Menlo Roundtable on Architecting a Strategic People Function

Hey, we’re excited to have you here. Today we’re gonna be talking about architecting a strategic people function. We have Anthony Lewis with us today. He’s an engagement manager at Beacon, a talent consulting and recruitment firm that helps growing organizations level up their internal hiring programs. He’s helped over 60 companies with revenue from 5 million to 50 million build out their people and talent functions, scaling head count from 10 to 250 employees.

Today we’re gonna talk about building a strategic people function, including HR evolution stages, structuring sub functions, and HR org slash leadership developments and profiles. Feel free to ask questions along the way. And we’re definitely gonna be recording this and sharing out the recording and slides. So if you didn’t catch something, you can definitely watch it again. Anthony, thank you so much for being here today. I’ll turn it over to you to get things started.

Yeah, thanks so much for having me, Kayla. I love doing these as we were kind of chatting about just now. Thanks for everyone for being here. Just a quick bio as folks walk in. Like Kayla mentioned, I partner with growth stage organizations to help them scale their recruiting and people function. Started out as a career recruiter actually way back when, doing staff and recruiting at large technology firms. Got the startup bug, moved into Freshly, if that name rings a bell.

We scaled from 60 to a little bit over 300 FTEs and exited to Nestea for $ 1. 5 billion, I think. And that’s when I moved into Beacon because I kind of missed working with a diversity of founders and leaders on executive teams. And so now I work directly alongside our partners to help just growth stage leaders continue to do really awesome work in terms of people and in recruiting. One disclaimer I always say is, this is a vitamin, not a painkiller, right?

Like I don’t, if you’ve ever been to a one hour webinar that you’ve learned everything and tactically and went in back and crushed it at your team, like invite me to that webinar. But this is typically something I like to do to hopefully help people aim at the right place and uncover certain things that they can go back and start to think critically about. And I always make myself available after these as a post- webinar follow- up. And I find that we can have a bit more contextualized conversations leading up to those.

And so I hope you get a lot out of this, but always say I’m available afterwards as well. Just kind of quick screenshot of some of the companies and partners I’ve worked with. Some may look familiar and some not, but a lot of health tech.

Funny enough, I know Menlo, you guys invest in a lot of health tech, but a lot of partners who are in health tech, Trusted, Hedway may have been helped those founders and CEO scale on beyond a series B and C. And especially Hedway who recently, I think closed a pretty large round, which I’m really happy for them about. And so I’m very familiar with the space and I’m just here to impart not wisdom, as I said to Kayla, but past experiences that may convert into wisdom based on how you choose to apply them. So let’s jump into it.

So, excuse me, what is the difference between a strategic people function and a perfunctory HR function? I’ll start by saying, I think it’s not binary. I think everyone starts at like level one, right? Especially if you’re literally just joining at the ground level at any startup, touch that on, you start as reactive, ad hoc and short- term focused. And it’s more of a maturity model, right? Trying to get from level one, two, three, and so on throughout each growth stage. And we’ll talk more about that.

But in each theme proactive versus reactive, that’s just when you go from kind of playing whack- a- mole to identifying opportunities, the right opportunities. That drive the business forward, rather than just acting purely in response to issues as they arise, right? You’re catching the root cause and not the symptom. Systematic versus ad hoc, basically think about cogs in a wheel, moving in tandem motion, right? All the departments and sub functions are in communication with each other.

And if you have a scorecard, for example, at the hiring process, that scorecard isn’t lost at the end of the hiring process, it’s taking throughout the entire employee life cycle.

where it’s used during performance evaluations and exit interviews. So think about systematic being the things that you do in one part of the HR organization, touching and responding to other parts of the HR organization in a very efficient way. And then long- term versus short- term focus. I think this is more around philosophy, right? Again, when you start, most things are short- term, but as you get, you know, theme one and two down, you start to create a much more long- term lens to the future.

And you’re starting to build systems that can scale and adapt as companies grow. One thing I’ll say from past experiences is I think a lot of us HR leaders and people leaders have to work really hard to balance building an HR organization that’s unique to our company, but also responding to the external environment. And we saw that a lot during COVID, right? I think this is true for business in general, right?

But I think this is especially true for HR I’ve experienced because you’re dealing with the complexity of people in organizations, which creates a lot of gray area. And one thing I could advise, you know, HR leaders today, whether you’re a first- time head of people or you’re an experienced people leader is beware of FOMO, quite frankly. You know, my perspective is there’s not a lot of best practices in people, you know, operations, but there are things that are good for your organization that you do based on the vision.

For example, I had a lot of CEOs, founders, and HR leaders come to me after COVID saying, hey, like, I don’t know if I wanna go like remote or in- person, what’s like the best practice? What do you think I should do? And that decision is based on what is good for your organization. So for example, if you are saying, hey, do I go in- person or do I do remote? Your job as a HR leader is really to do a cost benefits analysis of that decision and make the best decision based on that cost benefits analysis.

