Successful start-up founder on why HR and leaders should be prepared to take risks
Feel like a key part of your HR role is taking the risk out of your organization?
A successful start-up leader urges HR professionals to throw out that sentiment, and instead, embrace risk-taking to find a better way to work.
Before Lee Seymour started reference-checking platform Xref, he’d been at his “very safe” job for more than a decade.
“I had a great team, my earning level was good, at the time my son was five and my wife was six months pregnant, and I decided to leave.”
Seymour tells HRD he was running out of time in his day to both do his job and pursue his own business plans, so he and co-founder and CTO Tim Griffiths launched in headfirst.
“The problem was: I didn’t have time to run it whilst I was doing my day job, but the business itself didn’t have the money to support me. The risk was that I either stay safe or find another way to find revenue.
“It took us three years to finally recruit our first employee, and even that was a risk. We only had three months of payroll in the bank, so it had to be a success.”
Six years on, he says, risk is “less of a professional byproduct and more of a choice”.
“The risks that you experience in the early days are forced risks – they’re forced upon you and you have to deal with them. We had one of our clients pay us one of our biggest invoices ever, and they paid us four weeks late. You can’t help that, you’ve just got to deal with it. When you get to a size when you don’t have to carry so much forced risk, you then have a choice to adopt risk and welcome it in, and even look for it.”
Seymour says some leaders are too risk-averse – fearful of not having control over the outcome of their decision or actions.
Often, they don’t know what the right answer to a problem is – and he urges them to rephrase the question.
“Say ‘do you know what you’re not going to do, do you know what you don’t want?’ because if you know what you don’t want to do or what you’re not prepared to do, then it gives you a clearer idea of what your opportunity is.
“A large percent of a company’s activity should be in new things they haven’t done before, because if you always do what you’ve always done, you certainly always get what you’ve always got.”
He urges HR professionals to think about risk, or their adversity to it, in terms of their business, and not in relation to their own role – including hiring unconventional recruits (who may turn out to be “an absolute legend”).
“Sometimes HR professionals have the fear of God into them, because they don’t want to put anyone into the business that is in any way not going to fit, either culturally or not going to have the skills to perform, so they don’t take risk on behalf of the business, and it’s very much a prescriptive placement.
“If they did take a few more risks, they’d probably change the face of the company. You see leaders recruit in their own image, and they also recruit people that don’t challenge them. Maybe that’s a protectionary tool to ensure their own position.”
When it comes to engaging with the C-suite, again, don’t fear risk, he says.
“When you communicate with someone that is managing a business with an appetite for risk, your conversation with them isn’t a ‘these are the three options, what one would you like?’ and just presenting opportunities all the time. It certainly is ‘here’s the risk of not giving me an answer on this’.”
Seymour says he personally responds a lot better to the latter.
“Opportunity for me is limitless, but risk is measurable, so if someone says ‘the risk of not doing this is that we’re going to lose X’, I can absolutely measure that risk in our business.”
Related stories:
How to survive with a missing manager
Why HR’s communication is failing
A successful start-up leader urges HR professionals to throw out that sentiment, and instead, embrace risk-taking to find a better way to work.
Before Lee Seymour started reference-checking platform Xref, he’d been at his “very safe” job for more than a decade.
“I had a great team, my earning level was good, at the time my son was five and my wife was six months pregnant, and I decided to leave.”
Seymour tells HRD he was running out of time in his day to both do his job and pursue his own business plans, so he and co-founder and CTO Tim Griffiths launched in headfirst.
“The problem was: I didn’t have time to run it whilst I was doing my day job, but the business itself didn’t have the money to support me. The risk was that I either stay safe or find another way to find revenue.
“It took us three years to finally recruit our first employee, and even that was a risk. We only had three months of payroll in the bank, so it had to be a success.”
Six years on, he says, risk is “less of a professional byproduct and more of a choice”.
“The risks that you experience in the early days are forced risks – they’re forced upon you and you have to deal with them. We had one of our clients pay us one of our biggest invoices ever, and they paid us four weeks late. You can’t help that, you’ve just got to deal with it. When you get to a size when you don’t have to carry so much forced risk, you then have a choice to adopt risk and welcome it in, and even look for it.”
Seymour says some leaders are too risk-averse – fearful of not having control over the outcome of their decision or actions.
Often, they don’t know what the right answer to a problem is – and he urges them to rephrase the question.
“Say ‘do you know what you’re not going to do, do you know what you don’t want?’ because if you know what you don’t want to do or what you’re not prepared to do, then it gives you a clearer idea of what your opportunity is.
“A large percent of a company’s activity should be in new things they haven’t done before, because if you always do what you’ve always done, you certainly always get what you’ve always got.”
He urges HR professionals to think about risk, or their adversity to it, in terms of their business, and not in relation to their own role – including hiring unconventional recruits (who may turn out to be “an absolute legend”).
“Sometimes HR professionals have the fear of God into them, because they don’t want to put anyone into the business that is in any way not going to fit, either culturally or not going to have the skills to perform, so they don’t take risk on behalf of the business, and it’s very much a prescriptive placement.
“If they did take a few more risks, they’d probably change the face of the company. You see leaders recruit in their own image, and they also recruit people that don’t challenge them. Maybe that’s a protectionary tool to ensure their own position.”
When it comes to engaging with the C-suite, again, don’t fear risk, he says.
“When you communicate with someone that is managing a business with an appetite for risk, your conversation with them isn’t a ‘these are the three options, what one would you like?’ and just presenting opportunities all the time. It certainly is ‘here’s the risk of not giving me an answer on this’.”
Seymour says he personally responds a lot better to the latter.
“Opportunity for me is limitless, but risk is measurable, so if someone says ‘the risk of not doing this is that we’re going to lose X’, I can absolutely measure that risk in our business.”
Related stories:
How to survive with a missing manager
Why HR’s communication is failing