it cannot be static.
"Beyond Bole" is actually the last item of Ali's latest values. It also refers to the need to cultivate talents and help them grow.
For managers, it is necessary to make good use of "management levers" to cultivate their own D (subordinates who report directly), so that they can take charge of themselves, rather than dying from exhaustion. Managers who exhaust themselves to death must not be successful managers.
Clear goals, clear responsibilities, clear rewards and punishments, and surpassing Bole are the most basic qualities that managers need to have. If they can't do it, there will be more or less problems within the organization. .
If some entrepreneurs can understand and do this from the beginning, I think the success rate of startups may be much higher.
This article is reproduced from [Beijing University]
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