There’s no, it’s good to be in- person or it’s best to be remote. And so that’s just an example of where I wanna take the conversation and set the tone is HR is hard because you’re dealing with a lot of complexity, but you’re balancing building an organization that is unique to your organization while balancing the needs of the external environment.

Can I get a quick kind of poll on where we are at in terms of headcount, some of the leaders in this chat, Allison, Matthew, Lisa, you just drop a number, 35 FTs, 50 FTs, 10, just to kind of get a sense of where we’re at. Six, five, 100, 500, 90, 65, 1, 200, okay, got it, cool. So this is great because we’re at a variety of different sizes. And the big thing I’ll say is what I’ve experienced, HR goes through an evolution, meaning that when you go through these different stages, your sub- functions really just create a bit more maturity.

They don’t change. For example, employee engagement at 35 employees functionally is very similar to 70, 80, 90. You just create a bit more process and cadence around what you’re doing. So what your motions don’t really change. You just start to incorporate the right tools and systems to make it more efficient. I’ll get into when you should hire your first full- time people, employee or leader. Typically it’s three to 5% I’ve seen. I haven’t seen more than 7%. I haven’t seen much less than 3%. Just based on what I’ve experienced.

And it really does depend on, I think, industry and type of organization. For example, I’ve seen a lot of medical companies, law firms, not saying that because they’re all litigious, but those kinds of industries typically, because of the complexity of those organizations, I have a higher percentage of headcount. And that’s what I wanna use as a marker. I used headcount here as a marker, 35 to 50, not because of growth in and of itself, but growth as a leading indicator to complexity.

When you hit 35 to 50 employees, you probably start to see your first management layer. Functional management layer, you have middle managers who are managing direct reports. And that’s when it starts to get a bit complex. And so I typically see folks between the 30 to 5 to 50 mark hire their first full- time HR person. But I mean, contrary to that, yeah.

Oh, I thought we had someone jump in, but contrary to that, I’ve seen people hire fractional leaders at this stage. I’ve seen people outsource to HR consulting firms at this stage. And so if you’re not using headcount as a marker, I’d probably use funding as a marker. You can, as far as you are comfortable outsourcing, you can continue to do that until you probably anticipate consistent growth. And usually a fraud raising round is a marker for that growth where you’re anticipating a lot more people.

So again, it really depends on what, you know, your team is comfortable with. I wanna stop there and see if the crowd had any particular questions around, especially first time, like folks who are earlier in their journey, questions around hiring their first full- time people leader or full- time people person on generally. And if we don’t, we can move, but I just wanna stop and

pull.

Moving on, what are the different stages of scaling an HR function? Very early stage, you’re one to 35, right? You’re an HR journalist, you got a PEO, right? That’s managing your benefits, payroll, et cetera. And you probably have, you know, a very basic ATS, like a breezy or recruiter flow, right? Pretty can- ban style, inexpensive. And you’re, if I have any chess fans in the room, you’re kind of in your book moves, right? You’re early game, you got a few book moves and that’s really it, right?

You’re paying people on time, you’re ensuring people get onboarded, right? And you’re managing, you know, your small amount of employees through your PEO and HRS or HRS or, and you’re also just kind of acting as, you know, CX for people, right? Instead of now, if someone doesn’t get paid on time or there’s an issue, they’re not going to that direct manager, they’re going to that HR person, right? And so I think, you know, there’s not much at this stage.

I think that’s a lot of book moves, but I think the next stage of growth is very critical for a number of reasons, because the gap between that first people leader stage and building out sub functions is a huge gap. It’s like going from adolescent to teenager and I think a lot can go right or wrong during that stage. But any questions for the folks who are either first time heads of people or people leaders, or maybe early in this stage who are non HR people or curious? You’re submitted as a team.

All right, so as a team of one, how do you prioritize what’s most important of the company and balance wearing all the people hat? I would, who is it? Okay, so I’ll answer the facilitator question and then Lauren’s question. And for the facilitator question, if we have the question asker in the audience, feel free to jump in for context. But generally speaking, I think that question itself is good because it shouldn’t be at odds, right?

I think depending on what stage of organization you’re in, the needs of the HR organization should actually align with the needs of the company organization. So imagine you’re kind of in a boat, right? And the HR leader’s job is to manage inside the boat. Outside the boat, your CEO, founder or general executive team, including yourself, they’re kind of focused on the direction, right? They’re popping in and out of the deck shore, but they’re focused on, we’re out, just out to shore, early stage startup, right?

