Assembling Your Dream Team: Kimeia Vu of Octaura on How CEOs & Business Leaders Can Build & Lead High-Performing Executive Teams

An interview with Dr. Bharat Sangani

I’d start with clearly understanding and defining the team’s purpose — why are we here, who do we serve, what are the critical priorities. Early on, we learned when things are vague and ambiguous, it led us to focus on role-specific accountabilities, and we almost lost sight of the overall agenda.

Building and leading a high-performing executive team is crucial for any CEO or business leader striving to create a thriving organization. But what does it take to attract top talent, foster collaboration, and ensure long-term success? In this series, we will explore how CEOs and business leaders strategically assemble and lead dream teams that drive innovation, growth, and excellence. As a part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Kimeia Vu.

Kimeia Vu is the Chief People Officer at Octaura, an electronic trading solution that has reimagined the way the syndicated loan and the CLO markets trade. There, she oversees the company’s people strategy, which includes fostering an inclusive and dynamic culture with its recruitment and retention efforts and training initiatives.

Thank you so much for your time! I know that you are a very busy person. Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?

I ended up in HR by accident. I studied finance and always thought that was going to be my career path. After a few years in accounting, I knew it wasn’t what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. After some soul searching, I reached out to headhunters to explore jobs outside of finance and was ultimately presented with an opportunity to be an in-house recruiter for a medical device company in the Bay Area. I joined the company and knew immediately that this was where I wanted to grow in my career. I went from a job that had me counting the hours until 5:00PM to one where I was able to thrive.

Lucky for me, that was a great company to cut my HR teeth on because they had over 10,000 employees and multiple divisions. I moved around within HR and spent about a year in different specialized areas — from recruitment to learning and development to total rewards — before I was promoted to head up HR for their division in New Jersey. I think the exposure to different aspects of the business helped me become a more well-rounded HR practitioner.

Three years after I relocated to the east coast, I wanted to change industries and decided to venture into financial services, which then led me to different fintech startups before I joined Octaura.

None of us can achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person that you are grateful for, who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?

That first HR job was with a team that was led by a forward-thinking HR executive named Bob Boehm — who coincidentally also started his career in finance. He had moved up the ranks and was successfully leading their finance team before being tapped to do a rotational assignment in HR and the sole purpose was to revolutionize the entire HR function.

In just a few years, he transformed HR from a transactional practice to a strategic business partner model. What made him so effective was that he approached HR through a business lens. He hired me with no HR experience — actually, I think he preferred that I didn’t have preconceived notions about what HR was supposed to look like. I think he was an early adapter of David Ulrich’s HR Business Partner model.

You are a successful leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

I think to be an effective HR partner, you should have business acumen, innovative thinking, and the ability to build trusting relationships within the organization.

Having a high degree of business acumen is important for HR leaders to translate business objectives into people-centric strategies that align with the company’s values. Speaking their language gives me credibility when collaborating with business leaders to address people challenges and optimize talent management.

Innovative thinking in HR means having the ability to approach people challenges and opportunities with a creative and forward-thinking mindset. Leveraging technology and data-driven practices that optimizes employee experience and streamline processes are how we are able to adapt to the evolving needs of our workforce. I don’t rely on the conventional way of managing HR, i.e. creating policy’s sake or processes for process’s sake. If it’s not solving a business problem, I have no use for it.

Building and fostering trust within the organization is probably the most important aspect of HR. This is easier said than done. Unfortunately, too many employees avoid HR because they misunderstand our role, or they simply don’t trust us. One of my friends recently told me that his manager warned him to filter what he shares with HR, because “HR works for management and everything you say goes straight to the top.” This is a very antiquated view of HR’s role in the company. This type of mentality creates an “us versus them” culture; it gives the rest of us a bad rap and a steeper hill to climb when getting people to collaborate with HR. In contrast, my team ingratiate ourselves with the rest of the organization, we prioritize employee engagement and creating a positive culture.

Ok, fantastic. Let’s now turn to the crux of our interview. What are the top three qualities or traits you look for when hiring for your executive team?

When hiring leaders, we prioritize our core values, which are collaboration, impact, innovation, and transparency. The qualities that we screen for are in service of those values.

