How to do internal hackathons the right way?

Why not allow employees to put forward innovative suggestions that would benefit the company? Employees who suggest the most innovative ideas to save the company money or offer a more efficient way of working could receive incentives. For a limited time I’m offering free advice for 20mins. VIP link: https://clarity.fm/robstephens/scale323 Rob Stephens robstephens.com

Almost all my clients have the same issue as yours. So your challenges are not unique. While making positive business progress is a wonderful thing, external growth must come with relevant similar pace of internal growth. It seems that you are using the same old management approach/ style despite your business has grown from 1 or 2 people into current size. It is no more purely a number game now, mismanaging people will lead to loss of knowledge, valuable customer, profits, and growth potential. Your backyard is having fire currently means your internal support team is having some challenges and you may have uneven growth in some business functions - immediately you should investigate the following areas: 1. Review your management approach/ style and system 2. Review whether you are capable to manage C-level employees. 3. Review your human capital policies and culture diversity 4. Review, whether you have clear/ appropriate a) accountabilities, b) roles and responsibilities, c) committed budget, d) monitoring and control system, e) KPIs, etc 5. Revisit your mission/ vision/ expectations, adjust if necessary. 6. Review workflows and communication models to identify what has triggered the conflict(s). I think the above should help. Upon making the reviewing, you may already have action plans. If you still have problems, feel free to drop me a message

Ugh. Investors. Here's the harsh or maybe happy truth. If your Startup offering (product, service, information, courseware, consulting, etc) provides stellar value, then you require no investment. Do your launch + if money starts pouring in, either skip the investors of if you really must use investors (doubtful, if you're providing stellar value), then the more revenue you have, the better terms you'll get from investors.

I'm going to answer this from the perspective of an engineer who has worked in similar environments and who has had leadership changes that went well, as well as ones that didn't Basically you're describing an environment in which people aren't doing as much as they are capable of, they were working in a hostile environment in which threats were common, and there's a sort of lack of accountability + poor communication / collaboration. Okay first thing, I wouldn't recommend using analytics to hold people accountable. Not yet anyway. It's a carrot and a stick problem and bringing out the stick first... you're likely to add demoralized staff to the list of problems you're trying to solve. What if instead you talked to everyone and explained your vision for the company and then followed up with each employee over the next week or two. Figure out what their vision for their own career is and what they want the next year to look like, the the next three, the next five. If you can align your employee's goals and ambitions to your own, I think you'll have a lot more luck getting people to solve the disfunction that they can. And they'll be a lot more understanding when you start taking measures to hold people accountable. Again, just my perspective as an engineer. I would bet you that the people you are working with are aware of the same problems as you. And they would probably agree with you that people need to be held accountable. But you need to be careful about how you do that. Accountability right now probably will look like more micromanagement and intimidation. Paint a picture for where you want to go and commit to helping your people reach where they want to go... well, then accountability isn't such a bitter pill and it will likely be seen as necessary, not more of the same toxic leadership that wrecked the culture last time.

There's many ways to help with this, here's what I do at Clarity 1. Build an email relationship with your supply. They should have direct access to you, and you should build an ongoing drip campaign that teaches them how to improve their experience (and make more money) on Clarity. 2. For members, you should define community guidelines (Do's & Dont's) and ensure they all review / agree to them - and enforce them proactively. 3. Create a discussion forum (we use LinkedIn group) but you could use VanillaForum.com or similar, and invite members/experts to join to ask questions about your marketplace. 4. Feature experts & members that have had success or are exhibiting the types of behaviours you want from other members. We do that here: http://clarity.fm/customers Those are the big things ... smaller items would be the copyrighting, design and data you show on profiles to help increase the right behaviour (ex: Search with filter by Last Active, tells experts to be active). Hope that helps.