Building and Scaling a High Performance Culture
Our Takeaways from Bowery Capital’s People & Talent Summit
Earlier this summer, the folks at Bowery Capital put on a half day conference focusing on culture, hiring, growth, and people ops. I though the talks were great and wanted to share some of my key takeaways.
1. Strong Values are Built Bottoms Up
Creating a values-led company is top of mind for many entrepreneurs, and Nikki Schlecker Goldman had a great deal to share about her experiences and lessons as a founding team member and later Head of People for WayUp.
Wait longer. Many founders want to put together their company values when they’re company is small and Schlecker argues this is a mistake because startups are volatile and can change markets, customers, products, and cultures early on.
Instead, she recommends waiting until 20 people so that you’re further out of “the startup wasteland” and so you have historical performance to review.
“You can’t just have a founder or executive pick off some values from a list, have them designed into a poster, and present them to the company. That just never sticks.” Nikki Schlecker, Head of People @ WayUp.
Dig deep to find themes. Sheckler recommends gathering a small group of leaders in the room and have an honest conversation about every single person in the company’s history, analyzing what made them successful (or what caused them to struggle). The goal is to be totally honest (and confidential) about the behaviors that drive success within the firm, and then look for the patterns and themes that emerge.
Get specific. Intel has a direct, debate driven culture. It’s not for everyone. And they even have a booklet for new hires called “The Art of Verbal Jousting” to support that. Avoid generic, obvious values like “work hard” or “be a good person” — instead drill into what specifically makes someone “good”. Are they kind? Honest? Responsible? Inclusive? Test out language and workshop it. At the end of the day, Schlecker says values should look like concrete operating instructions for your team.
2. Structured Hiring is Smarter Hiring
Most hiring managers and recruiting teams are aware that their hiring processes are more biases than they’d like. Some companies are actually trying to do something about it.
Jacqui Maguire, Head of Talent for Greenhouse, shared the 6 key steps for structure hiring so that your company can increase confidence in the success of their new hires.
A system for success. The reason why structured hiring matters is because it increases the chances of finding people who will have the attributes necessary to succeed in the role.
Too often hiring is about connecting with a candidate on a personal level but that can lead to hiring for likability rather than competency and can also create homogenous work environments.
Structured hiring ensures that candidates feel respected and treated fairly. It means that your interviewers are clear on what they’re supposed to be looking for and that recruiters have clearer expectations for qualified individuals. Plus it speeds up the whole process!
Plan ahead of time. Structured hiring is all about being deliberate. Maguire recommends starting with a role kickoff where the hiring manager and a recruiter (or trusted advisor, never solo) discusses the business objective of the role — what will they achieve? Is this really a full-time role?
The team would then document the skills, traits, qualifications, and cultural values that would indicate someone would succeed in achieving these results. Next they’d figure out how to actually identify those attributes through the appropriate questions or activities. Finally, make sure to identify who will be evaluating for each of the different attributes, with a MECE (mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive) approach.
By working hard upfront to establish this plan, the actual process of reviewing candidates becomes much more consistent and easy to manage.
Ask candidates to produce work samples. Maguire explained that Greenhouse has a take home assignment for every single role at the company unless there is an on-site case study because it helps them identify candidates with the right technical competence. Candidates have generally found it reasonable and a chance to show off their skills. It’s also an opportunity for candidates to disqualify themselves if they aren’t right for the role.
“By explaining that take-homes are a way for them to show off their skills, we’ve found that most candidates find it a reasonable step in the process. We get to see them in action and they get a taste for the work they’d be doing in the role.” -Jacqui Maguire, Director of Talent Acquisition @ Greenhouse
Note: Headlight offers a full-service take-home assessment platform. We help you develop an appropriate assignment and grading rubric, send them to candidates and do a comprehensive evaluation on their work within 3 business days. Hit us up if you want to learn more!
3. Maintaining Culture as You Scale
As a company grows, they face a new set of challenges in maintaining and growing their culture.
In a discussion lead by Bowery Capital’s Head of Talent Alexandra Adamson, panelists Kirsten Behncke Colyer, VP of People & Talent at Justworks, Jordan Wan, CEO & Founder of CloserIQ and John-Paul Sukkar, Senior Director of People at Rent The Runway explored a wide range of ideas in their aptly named panel “The Company Glow-Up”
Minimum Viable Culture. Finding the right amount of cultural structure can be hard in the early days.
- Because sales is often associated with being transactional, Wan of CloserIQ (a sales recruiting firm) really emphasized being consultative and “giving first” as an early company value.
- Behncke Colyer of Justworks shared her own story of how Justworks originally started with 9 values, which ended up being too many. After taking a hard look at what was truly core to its people and product, the company settled on 5. Plus, from a culture and hiring standpoint, having fewer has ultimately driven greater accountability.
Growing pains. As companies grow, they have to shift some of their practices from the early days.
- Sukkar from Rent The Runway recommended that as companies grow, they onboard their new employees in cohorts so you can batch certain training steps in a group, instead of letting things fall through the cracks because people are trickling in one at a time.
