I am an entrepreneur with 2 software businesses, both quickly growing.
I have a lot of questions and advice I need on handling fairly specific situations to my business. So far I haven't found a good place to discuss these important issues except for personal mentors.
I believe in sharing knowledge/experiences I get to help others. I also believe in the "knowledge of the masses" and making decisions based off of concrete facts.
A lot of my questions involve:
- Forming Company Policy - on anything from security to HR.
- Examining reasons why certain corporate policies exist and figuring out alternatives (ex: Why is there a stigma in corporations against revealing hourly rates and salaries? Anyone implement “transparent salaries” policy?
- Leadership - how to be a good leader
- What are good and bad qualities in employees - ex what makes a good and bad developers
- Interview Strategies
- Compensation strategies
- Ideas for employee satisfaction
- Ideas to encourage transparency
- Encouraging certain behaviors - question would be whether or not it's in company's best interest to encourage something
- Discourage other behaviors
- Thinking of incentives to encourage those behaviors and disincentives to discouraged the bad ones
- Advise on handling difficult employees (phrased as "employee x is doing y. I want him to do z")
- Finance: how to get loans, cash flow problems, credit card usage
Skimming through the questions on Workplace.StackExchange, they usually seem to be asked from the "employee" POV. I would really like a place where managers/leadership like myself could ask questions as well.
My theory is the reason why there are so many dissatisfied employees is because management generally doesn't have enough open discussion to figure out better ways to manage. For the most part it's hard as an entrepreneur to get unbiased advice on how they should handle a situation. They're just expected to "fix it" or "know". In fact upper management looks down on managers who come whining to them about how to solve problems. This could be a "safe place" for managers to start asking the questions in their head.
A lot of times these questions get down-voted (especially in the beginning), and I'm not 100% sure why...
I would like to have a meta discussion on what types of questions the community wants and why. I would also like some advice on how to phrase my questions better to be accepted.