And we’re out and we’re kind of making headway into the ocean. We’re trying to decide the direction, right? We got some sand over there, some shore over there. We got some treasure over there. We see some other boats doing their thing over there, but I’m the CEO and founder. I’m kind of trying to steer the ship. My HR leader is a great confidant who would tell me what’s going on inside the ship, right? And tell me like, all right, the routers are busted or the coal, we need more, is the old boat, but maybe we need more coal or something, you know?

So we’re basically trying to align what’s going on inside the ship with outside the ship. And so, you know, hopefully to answer your question, I think what’s most important to the company in balancing the hat, if those two are at odds, that’s the issue you need to fix on itself. Who do you suggest that first HR journalist report into?

It does, I would say typically, depending on the size of the stage of the organization, if it’s like under 35, I’ve seen them report into the CEO founder, but most times if you have a CFO, honestly, that HR journalist will report into the CFO and you’ll build the organization into the CFO or finance leader. It’s not until the organization gets really big you kind of have that CTO who probably sits on the executive board, but very early, typically, that HR leader is reporting to the CFO. If not the CFO, probably the CEO or a CEO.

Hopefully that answers your question, Lauren. Awesome, all right. So not much to cover very early stage. I hope you’re just doing your book moves, your pawn to E1, your knight to E4, and it’s super simple, right? The next stage is when things start to get hairy. As some of you, you know, at the larger organizations, if you’ve kind of taken it from, you know, stage A to stage B, or position A to position B, have experience. This stage, I think is pretty critical, between 35 and 50, probably more.

Because it’s when you as an HR leader are acting both tactically and strategically.

And that’s a hard job, right? And it’s still, it’s okay, because at this stage, you’re probably still acting more tactically than not. That’s fine too. But what I’ve seen and experienced is, unfortunately, there’s so much going on at this stage, you forget to carve out cycles to think strategically, particularly, I’ll tell you, on organizational structure. This is a stage where you’re moving slow enough out in that ocean, right? You’re doing like maybe 50 knots and, you know, there’s not, you’re still not that far from shore.

I’m gonna just keep using this analogy.

I like that. But you’re not so far from shore. You’re not going too fast. You’re not that big of a boat yet, right? You’re probably like a mid- decker, right?

You’re not a canoe or a dinghy anymore, with a few, you know, the founding leadership team. But you’re a good size, but you’re not moving that fast. But your job as an HR leader at this stage is to say, all right, I’m getting all this stuff done.

I got a recruiter. I got an HR journalist, probably, who’s like handling payroll, handling the needs of the employees. And I’m helping oversee that.

But there’s 20, 30% of my capacity that’s going to, okay, especially for a venture- backed organization, I know that next stage is like hyper growth.

I need to poke holes.

I need to ask about organizational structure and strategy. We need to understand and create lines of accountability and community, communication, excuse me, right?

You have probably a lot of first- time managers.

You start to see churn at this stage.

You probably have past employees, right? And going back to that marker, the complexity, the complexity of the organization is starting to get there. We’re managing outside the boat, the direction, the navigation, the waters. That is getting as hard as managing inside the boat.

And that’s why this stage is really, really hard. But what I’ve seen is focusing on organizational structure and strategy, not headcount planning. That’s different.

It’s very tactical, right? It says, how many folks in what departments do I need to hire next quarter, next two quarters?

Maybe what are the salary bets? That is in response to organizational strategy and structure. Organizational strategy and structure says, what are the job families that folks belong to?

Where are the departments rolling up or functions rolling up and why, right?

Is it necessary and critical? What is going to break organizationally in the next three to six months that this function reports into this department and what change needs to happen? And I implore you to get it right at this stage because we’ll see in the next slide that once you hit that next stage, hatchet doors are closed. You’re into a stratosphere, you’re out, sit.

There’s no going back. You’re moving fast. You’re moving a thousand knots.

You’re three- deckers.

You’re out in the open sea and you’re moving.

And any move you make, that’s an inch off. You know the saying, you’re off an inch, you’re off a mile. So this is the stage I implore HR leaders to really carve out cycles to focus on organizational strategy and structure. I’m going to toggle to the chat to see, make sure I’m not missing any comments or questions. Great. But any questions around this stage, I’d love, I’m happy to spend a little bit more time.

I’m very familiar with this stage, but I think that’s what makes it hard.

But continue to build that organization in a way that’s unique to the company and not the external environment. And continue to focus on organizational structure. That’s my biggest advice at this stage.

So, once you kind of move away from that small to mid- sized stage, I think you’re moving much faster now in the next stage. This is probably 50 to 100, maybe a little bit more. And this is where you probably hire that head of people, or that VP of people in a large organization. That’s probably what’s going to be the job of online. You’re establishing organizational philosophy, right? You’re aligning organizational strategy with mission and vision, and you’re preparing to add scale on those strategies, meaning you’re considering new business units.

