HR in big companies is often broken because it focuses on rules instead of culture. Speaker B ran Sales Sniper with almost no policies, just strict values that everyone had to buy into. When culture was strong, there was no drama. When it wasn't, everything fell apart.
Is HR not your friend actually true or is the department misunderstood?
I think traditional HR in a lot of big companies is pretty shitty. The best companies, they make HR strategic advantage. Like here we call it the people team because I don't want people to think hr. I look at it as their job is to protect the culture of the company. The culture protects the business and the employees. The second piece to it is that the job is not to put in place arbitrary rules and policies. The job is to put as little in place as possible and instead reinforce our values.
That's a great point. It's probably something like I've never done. Well is hr. I always say as soon as HR gets into a business, I'm out. Because like I like saying gay and retard stuff like that. But I think that the sentiment is correct and I think that I accidentally did it right in Sales Sniper. Sales Sniper is basically a completely internally led culture business. I was the leader. I was a very strong leader because I was leading from the front. I remember I had a conversation with client of mine and like we still hang out every now and then, Ryan Sirhan. And he said, you should never stop selling. And I was like, ah, you're wrong. I gotta do business things because I had a fucking loser business mentor that was like, you gotta do business things. And turns out I look back and I think Ryan was 100% correct. Because you know what he's done extremely well, for example, is like he is the leading from the front, so he is the top sales rep. And when you're in like a sales organization, for example, like there is something to that that they know the boss can get on there and bang deals out, right? And if the boss is banging out the biggest deals, there is something to say for that that the culture is very difficult to dilute. If that's continuing to happen, is it possible all the time? No, it's not. But with Sales Sniper, for example, the culture was incredible. Everybody was kill a lot of fun. We never really had any dramas because it was completely self run and self managed by the values that we espoused in the company. So we had this thing, it was scope and so it went through like it was strategic. So we had all of these things and everybody as they were onboarded was like, these are the values that we have in this company. If you don't want them, then fuck you, you can leave. It's fine. High five. We'll still be friends, but like you're not to be here. And then that was so diligently. Maintained by the senior people by like Road and Shane and like all these guys that were around for age and it just permeated throughout the entire thing. And what that meant is that like there was just never any issue because it was a purely values run company. At subsequent companies, like at say seventh level it was done nowhere near as well. And a lot of things permeated into that business that like I didn't want for example but like these things happen and like you learn lessons but I think like HR is there to perform a service and if you have to have all these rules about you can't say this and you can't say that and that's stupid. However, I get that like litigious people were going to do like litigious people things. However I believe that if you can have the very clear value proposition position of a company and the way in which people are supposed to act and you can have a culture of excellence, then you know a lot of it can be just be done internally by people just wanting to uphold an awesome culture. So hard to do. But if you get a chance to do it, it's a lot of fun.
