“The owner must assess his strength, not to chop off his shoulder” – Business – Kommersant

Elon Musk, who completed his purchase of Twitter last week, has gone through a series of high-profile layoffs at the company. Kommersant asked the owners and managers whether the new leader should start with personnel purges.

Luka Safonov, co-owner and technical director of network security and protection companies “Synclit” and “Cyberpolygon”:

This is where you should always start! When expanding a business, I do not come alone, but together with a team of programmers, financiers, and security officers. And I place my people to control. How else can you provide customers with the cybersecurity of their business?

For ten years, my employees practically did not change and only grew from the position of techies to the level of heads of directions or companies. Of the old staff, well-established “working hands” that generate profits can be preserved.

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Evgeny Gerasimov, Artistic Director of the Theater of the Moon:

– The first thing I did when I came to the management of the theater was to fire the director. Too many violations in his work has accumulated. As for the creative life, the theater is a living organism, there is a rotation, directors, actors “from outside”, including film actors, come to new productions.

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Oleg Zherebtsov, General Director of the pharmaceutical company Solopharm:

— I have never bought a company: Lenta, Grotex and now Solofarm, which employs 2,000 employees, were created “from the first loader”. But if I bought the company, I would take a closer look at the management, not do sweeps, but concentrate on eight or nine leaders. I would try to understand if they share my point of view on doing business. If not, then I would find the best people for this task.

The owner, the shareholders have every right to change the management. Another question is whether there is a need for this.

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Kirill Babaev, and. about. Director of the Institute of China and Modern Asia RAS:

– No personnel decisions should be made at the initial stage: this will tense the atmosphere in the team and may generally wreck relations in the team. The first step should be an audit of people, their functions, desires and abilities. Until the manager has a reliable impression of who can be useful in what way, it is not worth firing.

In addition, new stimulus can be breathed into old shots. For example, in our institute a year ago, the average age of employees was 62 years, and many advised me to rejuvenate the team. We went the other way: we gradually found out who was out of place, who could be given interesting tasks, who could be given a young fighter to help. And gradually the activity increased. And we lowered the age differently: we hired a lot of young people who have someone to learn from.

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Pavel Kuryanov, co-owner and CEO of Black Star music label, Black Star Wear clothing lines, Black Star Burger restaurants:

— Starting a new line of business, I preferred never to buy ready-made. We assembled a team from scratch and hired all the employees ourselves, including the most exclusive ones. And from my own experience, I can say that the dismissal of Elon Musk is a normal and frequent practice in large companies, when there is an overload of the payroll, efficiency raises big questions, and the financial result is also negative. If there are no such problems, then large reductions are approached more carefully.

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Alexey Zakharov, owner and president of SuperJob.ru:

— This is very individual and depends on the trust in management, on the success of the business and the development of the company. According to our surveys, only one in eight, having become a boss, is ready to part with the loafers from yesterday’s colleagues. But for top managers, this is a necessity that allowed them to become such.

A long time ago, when I was the deputy director of a large company, against my will, I hired my closest friend – my boss insisted. I foresaw that he would not be able to work under me, and a week after the working conflict, I fired him with a bang. For this he has been grateful to me for the last 30 years: otherwise he would not have opened his own business and would not have become a well-known entrepreneur.

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Andrey Burykin, Head of Non-woven Materials Department of TechnoNIKOL Corporation:

– If we talk about production, then the owner must evaluate his strength, not chop off his shoulder. It is not easy to find competent people, especially in an industry that is experiencing a huge shortage of personnel in almost all technical specialties. When buying an enterprise, we are not faced with the task of reducing the staff, the main thing is to bring the enterprise to the company’s standards, to increase labor productivity.

But there are always people who are not ready for change, openly sabotage, interfere with the work process. In our experience, this is about 10%. They must be separated as soon as possible.

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Victor Semyonov, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Belaya Dacha Group of Companies:

— Personnel decisions are the first and most important step in a new stage of the company’s development. But the depth of “cleansing” is very individual. It all depends on how the current model matches the one you see in the future development of the company. In the mid-1990s, Belaya Dacha had a company that imported bananas, pineapples and other fruits. The directors were young guys – a little over 20. They began to have conflicts with the staff. I tell them: “Do you even know this worker? Maybe he has problems at home? They look at me in surprise and answer: “We pay him grandmas, why do we need to know his family? It can’t, let it fall.” I answer: “As a shareholder, it is unprofitable for me to have such managers.” I had to part with them. There were cases when we completely changed the main backbone of control, and sometimes we were limited to light tuning. But in any case, we must not forget about continuity, especially in social issues.

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Irina Eldarkhanova, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the company “Konfael”:

“Our life itself is stressful, and the stress of being fired can bring a person to a very difficult state. I probably have a feminine approach to both business and people, so I think that people need to be protected and given the opportunity to find a new job for themselves, and not just put out on the street right away. From where we came, they never fired anyone just like that. I always try to give the opportunity for gentle care, I provide a free schedule for finding work. Most of the layoffs occurred for professional qualities, but there were also for personal reasons: theft, absenteeism. Practically with everyone whom she fired, normal relations were preserved. I do not support the mask, I think that he does it too hastily. He still could not fully understand and understand who is loyal to the company and needs it, and who is not.

Group “Direct speech”