Maybe you’re winding down a feature or a product that’s not performing. This is where you’re making very big, hairy decisions, decisions that have ripple effects. And that’s why I emphasized in the previous stage, it’s very important to set that tone based on the speed you’ll be going in this stage. It’s going to be really hard to do that. Because at this stage, depending on also how long you’ve been with this leader or this team, you’ve also set the tone on the type of HR leader you are, right?

And so, what I’ve done in the past at this stage is I’ve gotten coaching, to be very transparent, right? Especially if you’re either a less seasoned HR leader, you haven’t seen the complexity of these types of organizations, I would invest in coaching. Because at this stage, you’ll probably hire a VP of people above you, quite frankly, or a chief people officer, right? So it’s either it’s, hey, I was the one to get us from zero to one, right? But I think I can get us from one to N, right?

So versus hiring a $ 300, 000 chief people officer or head of people, and that’s 40K and me. Right? And so, depending on who that resonates with or is relevant to, I think that this is the stage where you can invest a lot more in coaching.

What I’ve seen, though, and experienced, and some of you may experience this as well, is I think at this stage, depending on who your backers are, what your leadership team’s philosophy is, I’ve seen folks over- invest in recruiting, in growth, and because of that spending goes to recruiting, going to job boards, going to hiring an outside recruiting team. Some of the other sub- functions that we’ll talk about just now gets under- invested in. And that’s why in the next stage, there’s not a strong HR foundation, right?

And so, that just kind of doubled down on, that’s why it is important to kind of set that tone in the previous stage, because once you get to the stage, what was talked about in the previous stage and where kind of the markers were set, it also dictates where you will be spending your time, which will dictate how you can create a bit more of a strategic people function. And so, if you’re stuck tactically based on, right, what the OKRs of the organization is, you’re not going to be able to spend time creating much more foundational HR structure, right?

At this stage, you’re probably level two, just hitting level two or passing level two on systematic. You’re probably at level, mid- level two, hopefully approaching three on proactive versus reactive. You’re probably still at level one, maybe heading to level two on long- term vision versus short- term vision, right?

And so, this is a stage where, particularly, I would say, if you want to spend a bit more time on the systematic, because that’s where you’re probably losing time and resources, where things are not speaking to each other well, where things are not moving systematically. That’s why you’re probably still playing whack- a- mole. And so, this is the stage where you want to make sure everything is kind of well- greased, connected, nothing’s working in a silo, and you have things kind of moving and talking to each other.

I want to stop there and see if anyone, particularly for the folks who are probably at this stage, what are some of the things you’re experiencing at this stage that you would want to kind of talk to? Right? Like, I think Ashley, you’re at 90 people, Matt, Matthew, you’re at 100, you know, so Brendan, you’re at 65. I’m curious if there’s anything that you’re seeing or experiencing that you’d want to kind of pose a question to before we move on.

And if not, that’s fine too. I just want to make sure this is as conversation as possible.

Hey, Anthony, Matt here. I hope you don’t mind me chiming in as opposed to typing really quick.

Yeah, please. Yeah, nice to meet you all.

Right, nice to meet you as well. Thank you for all the advisement that you’ve given here. It’s. It’s great to see this broken- down. Question for you is this: we’re about a hundred people right now. The executive team made a decision over a couple years to branch out into some different locations, which adds different complexity to things. So I mean, believe it or not, we’re in five different locations right now: Canada, India, estonia, Argentina, and scattered through the US, or fully remote, which you know.

Just trying to keep eyes on things and make sure that we’re complying in itself makes things a little bit difficult. So, yeah, question for you is this: I know you’re talking about the three to five percent range as far as the team is concerned to help build things out. And also, like you said, let me go through cycles for a strategic standpoint. What would you say in reference to that, noting that we’re so diverse as far as locations are concerned? How does that come into play?

Yeah, no, that’s a great question, man. I think it goes back to complexity piece like, Wow at that, that headcount right. I think things like being in a global market to your point adds complexity. The type in structural organization- whether you can be an employee owned organization or cooperative organization with subsidiaries- that adds complexity. So I think that that kind of slider on headcount percentage goes along with complexity.

And so question I guess for you like, where are you at now in terms of percentage of headcount compared to organization?

I think we’re pushing more on the 5% side, to be honest with you. But I do find that you know it is very cumbersome to make sure that we’re staying compliant as far as employment law and also streamline across different cultures some sort of strategy on, you know, employee value proposition. You know making sure that people feel some sort of unity, being that different people from different locations really required different sort of support.

Yeah, yeah, no, it does. I’ve seen typically larger. So depending on where you are, you have resources available. But with that kind of complexity, minus headcount, I’ve seen kind of a hub- and- spoke HR model where you almost have boots on the ground in different markets, kind of acting as that champion and then kind of centralized to whoever that people leader is.