1. Authenticity. Being transparent about who you are as a leader — having the integrity to be genuine and real — breeds trust and enables a collaborative culture. To be authentic means having some level of self-awareness, being able to recognize your strengths and weaknesses, and adapting your behavior to different situations. If leaders show this type of vulnerability, they create a safe space for others to do the same.
2. Risk Takers. Leaders are willing to take risks; they have the courage and confidence to try new things and risk failure to push forward advancement. They avoid stagnating because they aren’t afraid to make mistakes or make the wrong decisions. I’ve worked with leaders who are so afraid of making the wrong decision, they end up not making any decisions. Playing it safe hinders progress and innovation.
3. Open-Mindedness. When leaders are open-minded, they’re able to empathize with others, they’re receptive to new ideas and are adaptable to change. This creates an inclusive culture, which invites different perspectives and mitigate groupthink.

How do you foster collaboration among executives with different strengths and leadership styles? What’s your approach when executives challenge your decisions or bring differing points of view? How do you create space for healthy disagreement?

Forcing tough conversations in groups is difficult, but absolutely necessary at this level.

Our exec team have been together for two years. We’ve faced challenges like any other team standing up a new company. I’m proud of how we’ve evolved and matured as a team. I found Tuckman’s model for nurturing high performing teams helpful throughout our journey.

During our “forming” stage, we were polite and agreeable in exec meetings. Outside of those meetings, we weren’t as aligned as we led ourselves to believe. Misalignment trickled down to the broader teams and manifested in constant changes in priorities, lack of ownership amongst teams, and miscommunication cross-functionally — not to mention, employee frustrations and burn-out.

Something had to give, so I forced us into the “storming” phase by bringing controversial topics from our 1:1s (I have regular 1:1s with each of the execs) into the room with the broader team. This phase could have backfired if I didn’t have Brian’s buy-in. I remember giving him a heads up that exec meetings were going to be contentious, and he basically said, “bring it”.

We eventually made it to the “norming” phase and got to a point where I’d be in a 1:1 with one of the execs and if something came up that involved other team members, one of us will say “let’s put it on the agenda to discuss at the next exec meeting.” We were no longer solving problems in silos.

I think what pushed us to the “performing” phase was when Brian had all the leaders read “Crossing the Chasm” by Geoffrey Moore and proceeded to build a whole campaign around it. It became the entire firm’s focus and priority last summer. The launch was successful, but more importantly, Brian proved that the team can rally around a shared purpose and commit to a mission. This resulted in a fantastic year in 2024.

How do you encourage innovation and risk-taking among your leadership team?

I think it’s maintaining a positive culture of trust. Treating employees like adults. And creating a safe environment where employees can experiment and exercise their creative minds.

I remember an incident where I learned about a mistake that apparently could have caused significant problems for a client. It took two days and three leaders to resolve. I was surprised when I heard, because there wasn’t a peep about it during the two days they were trying to fix the issue. The execs responses were, “mistakes happen. We dealt with it.”

At a prior company, there would have been shouting, door slamming, topped off with a “heads will roll” threat. The leaders there believed that cultivating a culture of fear keeps employees from making mistakes. This is the opposite of productive. Fear activates cortisol — the stress hormone — which impairs cognitive function and productivity. It reduces creativity and impairs problem solving. When employees are afraid, they are not likely willing to take risks if there is a chance of failure. No risks and no creativity mean no innovation.

Toxic cultures kill creativity.

What processes or systems do you have in place to ensure continuous learning for your executives?

What works best for us is feedback — it’s a big part of how we nurture trust, foster alignment and collaboration, and how we’re able to grow as a team.

Feedback works when there’s transparency and accountability. One of the ways that we demonstrate transparency is by publishing company OKRs publicly. Employees are granted access to view top level OKRs down to department level, teams, all the way down to the individual level. This level of transparency enables us to hold each other accountable while working as a collective team to achieve company objectives.

Another way that we cultivate our feedback and learning culture is through engagement surveys that we run twice a year. Execs take this process very seriously and actively encourage participation. We review the survey findings as an exec team, share overall results with the rest of the company as well as team results with the respective teams, only implementing action plans once we gather additional insights and context.

In addition to that, we seek development and learning externally by investing in leadership and executive coaching. This coming year, we’ll focus more on executive team development by engaging with an external facilitator. Jason (COO/CFO) usually keeps us on our toes about our spending, but he often advocates for training and team building.

How important is diversity within your executive team, and how do you ensure a variety of perspectives?