- Behncke Colyer shared a great story of how Justworks does not want a company-wide working from home policy and has a bias for people to be in the office. To accommodate the need of some employees for more flexibility, they organized a “work from anywhere” week for the entire company which allowed employees to have that additional flexibility without doing a 180 on the policy side.
Setting the example. Companies have to realize that the actions they take as they grow have a symbolic meaning to the people there and as a story for future employees.
- Wan emphasized the importance of rewarding and recognizing those who really embody your culture
- On the flip side, Sukkar and Behncke Colyer underscored the need to let go of people who don’t line up with the culture, even if they “high performers” otherwise.
“A reminder to everyone in a leadership role: you live in a glass box. What you do becomes a cue and example for others to follow.”
— John Paul Sukkar, Sr Director of People @ Rent The Runway
4. The People Ops Toolkit
With so many ideas and recommendations and so little time, what resources do leaders have to help them operationalize this work?
The next panel focused on the tools and data in the people operations space and was moderated by Bowery Capital’s Director of Growth Andrew Oddo and featured Ilya Usorov, Co-Founder of Day100, John Erban, VP of People at Axiom Law, and Jennifer Williams, COO of Drive Change.
A big part of the conversation revolved around data — how to get it, what to do with it, how much it should cost, and how to keep it safe. A couple bullets that came out of it:
- Before you set up a new tool, can you make an ROI case for it? How does it save or make money for the business? (Erban/Axiom)
- Great book on personalizing how we treat people and not doing one-size-fits all: End of Average. (Usorov/Day100)
- Data isn’t the whole story about anyone, but it can give you important insights. The key is using data about someone responsibly in order to set them up for success. (Williams/Drive Change)
5. Building a Company that’s Diverse and Inclusive
One of the most talked-about issues for people ops and talent professionals today is around building a diverse and inclusive workplace.
Often, the issue comes up with companies struggle with the issue, like the recent resignation of Uber’s HR chief, but occasionally it’s about companies doing things right, like the piece in Harvard Business Review by Pinterest’s head of diversity and inclusion.
Button’s VP of People, Stephanie Mardell, had some great insights to share.
Behind our decisions are unspoken assumptions. One of the biggest challenges facing orgs that want to hire, promote, and retain underrepresented groups like women, people of color, or disabled people is the hidden beliefs we hold about the world. Stephanie asked everyone to draw “a picture of a great leader”. Here’s mine:
Then she asked us to compare pictures. Everyone drew something different. She asked if we drew men or women (mine’s a stick figure but this exact exercise was recently covered in the NYTimes and yes, it turns out most people draw men).
Her point: we’re all starting from different places.
Get ready to challenge your beliefs. Given that we’re holding all these invisible but different images of leadership, we probably also have differing images of success, good communication, respect, etc. She shared a story of a senior executive who had a potentially awkward question around D&I work and working to create a safe space to allow him to ask in a sensitive way and have his views challenged.
Diversity drives business outcomes. Whenever people question the value of D&I, Mardell points to the research by McKinsey that shows that companies in the top 25% of racial and gender diversity are 35% and 15% respectively more likely to have financial returns above industry average. And vice-versam the lowest quartile groups for diversity underperform. D&I pays off.
Put in the work. Mardell ended with a couple key actions companies can take:
- Set D&I goals and put a budget behind them. Obvious.
- Improve job post language to attract more diverse candidates (e.g.Textio)
- If possible, make sure your interview panels are not all white men
- Set up employee resource groups (ERG) to allow individuals
- Build your own professional network — get to know more senior professionals from different backgrounds
6. Telling Your Company’s Story
Just as marketing and branding is crucial for making consumers aware of your product and interested in learning more, companies have to put their organizational stories out into the market so candidates keep them in mind when they decide to make a move. The last session of the day was a conversation between Alex Adamson of Bowery and Toni Thompson, the VP of People and Talent at The Muse on how to do exactly that.
Your Employer Value Proposition — just as products have a distinct value proposition — the features and benefits that allow it to stand out in the marketplace — companies need to understand what makes their workplace special. The best place to start is to ask the folks who have already chosen to join. This brand can’t be a fantasy, it needs to line up with what else is out there about your company (e.g. Glassdoor, word of mouth, etc)
Video can be a powerful tool. The Muse works with companies to use video to help them tell their story. It’s hard and can be expensive because you want to work with professionals, but the results can be enlightening both for understanding your EVP (by interviewing members of your team) and conveying your culture to the world.
Culture is not static. Leadership can and should look to evolve cultuer over time based on business needs. Thompson shared how The Muse had identified three traits initially that a core part of the culture via an annual survey, but wanted to add additional qualities — curiosity and being data-driven — and started screening for those more in new hires.
About Headlight
Headlight is a tech hiring platform. We partner with companies to screen their candidates for technical ability using take-homes projects graded by our network of Field Experts. We also put on fun tournaments for product managers and engineers to test their skills, win prizes, and land interviews at top firms.
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