And so you’ll have, you know, boots on the ground in Estonia, boots on the ground- I think you had mentioned germany, boots on the ground XYZ. And so I think, having that hub- and- spoke model, having people on the ground almost as an HR business partner to that market and then kind of sent, and then once you see what is happening at the ground level, you can work backwards to start to create, uniform it on. You put on uniformity. Uniformity can’t speak today across those different markets.

But I think in the beginning, to your point, you’re going to experience a little bit thrash but the best thing to do is create- I think start to create- a bit more cycles in communication. So, depending on how much you are, folks on the ground are updating you, whether it’s like weekly, daily etc. What I’ve done in the past when I’ve experienced that, is create increase in a velocity of communication between those spokes to the hub because the learning becomes faster.

You have to accelerate the learning because basically what you’re doing is like you’re accelerating the time to make the mistakes, between making the mistakes and learning what works. And the faster you could do that, the more you can centralize and standardize that hub- and- spoke and then you might actually not need that hub- and- spoke in, let’s say, six months because you’ve done everything you needed to do on the ground.

So I’d say like you’d probably have to invest now and kind of getting boots on the ground- even if it’s someone they’re not in that market per se- trying to invest a little bit more on having even fly out. Maybe you spend a little bit more time there. But I think it’s about how do I create a hub- and- spoke model, right, each organization to accelerate the learning.

So take that learning from the ground and start to standardize things and from there I can decide how much do I need to invest or not invest in those markets moving forward, perfect, thank you so much.

Appreciate it, yeah, of course.

So, yeah, this stage is is fun, right. You know, as you can see, that Matt, complexity is not again just in headcount. It’s really based on what your organization looks like.

And just to kind of lean back on that HR is hard because not just about headcount, all right, you have complexity of different sizes and scales of organizations across different companies and so your organization at a hundred people may look very different than Matt at a hundred people, and that’s why I say: invest in coaching, when you have an opportunity and continue to build the HR function in response to your organization and not what you think is the best practices in the market, because there’s just always going to be difference.

Once you pass this stage, yep, can you give some recommendations for coaching? Yes, I can. We can chat after this. I have folks who are pretty experienced people leaders who’ve scaled organizations from 50 to 1, 000. CHROs, Chief Human Resource Officer friends who are really good. So yeah, I can say that research with the whole group. But yeah, so I think from here, the next stage is, and I don’t know how many people are in this stage. I think I saw one or two people.

I think somebody was at 1, 200, but I think at this stage, it’s interesting because it starts to, things start to solidify at this stage, right? You’re hitting 250 people. It’s basically like, okay, I might be getting into M& A, right, we might’ve bought a company. We might’ve, to Matt’s point, launched in three or four markets. We might, there might be dissent throughout the organization, unfortunately.

Some senior level people, because again, you have at this point, seven, eight layers of organization and probably at least two to three management layers, at least at 250, there may be dissent. I don’t, right, people are looking out on the boat and they’re like, I don’t agree where the boat’s going. Right, like, what are we doing? What’s going on? So again, these things create complexity.

And so I think at this stage, some of the challenges you’ll experience don’t come from this stage, funny enough, but comes from what you didn’t do, unfortunately, in those previous stages. And because this is particularly where you start to build up those sub- functions, and if you haven’t built the right foundation, those sub- functions are not gonna succeed. You know, on paper, this is where you’re probably having dedicated teams across different sub- functions.

So recruiting, you know, is handling talent attraction and sourcing, you have specialties like competent rewards, learning development. You’ve probably brought your PEO in- house and gotten an HRS. You’ve probably migrated ATSs from a breezy or a recruit as well to a level or even a greenhouse or maybe even an ISIMs, depending on, again, on what your goals are. And so I think this stage is interesting because this is the stage of experience where, all right, cool, we kind of have some maintenance to do, right?

And as an HR leader, you are spending more time on that above deck, kind of looking at the navigation with the rest of the executive leadership team versus in the previous stages, you were probably spent a little bit more time inside and outside the deck, right? Trying to make sure what’s going on inside the boat aligns with what’s going on outside the boat.

So I have less to kind of speak to at this stage, but my biggest advice probably is, I mean, probably just continuing to understand if you feel like you have made any strategic errors, right, strategic errors, how do I kind of turn that around, right? And how do I go to my leadership team to say, okay, we’re at 250 people, and this mistake has cost us X amount of dollars. If we don’t fix it by the time we’re 500 or 1, 000, if that is a growth prospect or growth vision, is gonna cost X amount of dollars now. This problem costs a million dollars today.

