What’s Career Pathing Anyway?

Helcim has a wonderful weekly tradition called The Captain’s Log, where our CEO (hey Nic Beique) email blasts the whole team with some inspirational words to help ensure we’re all aligned on mission, vision, values, & strategy.

Occasionally folks get the pleasure of guest-posting for Captain’s Log, and I was lucky enough to have the opportunity this week (picture me smiling mischievously & pulling the Riker Maneuver). Here it is!

The Captain’s Log: What Is Career Pathing?

Career pathing is about aligning opportunities for career growth and development for team members with their interests, goals and abilities, and with the needs and priorities of the business. You can think of career pathing as a map of multiple routes along your journey with the company towards your goals. When you come to a fork in the road, there may be a decision point or an opportunity that opens up for you, but the timing of when to trigger a decision is ultimately determined by the company.

Being a bit further along in my professional journey than many of our Helcim colleagues, I wanted to share a bit about my own career path (which has been anything but a straight line of promotions) so others could think about what career pathing might look like for them.

Flexing into What the Business Needs

In November 2023, I had a Career Path opportunity open up to me. The leader of our Merchant Experience (MX) group had resigned to pursue her next career adventure. It was a challenging time for the company; while the executives were working hard to secure funding, we experienced lots of changes in leadership and team structure, and everyone was working hard to figure out how to focus on the right work to get us through year end and Q1 2024. It was not the right time to recruit a new senior leader; the time and effort that would have been required from the Executive Leadership Team (ELT), especially Nic, would have been too big a distraction from the essential work of fundraising.

So Nic approached me to step in on an interim basis to lead MX and join ELT, to be the voice of our customers and our front-line merchant-facing team at the ELT table. This was a stretch for me. Although I have previous senior leadership experience, I don’t have much experience leading customer-facing teams. I was nervous and was definitely experiencing imposter phenomena, but was excited for a challenge, and energized by the vote of confidence from ELT that I could support the company in this way.

For about six months I worked with MX to establish some baseline KPIs, drive more accountability, make the team’s goals and priorities clearer, and give a better line of sight to ELT about team performance. We had some changes to the team that were tough calls, but the right calls. We had some turnover and challenges with reporting and visibility. We developed a better vision for our Technical Support group’s career pathing, and (I hope) got team morale to a much better place. This is tough but incredibly rewarding work.

Ultimately it became clear to me and ELT that MX needed a senior leader with more relevant experience who could spend less time researching best practices and just hit the ground running to ramp up our team members to superstar status. Enter Maria 🤩! I was so happy we found the right leader to come in who could take some of the foundations we had started building and refine them into a well oiled machine. With Maria taking over as the voice of our merchants and our MX team at the ELT table, I took a step back to the IC track and returned to my Compliance happy place.

Sometimes Career Progression doesn’t look like “Leveling Up”

Why am I sharing this story with you? Well, I’ve heard over the year and a bit that I’ve been at Helcim certain sentiments among the team, communicated through various channels, related to Career Pathing, such as…

“I report to a senior executive now… if there is a change and I move to report under a non-executive leader, I would consider it a demotion.”

“I used to have a more senior title; I guess my title better reflects my role and responsibilities now, but it still feels like a demotion.”

“I used to be a people leader, but now I’m back to IC level. I’m feeling pretty deflated about that — it feels like a step down.”

Leadership and career progression is more than your title, whether you have direct reports, or who you report to. I consider my time participating with ELT to be a big milestone in my career. That opportunity isn’t diminished, and doesn’t disappear from my CV by the fact that I am now back on the IC track. The experience stays with me, and informs how I perform my current work. Not only that, but the experience also helped solidify certain aspects of my career goals and reconfirmed my strengths and areas where I can continue to grow and flex into through my career.

For example, I really love leading teams and growing leaders; but sales and customer service are not my fortés. Every challenge is also an opportunity. Pushing myself into this area where I was less self assured about my ability to get the job done was a forcing function for growth. An example of a takeaway from this experience that will stay with me is–I always thought I was pretty good at picking up the phone to solve problems with customers quickly (rather than risk dragging it out, misunderstood tones and other pitfalls of emailing). But Seamus and Nic both challenged me on a couple of tricky merchant issues where my instinct was to respond with a written dissertation on why Helcim was in the right, and the merchant just didn’t get it. I had to challenge my natural response, pick up the phone, and (surprise surprise) the issues were solved with way less friction, anxiety, time and effort. It seems pretty basic, but it’s a good example of one of those skills that comes with getting comfy with customer relations.

Other opportunities that opened up for me included building a headcount capacity model and forecast for the first time, creating sales playbooks, reporting on revenue KPIs, and working at a strategic level with other senior leaders to get a more fulsome picture of how interconnected our different teams are–all new challenges where I probably didn’t get it 100% right, but I walked away from those projects with new skills that changed the way I think about the organization.

A Horizontal Structure

You may have heard the phrase “horizontal organizational structure” before. In a lot of ways, Helcim is a horizontal company, meaning we generally have only a few layers of management, with lots of IC team members, and lots of freedom and trust from senior leadership that individuals can make a variety of decisions without necessarily needing management approval to move forward.

You’ll find this kind of structure among high growth tech companies a lot, because it allows organizations to build and iterate quickly, make swift pivots when necessary, collaborate cross-functionally, and work efficiently. It relies on the cooperation of all team members, and breaks down when management gets in the way of team members working together. It also only works well when all team members contribute some level of leadership and expertise to the problems at hand.

Helcim needs everyone to show up from time to time as a leader, regardless of your title or position in the org chart. This is why “communication and leadership” is highlighted as one of the categories to consider at all levels in Helcim’s job level framework.

The Owner’s Mindset

I turned 40 this year (!) and my career has been a series of loop-de-loops through various levels of leadership and responsibility. I can say with confidence that your career growth will benefit more from the way you show up for your team, the quality of your work, the diligence and thoughtfulness with which you approach your role and align your work to the company, and your ability to deliver what the organization needs at the right time. My advice (to my Helcim colleagues who have asked for it) is not to get too hung up on title and level, and instead focus on the Helcim values, which are truly designed to help you thrive in your career (and are a huge part of what attracted so many of us to join this company).

• Be a builder — never solve the same problem twice
• Choose the harder path — work hard and smart
• Be a trustworthy advocate and advisor to your team
• Contribute to our company of many — know that your unique voice and experience are essential to good decision making, creativity, and innovation

I’ve worked at a few different places over the years, and from my experiences I can see that Helcim is a place to grow your career. It’s totally natural, given our societal pressures, to be driven to get that next title, that next raise, that next promotion. But IMHO, all of that is empty space if you aren’t truly contributing to building the thing that you will one day own (remember, we all have an equity stake in this project). A lot of the success and fulfillment I’ve achieved in my career has come from taking the entrepreneurial mindset–we’re all the Janitor/CEO. If we show up like we own this thing, we will all reap the benefits in the long run.