Build better soft skills: A Conversation with Hone’s Savina Perez
Our spotlight for June is the “Future of Work.” We will focus on brilliant investors and operators who bring a fresh perspective to the way we do our jobs. Our first feature this month is Savina Perez, co-Founder and Head of Growth at Hone. All Raise’s ‘Woman Crush Wednesdays’ (#WCW) is a series where we highlight genius women who are funding or founding tech companies. Please come back to the All Raise Medium blog every Wednesday to find a new profile of an awe-inspiring female VC or founder.
******
Savina Perez’s passion is democratizing access to training.
After 16 years into her career, as a Vice President of Marketing, Savina realized she had never had any formalized training on many of the soft skills required to be the most effective leader she could be. While employers trained on process and systems, skills like conflict resolution, managing up and how to give structured feedback were taken for granted and employees were left to figure them out themselves. So she, along with her co-founders Jeremy Hamel and Tom Griffiths, created Hone, a platform for live online leadership and management training.
Hone provides manager and soft skills training for modern, distributed teams. Using synchronous, online instructor-led training programs, Hone allows organizations of all sizes to easily deliver live online group training and measure the impact on the organization. In January, Hone raised a Seed round from investors such as Harrison Metal as well as some firms led by members of All Raise including education technology firm Reach Capital and Cowboy Ventures, led by All Raise founder Aileen Lee.
Savina and I sat down and discussed what it means to be Head of Growth at an early stage startup as well as her passion for democratizing access to training.
Q: Why did you decide to found Hone?
A: We found there was a delta from when people started their careers to when they actually received any type of formalized training or coaching. With training costs high and organizational resources limited we found there was a lack of investment in high-potential individual contributors and early and mid-level managers. Why are we not investing and enabling the largest contingent of our workforce? So we built Hone to provide access to best-in-class people skills training for employees at all levels.
Q: What does it mean to “democratize access to training?”
A: Historically the best leadership development experiences have been focused on senior leaders and high potentials at the best companies, and only offered at certain locations. We wanted to change that by enabling organizations to provide training to multiple levels of management, high potentials, and early employees no matter where they were located (HQ or remote) or their role.
Q: Why are “soft skills” important in the workplace?
A: The workplace is innately interpersonal so having strong “soft skills” such as communication, collaboration, and the ability to navigate conflict are essential to success for high-performing managers and employees in general. Looking further into the future, automation will make uniquely human abilities such as working together creatively and collaboratively even more important.
Q: What are enterprises missing when they train employees?
A: Often training is one-and-done, assuming people change as a result. Real behavior change takes application and time which is why we built that into our program design and platform. Also, the promise of asynchronous e-learning (read: watching videos to learn) is great because it is convenient, but we often hear that engagement is low. We find that enterprise organizations find the most success by taking a hybrid synchronous/asynchronous approach.
Q: What are ways individuals can supplement their soft skills and be better managers?
A: The first step is making a conscious choice to invest time in improving. Then, gather feedback from your team and close colleagues, by asking “what is one thing I can do better?”. Identify themes, prioritize, and focus on improving through whatever resources work best for you. Measure improvement by surveying your team and/or reaching back out to those close colleagues and getting their feedback on change.
Q: How do you measure improvements in leadership skills?
A: The key is seeing the application of the skills in the workplace and measuring the impact that it has on the business. For example, if someone learns a new feedback technique, did they use it within a week and did it impact a measure of their team’s impression of them, which is a leading indicator for engagement and performance.
Q: Changing course, how did you know it was the right time to found a company?
A: I was able to partner with an incredible set of co-founders that were just as passionate about training and development in the workplace and we had enough confidence in the product idea to say, “F^ck it we need to build this because organizations really need it, employees really need it.” I also thought of how my management experience has come from a system of trial and error and how we can provide a streamlined experience for individuals that are still making their way through their career from Individual Contributor to VP.
There are also external factors such as the rise of technologies like zoom that allow us to provide a high-quality live-virtual experience and fundamental shifts in the workplace such as the increase in distributed and remote employees.
Q: How did you decide to be Head of Growth at Hone?
A:My entire career has been spent in marketing, sales, and pr/communications. Leading growth at Hone was a natural fit given my experience. My co-founders are more technical, having led product and engineering teams. The split of responsibilities and ownership was organic.
Q: What does it mean to be Head of Growth?
A:My team is responsible for customer growth and success. We support our clients throughout their entire journey with Hone from awareness to advocacy.
Q: You mentioned you don’t fit the traditional mold of a Founder, how do you think that affected your fundraising or your journey?
A: There was a motivation to take advantage of any and every opportunity to network. I am a girl from Queens, NY, attended public school, and one of the first in my family to attend university. I didn’t necessarily have all of the right connections coming out of the gate. Hustle and hard work certainly helped to open doors. For example, I met an investor while attending a round table discussion at a TechCrunch All Raise event in 2018 and we struck up a conversation while waiting for the event to start. That 15-minutes ended up landing us an intro to our lead investor Aileen Lee.
Q: Do you have advice for other untraditional founders?
A: Get out there and take advantage of every networking opportunity you have. You never know who you will meet and what it will lead to. I was an introvert when attending events with an unfamiliar crowd. I would usually grab a glass of wine and retreat to a corner of the room until I spotted someone I knew. I had to learn how to shake that impulse and be ok with meeting new people in new surroundings and strike up conversations. Most folks are genuinely open to meeting, interested in learning more about you, and expanding their own network. What do you have to lose?