By the time we get to 500, if we don’t fix this right now, it’s gonna cost five million. So I think that is, if anything is wrong, you can do at that stage. But at that stage, if you’ve done everything really well, you’re pretty prepared and well- resourced to continue to navigate. Obviously things still come up, but at that point, they’re not tactical. Your team is kind of managing a lot of that and managing up, and hopefully they’re doing a great job managing up. All right, so I think next we’ll get into the sub- functions of it.

So what are the different responsibilities and sub- functions within a strategic people function? These are five, I would say like central themes or themes that I think make sense to outline based on the growth stages we’re at. Any bigger, probably, you know, comp rewards, like I mentioned, all those different, I think those are very, very specialty functions. I think these five cover a lot.

I’m going to spend a little bit more time on talent and recruiting and probably performance management today, just because I think the stages we cover today, those two are very important to getting us to a very strategic people function by the time we hit that last growth stage. Because I think that’s where I’ve seen a lot of organizations and people leaders make mistakes in those two things. So ops, pretty standard, it’s kind of like, you know, your customer success team for people, right?

They’re managing policies, needs, any employee requests, onboarding, exiting people, et cetera. So they’re kind of the BAU in cog in the wheel, like the automotive counterpart for that. So there’s not much to cover there. Talent and recruiting, I think is very important to cover because the biggest mistake I see early HR leaders make or early founders make is not bringing on an experienced recruiter or experienced recruiting because recruiting at this stage is actually the hardest, right?

The job of a recruiter at the early stages or the stages we covered is to identify what the employees are experiencing inside the boat, right? And to illustrate it and message it outside the boat, right? And so if you don’t have experience doing that, it’s really hard, right? You’re a young brand, probably a young team, you’re still figuring out the market environment in your own organization. And so, for example, who here has, you know, had a founder or CEO or peer say, hey, like this next hire needs to have startup experience.

We won’t hire someone with high experience. If you have it, don’t even put like a raised hand, put like a laughing face, like one of those like crying, laughing faces. I just kind of want to say, like who here is like, we won’t hire someone without, oh, how do I navigate back to the chat? Oh, there we are. Okay, there you go. Okay. Anyone else? Okay.

That’s the face I make when I hear that because all that signals to me what you’re actually saying is I don’t have the experience to message and position the opportunity I’m hiring for based on the mission and vision of my organization. That’s basically what you’re saying at that stage. But an experienced recruiter or recruiting partner, back up, will tell you, hey, actually you need to split those two roles into, that role into two roles.

You’re not looking for a general marketing manager, you’re looking for a marketing operations person who is more junior, and then you’re looking for a mid- level lifecycle marketing manager. Hey, you actually don’t need a product owner, you need a product manager. Hey, actually, if you want to build in this geography, the addressable market’s like a thousand, right? So if we need to hire 20 mechanics in this new facility in this geography in the next year, it’s a very small addressable market.

And so we either need to change our incentive structure or change our direction and choose a different geography. The delta between an experienced recruiter and a non- experienced recruiter at that stage is huge. And so I think that’s where I’ve seen a lot of people make decisions because you’re starting to move away from shore and you actually don’t have boots on the ground as a leader, right? You don’t have a pulse on the market as much as your team does, right?

And so you need an experienced mid- level recruiter or recruiting partner who can actually tell you what’s going on, going on out at sea, right, and bring that information back to help you make those strategic decisions and message that back to your leadership team. So hopefully before you even decided to go to the market in that new area or open up a plant in that, you know, Arizona, you did that talent mapping with your recruiter. The recruiter said, I went to JEM where I use a free talent mapping tool and the addressable market is 6, 000.

And here are the top companies, you know, mechanics are employed at these organizations. Don’t know how relevant this role analogy is, but, you know, hopefully, you know, that makes sense where it’s a lot of those decisions are won or lost way before that decision is made. And so I think this is where a lot of people at this stage make a mistake that they think they can hire a very junior entry level recruiter to just go and, you know, kind of order take.

And then when things don’t go well, they’re curious, well, we just don’t have a good enough recruiter. No, your recruiting strategy is in line with your goals.

Next, I want to cover employee engagement. Employee engagement is, I think, activation, I call it. This is where you’re creating brown bag launches and off- site planning. You’re getting the voice and the needs of the organization, the employees are felt and heard. Employee engagement is a great way to activate your employees and ensure that they’re performing optimally and that you’re creating a really strong brand culture that lasts.

One thing I’ll say about employee engagement, which goes into L& D, I think a lot of folks, HR leaders and just companies in general, for some reason, conflate L& D and employee engagement. Who here in their early stage experiences has had a learning stipend? I’ve seen a lot of job descriptions. Hey, benefits include unlimited PTO and then a $ 500 earning stipend. Who’s had that? You could put a thumbs up or high five or whatever the case may be, small learning allowances. Probably not. I mean, that’s rare.

