Founder conversations: Role alliances help edtech start-up Lingo Live prep its team for growth
Lingo Live helps companies improve their teams’ English communication skills with online coaching, but as the start-up rapidly grew, employees and leadership didn’t seem to be speaking the same language regarding career planning. And even when they did, what employees and the company needed from each other didn’t often align.
Many individual contributors had “shoot for the moon” C-level career goals, recalled CEO Tyler Muse, but didn’t understand the ladder of competency-building required to get to that level.
“You get these wildly creative, relentless, hard-working but green people who join your team in the early days and figure out how to make stuff work,” Muse said. “So we’d just give them more responsibility or promote them. Sometimes that would work, but if you’re holding them accountable to unrealistic goals, given their level of experience and qualifications, then there’s a big risk they’re not going to deliver what you actually need.”
The result was frustrated employees who burnt out quickly and Lingo Live not hitting some of its targets due to missteps.
But the problem went beyond supporting employees’ needs: moving from seed to growth stage and beyond requires a continual evolution of the skills needed within business functions. And the timing of these changes is different for sales versus marketing versus product, as well as for different verticals. Leaders didn’t fully understand how all of these moving pieces fit together from a talent perspective .
Creating clearer agreement and alignment
All signs pointed to adopting a more analytical approach, so Muse took a page from the talent playbook at LinkedIn (also a customer), which relies on the “tour of duty” as the new employee-employer compact to harness entrepreneurial energy while reducing risk of failure.
“Put simply, the tour of duty is a way of choreographing the progressive commitments that form the alliance between company and employee,” wrote LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman.
At Lingo Live, Muse instituted “role alliances” and applied them against the changing needs for each function as more levels and differentiation was created. “We would sit down with an employee and ask ‘Where are you trying to get in your career? What are the skill sets you need to acquire to be able to get there? And how does that align with the needs of the business?” said Muse, a former energy analyst who founded the company in 2012.
By pairing this with explicit remits for positions, the manager could have an honest conversation to play this scenario out over time, instead of the one-dimensional approach of solely focusing on current job description.
“We had a sales rep — really smart and hardworking — whose goal is to become a chief revenue officer,” Muse said. “And in the past, we’d want to keep him so let’s promote him to director of sales or VP of sales.”
“Whereas now, what we did was look at ‘What are the stages that get you to CRO? What are the things that you need to have knocked out of the park as an individual contributor in order to move to the next stage as sales manager, then director, then VP of sales, then CRO.’ We literally co-constructed the resume of each one of those people, the things they’ve accomplished and how long it typically takes to set expectations of what this trajectory looks like.”
If the employee hits her marks at each milestone along the way, she’s getting what she needs to make the next jump, whether it’s at Lingo Live and elsewhere. And the company gets a mutually understood framework for performance evaluation that also helps when it comes time to insert new layers of management (or transition someone out). No more promotion black boxes.
“The employee more clearly understands what’s required as we level up and whether she can credibly make a play for that role,” Muse said. “And by the way, if you don’t get promoted now, this is going to help you shoot up your trajectory towards your goals a lot faster by learning under somebody like this.”
Alliances begin well before employee orientation
As Lingo Live approaches 100 employees, role alliances have paid benefits in recruiting, not only creating a better applicant screen (powered by the company’s half of the alliance compact) but giving high-potential candidates a glimpse into their future. Now when a finalist is tracking towards an offer, she understands where the role fits in the company and what’s expected to move up.
This level of explicitness could have saved months of time right after Lingo Live achieved the twin milestones of closing its first seven-figure deal and Series A funding. The company then set about to hire its first vice presidents of sales and marketing to spearhead the next chapter of growth. That’s where the problems began.
“We conflated that huge win, which was not repeatable, with having some type of repeatable, scalable process, as well as knowing who our target customer was,” Muse said. “We weren’t prepared with the rigor of really knowing the right type of executive you need at this stage in each critical function.”
The combination of these two issues led to recruiting senior professionals better suited to a more mature company — a classic case of “hiring for the stage you want to be at,” Muse said, “instead of the stage you’re really at.”
The skills mismatch resulted in both executives leaving in under a year, a setback that delayed Lingo Live in building the right acquisition machine targeted at the right type of customer.
Had role alliances been part of the culture, Muse believes the introspection involved would have helped uncover this false repeatability signal sooner, which in turn would have changed the remit.
“You should always have some level of this discipline regardless of stage,” Muse said. Once the company is above 10 employees, “the first step is understanding the different functions of your business and how they can best deliver value to the customer and the company in your current stage.”
Recommendations for founders
- Research how key functions evolve in the first few years of your business model: Most founders lack expertise in engineering, product, marketing, sales, and client success. Even well-rounded executives usually don’t understand all core business functions through the lens of time. Don’t force early job candidates to double as unpaid consultants to educate you and take the place of homework; rather, use interviews to validate and refine already-formed hypotheses.
- Look a stage ahead, but hire for now: Build descriptions of what positions look like now and in the next phase. Do they split, remain the same with new levels inserted above/below, or are unaffected? Then for the current need, create a more detailed version of the company’s half of a potential alliance. As you meet with candidates, think about how they nail the requirements that are must-haves for this stage and how they stack up against the future. Hiring a more accomplished candidate is perfectly acceptable if she’s comfortable and competent being a utility infielder.
- Level set with key team members on what they want out of their jobs and what you want out of them at this point in your company’s journey, as well as future career pathways: Early employees are essential for initial growth, “you can get too enamored with people and not what they can do for your business,” Muse said. Creating accurate role alliances “really moves the needle towards creating that healthy culture of solving for the organization,” he added.
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