Interview with Wang Wei: How to Incentivize Core Talents in Private Enterprises?

The success of a business depends on people. For many entrepreneurs, especially those of private small and medium-sized enterprises, how to retain and motivate the core employees of the enterprise is undoubtedly one of the most core management issues. At the "CEConline Salon" held recently, Wang Wei, a well-known strategic consulting expert, founder and CEO of Zhanluda Consulting and Zhanluda Capital, accepted an exclusive interview with a reporter from "CEConline" and talked about talent incentives. experience.

"CEConline": In your opinion, how to establish and motivate the core team in the early stage of business startup?

Wang Wei: In the early stage of entrepreneurship, the core is to figure out the value of our company's existence and which core positions can really bring value. This is the premise of incentives. Many of our companies only consider incentives, but do not consider the object of incentive selection. This is a misunderstanding.

Second, during the entire incentive process, we need to figure out how to combine our medium- and long-term incentives with short-term incentives, which means we need to see our short-term bonuses and performance. How are the indicators and the connectivity of operations bundled? At the same time, our long-term equity or profit sharing, how to solve the problem of this strategy and the long-term development of the enterprise.

There are some cases here. If the long-term and short-term goals and incentives are not well combined, the company may be very profitable in the first few years, but in the third or fourth year, due to lack of good follow-up. The combination of long-term goals has brought our business to the brink of bankruptcy. I have encountered a company before that constantly encouraged short-term sales in the early stage, so the R&D department launched many products, but the quality of product development was not good. Short-term sales are very good, but because there is no long-term R&D quality goal in our incentives for executives, this company has done well for two to three years, and in the fourth year due to some changes in the market and customers The quality requirements of the company have increased, which has led to great problems in the entire enterprise. Later, after readjustment, it returned to the track of healthy development.

The CEConline: Some Enterprises will give core employees real estate and MBA study opportunities as incentives. What is your opinion on this?

Wang Wei: We encourage many companies to use a variety of incentive methods, called non-material incentive methods, including the provision of platforms and means for learning, growth, and development, to help corporate executives to To grow and meet the development requirements of the enterprise. But there are some key points that I think are very core that must be resolved: First, can we understand what the core competitiveness of our company is? What kind of talent is missing? On this basis, which of our core executives are best through what means of learning and development.

For example, we say that MBA is more of a one-way training exchange. There are many other means of this training, including job rotation. For example, we once had a case where we wanted to train a research and development person to be a general manager. At this time, we let him start contacting sales, and let him rotate in the sales position for two years, so that he can establish in actual work. Business awareness, this is not the effect that MBA training can achieve. There are also coaches called CEOs, and some CEOs may be more technically or sales-trained. He manages the CEO through a technical management style, requiring a broader view of the overall situation, so he has to divide a lot of problems. Through this CEO interaction, feedback and coaching, the global awareness of his business can be increased.

So, there are many ways of learning, MBA is just one of them, we also need to establish a corporate university internally, including the rotation system of tutors, including special action learning methods.

Pure real estate is actually a material incentive. We can give you more ways to operate. For example, after you work for how many years, we can give you the property rights of the real estate, so that It is equivalent to a deferred long-term incentive plan to help you keep key employees. I think there should be better catalysts to help entrepreneurs retain key employees, and the incentive effect is better.

It's like having a fish, but you need to have fire, a pot, monosodium glutamate, and a recipe to know how to cook it, in order to make the fish delicious. So how many means are needed to combine to make the incentive effect better.

"CEConline": Technical R&D personnel and marketing personnel are often the core personnel of an enterprise. Is there any difference in their management and incentives?

Wang Wei: We have seen that there are indeed many companies whose growth is driven either by the core competence of technical R&D personnel, or from sales or marketing. However, we can find that the characteristics of the two types of personnel, the acceptable management methods and the performance objectives of the assessment are very different. In particular, we can see that the people born in the 1980s and 1990s have very strong personalities, so this brings great challenges to the management of our current entrepreneurs.

Specifically, we cannot simply say that the management of sales personnel is to adopt the method of basic salary plus commission. We also have many business models for sales, some of which are called solution-based sales. Some are dedicated to product sales, and some may be sold through distributor distribution, which is called channel management sales. Some are sold through online e-commerce. These types of sales managers require different management capabilities and assessment requirements.

For example, solution-based sales management, he must constantly have strong coordination ability, coordinate R&D personnel, including engineering personnel, and adjust many parameters. He must have a management for the entire project management, Is a project sales management. What we have done before, like Huawei is similar to this type, it is sales interaction. But for product sales, it's more about flexibility. We can't sell simple products well, just do solution-based sales, there will be some dislocations.

The sales and product sales of key account management are also different. For example, the products made by Procter & Gamble are for the public, and he manages the dealers. For example, for Huawei, he is a major customer who manages sales, and his processes and management capabilities are also different.

