John Linton Exetel has had, for as long as I can remember, a process of formally discussing each employee's career aspirations each six months (completely separate from job performance or other operational reviews). These reviews have, for the past few years, been carried out by Annette - both in Sydney and in Colombo (where they are quarterly rather than six monthly because of the 'newness' of the operation there and our general lack of understanding of all things Sri Lankan). The Australian half yearly reviews are almost completed and I read through those that had been completed yesterday as well as discussing the 'side notes' with Annette over what passes for Saturday lunch in our home. One of her email 'jokes' to me during the week was that Exetel had better make financial provisions for long service leave as so many of our people would qualify for that soon.
That is a quite serious problem (not the financial implications but the fact that so many of our first hires are still with us). Back in early 2004 we were a start up company with no problems (assuming we survived) in growing rapidly and always having to find the 'new' expertise within our few people to do the new things that constantly were required by a growing company. Not only was everyone pushed beyond every level of expertise they may have possessed at the time by constantly learning to do new things they were stretched to the limit by the rapidly growing 'transaction volumes' generated by acquiring ever more customers and the growing complexity of the constantly widening 'product range' and the ever increasing number of new/different suppliers.
Our lack of supervision, let alone management, skills within our predominantly recent graduate personnel made every day a challenge in all sorts of different ways. Over time we reduced the impact of growing transaction volumes by constant automation and years passing with very low staff turnover addressed the other major problem of task/process/product unfamiliarity. These were very, very good aspects in a growing company and have benefited Exetel and its suppliers and customers enormously - always dealing with people who were totally familiar with all of Exetel's internal processes and procedures and with a deep knowledge of all the details associated with them. Because we only hired very 'bright' people we created a two edged sword scenario simply because very bright people have an ineradicable need, not desire, to continue to stretch their minds doing new and ever more difficult things.This results in the inevitable situation where our people are continuing to look for new challenges at a faster rate than the current growth of Exetel in Australia (with the exception of sales and sales engineering) may be able to provide them.
In our particular situation the problem is compounded by the fact that so many of the company's functions are now dealt with in Sri Lanka and while several of our key people have had 6 or 12 months knowledge transfer assignments in Sri Lanka their professional futures, quite understandably, are in Australia. So Annette found that around 10% of our Australian personnel are now looking for increased responsibilities and new challenges that, for the first time in our brief corporate life, we may struggle to find for them. It's a strange scenario, at least for me, and it's something I, and others, will have to give a great deal of thought to over the next few days. The strangeness is to find it not so easy to continue to find future challenges for people in a company that is planned to treble in both revenue and personnel numbers over the next 2 - 3 years.
One down side of splitting the company over two different countries I suppose.
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