Competency and Compensation

A large part of sustainable growth for contractors is being able to effectively leverage people with a narrower set of skills to still deliver the same level of value-add to the customer.

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This support structure is called “Enabling Bureaucracy” and is a combination of management time, control systems, QA/QC, workflows, training, etc.

Leadership Tools: Graph representing Value-Add and Compensation with Quantity of people in the workforce, ability to manage ambiguity, and skill level and execution.

As contractors grow they need to refine their organizational structures, workflows, job descriptions  and their talent processes to support this growth.

These support structures must be built over time and integrated with the contractor’s growth strategy.  Once effectively in place these support structures will produce a more scalable organization that can actually deliver the same value-add to the customer at a lower total cost providing a competitive advantage. 

These systems are slow, painful and costly to put into place.  The recruiting focus of a contractor must be in alignment with the levels of support structures they have in place.  Netflix defines this quite well in their culture slide deck and book.  

Are your support structure capabilities and recruiting in alignment?  

If not there will be excessive stress on the team combined with lower profitability.  This just means you are at one of the inflection points on the business growth cycle.




What Are You Optimizing For?
Prioritizing is about sequencing. Optimizing is about balance. Both are defined by your values, strategies, and objectives. Both are constrained by your finite resources including talent and capital. Start by knowing what you are optimizing for.
Eric Hoffer - "Learners Inherit the Earth"
How would you rate the overall effectiveness of your team when it comes to learning something new and applying that knowledge? How would you rate your own effectiveness at learning?
Black Box Thinking
Failures, mistakes and problems are part of every contractor’s business. What separates out high-performing teams is a relentless focus on learning from these problems then creating systems and training to mitigate them in the future.