I’ve seen those and how I’ve usually seen those used is the wrong way. Typically, I’d see someone say, okay, I got a $ 500 earning allowance and I can go spend it at a conference. I’m probably going to go hang out, catch up with some old friends and hop back on a plane or something like that. L& D, specifically, the best way I’ve seen L& D implemented, is where there is an end goal, an application, and a return. $ 500 on a random conference is an L& D. That is employee engagement.

If you want to foster growth, I mean, foster employee sentiment, if you want to foster employee well- being, I think that’s employee engagement. A better application of L& D would be, hey, we need to implement this new system. No one on this team has the skill set. Who’s the closest person with the skill set on this team? I think it’s Veronica, right? Palma. It’s Veronica. She has a great IT skill set. Got it. Okay. Does she know this thing? No, but I think she can learn it. Cool. Do we want to hire someone for this role? No.

It’s going to cost like $ 100, 000. Got it. Okay. Maybe we fly Veronica out. It costs $ 5, 000. We’ll fly her out to IT systems worldwide where they have workshops on it, conferences. Her role is to get that information, do the workshops, the webinars, with context to our problem, do all that stuff. Maybe she can lay out on the beach between conferences and invite her partner or whatever or their partner. But when she gets back or when they get back, now they are taking that learning and applying and say, okay, cool.

Veronica, how long is it going to take us to implement this thing? I think about three months. I think I can work with the head of IT to do it. Okay, cool. So we invested $ 5, 000 in that application. Now, I think if we do this for three months, we’re going to be able to stand up this whole new system. It’s going to save us about $ 60, 000 in the long run. Return. Right? We need a new system that works really well. We can hire someone who has that system experience. We’re going to invest in someone.

We need them to get the learning and disseminate it across organization, application. And then we need to understand whether or not it was worth return. That is L& D. And I think I’ve seen organizations big and small, quite frankly, make this mistake where they conflate L& D with employee engagement.

A $ 500 learning stipend to go get better at public speaking or to take a LinkedIn course isn’t L& D. L& D needs to, in my perspective, and what I’ve seen the best organizations do, have a return on investment that is directly aligned with the needs of the organization and the needs of the individual. Lastly is performance management. This is also something I have a lot of experience around and perspective on because one thing I’ve seen organizations not do well, especially through the growth stage, is they don’t define performance. You can have…

What does some folks’ performance cycle look like? Is it biannually, annually, quarterly? Just a quick drop. I’m just curious.

Annual, Bilal does annual, Sahar does annual, Matt does biannual, Veronica does annual, Lauren does biannual. Okay. Got it. So, what I’ve seen is that we spend a lot more time on the planning of performance and not defining performance. Performance needs to have, in my perspective, an operational definition, right?

Meaning when I say, one, I can write it down quite literally, and I can point at it and say at, you know, Lauren’s company, right, this is what performance means, and it could be results- oriented, it could be project- oriented, it could be task- oriented, it could even… be operationally defined. I should be able to point at it and look at it. So when I’m in a review, I’m, you know, that when I say, you know, Veronica’s performance, right, Lauren and I are saying the same thing. We both are saying performance, that means the same thing.

So I think for a lot of organizations, when they’re building the sub- function, they get some of the pieces right around structure, but kind of completely miss on the operational stuff, right? Again, for example, when I’m hiring someone, you know, what are the scorecard goals, right? What are the OKRs? And that could change. Are they established? That is the set of mandates I’m hiring this person for as they change, but what is the performance, right? What is the output or outcome that I expect?

And when I get in a review or I’m sitting in a review, right, for someone under me and they’re having a review, like it’s a skip- level review, are we all three saying the same thing when we’re talking about performance, right? And so I would say that’s my biggest advice when it comes to performance management and evaluation. It’s about understanding what are the needs of the individual and how do I continue to align them with the needs of the organization? So these are the five themes or sub- functions, typically, between like 1 to 250.

I think that makes sense. Any bigger and you start to get specialty functions that roll up into these. Before I move on, I want to see if there’s any quick questions on any of these or either of these sub- functions. Cool. All right. What is or how can a strategic people leader help a CEO with tricky conversations and communications? I think the role of the HR leader is twofold. It’s being a confidant and a sounding board, right?

The CEO should be able to go to any of you HR leaders in the room and talk to you about, say, maybe another leader, actually, they’re not confident, that’s not performing well. Maybe there is an issue, a very sensitive issue between two employees, right? Or on the other end of it, maybe they want to actually get some cycles in and talk to you about something before they take it to the broader team. Maybe they’re like, I don’t know if this vision, like, I don’t, honestly, like I’ve been thinking more about this vision, but all in, I don’t know, right?