We are required to distinguish different sales properties and positions for corresponding management. Similarly, research and development, technology is the same. We can see that there are some R&D technologies called platform R&D, such as car chassis, we can see different cars, Audi's can be applied to the development platform of many other cars. His cycle is very long, and the requirements for personnel are different from those of general worker-type R&D, so we do not have high requirements for his incentive attributes. Generally, the chief scientist at the top of the latter platform-based R&D needs to be responsible for the results of the entire two to three years of future R&D, so they must have long-term benefits from developing product platforms, and even a benefit from equity. For some functional research and development, more bonuses, fixed bonuses, are his commissions, so that's ok, it's still different.

"CEConline": Do you prefer internal training or external recruitment for the core personnel of the company?

Wang Wei: There is no fixed and absolute answer. It depends on the stage of enterprise development. It cannot be used mechanically. For example, we have seen that some companies have developed very rapidly, and their companies have not well established a talent supply chain under the circumstances at that time, that is, the echelon of talent development. The so-called supply chain is how to get from rough talents to finished products, or from semi-finished talents to finished products. He has not established such a talent echelon management, so the more and less people are used, the last can only be through external employment. to supplement. However, there is also a running-in process between external recruitment and the talents in traditional companies. From the perspective of culture and loyalty, including the complementarity of personnel's abilities, there is a long-term process. If the management is good, it is called a benign run-in, and if the management is not good, it is torture. We have also seen many such examples, so we cannot say that external recruitment is wrong, but we emphasize that enterprises must have good soil capabilities. After the crops come in, the soil must be inclusive. The inclusiveness of the soil means that we must have a good performance appraisal for the growth of professional managers, and at the same time, we must have a better career plan for development, telling you what kind of position you are in today and what you may develop in the future. In a new position, he can see some room for growth.

We believe that in urgent cases, external employment is essential, but we must pay attention to the inclusive team of our own internal talents, and pay attention to the development of soil. However, in the medium and long term, we still tend to focus on internal training. In fact, we need to strengthen our own hematopoietic function, which is the self-hematopoiesis of talents. How to solve the problem of a student who has just recruited from school, he can gradually grow into a backbone, from a backbone to a manager leading the team, from a manager to a director of business management, each stage has different certifications, including different Training, including the empowerment of different abilities. Empowerment means empowerment. If this process is not established, our people will use less and less. In particular, in order to grow and grow, and for business needs, many companies need to expand across regions, so we have to continuously send people from Shenzhen and Shanghai, so your people are less and less. And a more challenging problem is that when you send this person out, he does not have some manpower reserves to prepare for the new position. Because of the short version of ability, his performance is not good, because there is no one Very good training process.

We once had a case where he managed a regional sales, and if you let him manage the whole country, you will find that the leadership requirements of regional management are different from those of national management. For example, when we transfer a technical R&D department manager to a field as the general manager, there will be many problems of leadership dislocation. These dislocation problems will actually lead to a lot of lessons for the company in the end, and need to pay tuition fees. I think it is better to have some means of intervention and training in a forward-looking way, pay more in the front, and do not need to let this person grow through the lessons of the company in the later stage, the cost is relatively large.

"CEConline": In fact, many private enterprises, especially large-scale enterprises, still prefer to use talents as they come. a pit. In this case, how can he build a talent echelon?

Wang Wei: We must know that building a talent echelon is a relatively cyclical and long-term process. The bosses of many of our companies, most of the Chinese companies, really emphasize ROI when there are not enough talents. The so-called ROI is the short-term input-output ratio of employing people, and the required cycle will be shorter. This is understandable. However, after solving the short-term urgent business needs and meeting them, the question is whether a mechanism can be built to fundamentally solve this problem. I think he must consider this problem. Therefore, many of our bosses have a greater sense of management than the management mechanism of talents to cultivate their awareness, which will make them more and more tired. And it will also make many airborne executives have insufficient running-in, resulting in another job change in half a year. You can calculate his recruitment cost, including the possibility that many executives have not yet completed the adaptation period, so it is difficult to generate value, so this amount of money, if you calculate it, it may cost more than training people. .

We think three things should be paid attention to:

First, entrepreneurs should not only have a sense of strategic management, but also have a long-term perspective, especially for the cyclical nature of talents. The echelon training must become a strategic task.

Second, with regard to the airborne troops, one cannot just blame the airborne troops. We can see that many companies say that this airborne soldier is gone, and he says that the airborne soldier cannot. Maybe you need to reflect more on whether your soil is enough for crops to survive, that is, why can’t you transplant this tree to your soil? It may be possible to live in other companies. This is a question that must be answered, and it is a soil problem. .

Third, my own leadership needs to be given more time and space to help these airborne troops integrate better, rather than blindly requiring immediate results in the short term. I think this is a pair of airborne troops. Soldiers are neither realistic nor fair. However, in the medium and long term, these talents must be cultivated through internal recruitment.