It’s extremely important if we want to cultivate growth and learning. We don’t just think about diversity from a race and gender standpoint — although if you look at our executive team, you’ll see we’re very diverse. Across the company, we represent over 35 different countries. And we value diversity in all aspects, including background, experiences, and thought leadership. Having this type of diversity allows us to have a more comprehensive understanding of our employees and our customers. It also provides us with different perspectives in how to approach problems and affords us more possibilities in solving them. It would be difficult to innovate if we all have the same background and experienced the same things.

An example of how Brian thinks about diversity is when we were hiring a COO. There were a lot of qualified candidates for that role, but Brian was clear about the profile he was looking for. He wanted someone who had a completely different background from him. Brian is a visionary and he often has what Jim Collins would call BHAGs (Big Hairy Audacious Goals). He wanted to hire a COO who can reign him in if his ideas get too crazy. I remember him saying that we don’t need “two Brians”.

This is the main question of our interview. What are “5 Things You Need To Build and Lead High-Performing Executive Teams”? (please share stories or examples)

There’s no one size fits all approach to building high performing teams. What worked for us may not work for other teams. As I think about our team’s evolution, the following points come to mind:

1. I’d start with clearly understanding and defining the team’s purpose — why are we here, who do we serve, what are the critical priorities. Early on, we learned when things are vague and ambiguous, it led us to focus on role-specific accountabilities, and we almost lost sight of the overall agenda.
2. As a collective team, be clear about what you value. Values dictate actions and behaviors, it’s reflected in who we hire, how we communicate, how we make decisions. Octaura is a values-based company, and we embed it into every aspect of the employee lifecycle, from recruitment to performance management to career development.
3. As elaborated earlier, building and leading high performing teams can’t happen without diversity. Appreciate and value people who are different from you, invite them to challenge you and create space for them to speak their minds. Strong leaders don’t need to hire “yes” men/women; they have the confidence to absorb and process meaningful dialogue. Spirited debate leads to better outcomes — actively seek opposing views and not just a reflection of your own, because ultimately you want to stress test your most critical decisions.
4. Accountability. Leaders, please what you say you’re going to do. Follow through on commitments. Trust can’t happen otherwise. Hold yourself accountable. Hold your team accountable. It’s okay to make mistakes — it’s bound to happen with risk-takers, but own up to them and self-reflect, learn from them and pay it forward by teaching others.
5. Check the ego. Be humble. And for goodness sake’s, listen more than you talk. An exec at a previous company once spent 45 minutes in a one-hour meeting (where he was allotted 15 minutes) patting himself on the back. That was brutal. It became a joke where people would say that they didn’t bother preparing for meetings with him, because he’ll do most of the talking. See? Now if he would have cultivated a culture of feedback, someone could have let him know that rather than letting him continue to be a joke. But no. That same execs only hired “yes” men.

Can you share a challenging moment when your executive team faced adversity? How did you overcome it together?

Adversity is such a big word because we’re a young company. Internal comms and keeping people motivated in a startup have been our main challenge. We had a few mis-hires in key roles that had an impact on our team and culture, so have had to learn from that by recalibrating our expectations and redefining objectives to identify the right people. We know we’re not perfect and we’re going to make mistakes along the way. We’re okay with that so long as we learn from them.

How can our readers further follow your work?

Follow me on LinkedIn or the Octaura blog!

Thank you so much for sharing these important insights. We wish you continued success and good health!

About The Interviewer: Dr. Bharat Sangani is a cardiologist and entrepreneur with over 35 years of experience, practicing in Gulfport, Mississippi, and Dallas, Texas. Board-certified in Internal Medicine and Cardiology, he specializes in diagnosing, treating, and preventing cardiovascular diseases, including heart disease and hypertension. In 1999, Dr. Sangani founded Encore Enterprises, a national real estate investment firm. Under his leadership, the company has executed transactions exceeding $2 billion, with a portfolio spanning residential, retail, hotel, and office developments. Known for his emphasis on integrity and fairness, Dr. Sangani has built Encore into a major player in the commercial real estate sector. Blending his medical and business expertise, Dr. Sangani created the Life is a Business mentorship program. The initiative offers guidance on achieving balance in health, wealth, and relationships, helping participants align personal and professional goals. Now based in Dallas, Texas, Dr. Sangani continues to practice cardiology while leading Encore Enterprises and mentoring others. His career reflects a unique blend of medical expertise, entrepreneurial spirit, and dedication to helping others thrive.