I’m the CEO, I’m the founder, like, I don’t know if people are kind of jiving with it. Like, what do you think? Are we off track? Like, do you think people are like, feel good about where we’re heading? Or like, you know, honestly, like, this product that we’re pushing out, like, when I started it, I was really passionate about it, but like, nowadays, I just don’t feel it’s connected to the product. Like, I don’t, right? So, I think a lot of the time, you know, HR leaders get stuck in a very tactical role and that’s it early on.

But later on, you need to become that confidant, that sounding board. And that’s why I say invest in coaching, because at the end of the day, back to the boat analogy, you’re moving along, you’re 250, you’re 500 people, you’re navigating, you know, all right, we got some boats over there, we got to avoid pirates over there. I’m just like, this is an analogy, you’re avoiding pirates over there, you got beach over there. So, what it is, as an HR leader, is to get your team to that destination. They’ve worked really, really, really hard to get there.

We’ve all worked, if we worked in a startup environment, 50, 60, 70 hour weeks, right? Like, your team has worked really hard to get there. The last thing you want is to get to shore and dock and open the hatches. Everyone gets off and they’re like, what the hell is this? Like, the sand is dirty as hell. What is it? Where’d you bring us? Like, there’s trash on the sand, there’s no trees, this island is small as hell. Where are we right now? I’m getting back on the boat.

Right. So I think the biggest advice I have in general to hopefully untie all this in a knot is make sure you build your HR organization in a way that when you get to that certain stage, you can spend more time helping your CEO navigate and get to that destination. Right. Because when they’re working really, if the team’s working really hard to get there, it needs to be worth it. Right. Because I’ll tell you another thing. I’ve seen chief people officers come in when things are not so great, when sometimes that is actually the need.

Right.

You bring in a CPO at 300 people, 500 people, a thousand people when there’s a ton of turnover, 20, 30 percent turnover. There is, again, dissent. Right. You got different leaders who are infighting. You got people who are like, this is my team and my resources and I don’t care what everyone’s doing over there. You get the strategies out of whack. That’s a bad time to come to an organization.

Right.

Because at that point, everyone has gotten off the boat. And so I implore you. We’ve got another question. How do we distinguish appropriate profiles for wartime CPO? That is a great question that I cannot answer in seven minutes. So whoever answer that, I’m more than happy to chat after. But I will do that question of disservice if I try to answer it right now. I’ll be completely honest. But I’m serious. I would like to connect with whoever asked that question. But just to tie this up, because I want to leave, leave room for more questions afterward.

I’m excited for where HR is going. I think the complexity of the role makes it a lot more interesting today than even just three to five years ago. And it makes it real harder. But I’m excited because I think that creates a lot more opportunity for the HR leaders in this room. And I’m excited for the next generation of HR leaders to continue to push the function and the organization forward. So I want to stop there because we only have a few minutes if there are any questions.

And I want to turn it back to Kayla and Mary, who did a great job facilitating.

Anthony, thank you so much for your time. We just popped up a poll. If you guys have the opportunity to just fill that out for us, that would be great. Any other questions for Anthony while we have him here? We have about six minutes left. Feel free to jump in.

Yeah, and if we don’t, I’ll try to answer that wartime versus beat time question as best as I can. And just just to jump in, we’ll be sending an event recap email, where you can see the link to contact Anthony if you have any follow up questions, as well as we’ll be posting the resources on the recap web page for the coaching referrals that Anthony mentioned earlier in the presentation. Yeah, awesome. I’ll give a TLDR on peacetime versus wartime. And wherever I answer that, I ask that question, would be happy to chat.

But I’d say like, in general, honestly, wartime versus peacetime, any leader, I found it, I found it is where, where you kind of cut your teeth, quite frankly. Right, like, I would define first, let me start off by defining them. A peacetime CPO is someone, typically times are good, and you’re probably growing. And this, by I think nature of this person’s personality, they’re very like, we need to like go fast, we need to innovate, we need to do this, we need to do that. And it creates a lot of opportunity for the organization.

Wartime is someone by nature and personality or design is hey, we’re betting on the hatches, we’re not moving 100 knots, you know, we are not going to put in that extra deck, right for more people to pick up next, next up, right, they’re really focusing on the maintenance, right. And so I think evaluating for those profiles is based on what they’ve experienced, quite frankly, because there’s no way you can teach those experiences. They’re very unique profiles. One circumstance is not good for another CPO. It doesn’t make them better or stronger.

Like I wouldn’t say a wartime CPO is more effective than a peacetime CPO. I think that’s a, if anything, I want to kind of, you know, get that misunderstood. But I would say it’s, you have to be honest with yourself and say, what kind of CPO am I? Where am I most effective? Is this the tour duty for me? But I don’t think you can manufacture that experience. It had to have been something someone as a leader has experienced. From my, my, my perspective, that is a TLDR. You can’t manufacture. Awesome.

Awesome.

Thank you.