Launching My Sonder Adventure as VP of People
By Melissa Lightbody
Sonder is disrupting the future of hospitality with thousands of beautiful spaces built for travel and life. Our business model is proven — we’re a rocketship taking off at record speed. This is what I learned in my first week at Sonder, and it’s exciting, but not the reason I joined.
As a former Trulian, I know how a strong culture — one where you feel like you are working with passionate people, doing some of the best work of your life and building a product that is disrupting an industry in a meaningful way — can make every workday feel exhilarating. When I first met with the team at Sonder, I left feeling connected to the co-founders and aligned on the mission and vision. I love and believe in our principles (values at most companies). I felt that the team authentically believed in the product and had passion around driving success. Instead of being scared off by my enthusiasm, the co-founders were excited about my ideas for people programs. I left several day-long interviews feeling inspired and energized. I hoped they liked me as much as I liked them.
Now as the new VP of People at Sonder, I have the opportunity to marry two of my life’s passions: a love for travel and people. With the backing of Sonder’s leadership team, my goal is to build the most amazing employee experience in the world. We’re going to experiment with new people programs that I’ve frequently thought about but not yet had the opportunity to build and deploy. We want to invest in our employees and empower them to own their careers.
You’re probably thinking, that sounds great but how? I have a few learnings that I’m excited to incorporate while building this important function at Sonder.
A Self-Sharpening Team
One of Sonder’s key principles is Hire Only the Best! It’s one of the most critical things we spend time on. Best means different things to different people. To me it means creative and entrepreneurial individuals who work collaboratively, celebrate key strengths and appreciate their own (and each other’s) areas of opportunity. In other words, the best make all of us better.
I surround myself with rockstars who fill my gaps. They are confident, smart, and drive goals with no drama or politics. They come into my life as co-workers and remain forever dear friends. I’ve had a lot of success building teams that have wildly achieved what felt, at first, like the impossible. This extends way beyond my direct reports. I’m lucky enough to spend a significant portion of my life partnering with and learning from teams that I’ve helped build. Together, we’ll continue to coach leaders on the importance of hiring only the best so that our team self-sharpens as it expands.
A Strong Foundation (Simplifying the Complex)
As is the case with all hyper-growth tech startups, there’s a lot of ground-up foundational work to do. Creating programs that feel simple on the front-end requires solving complex, highly analytical and data-driven workflows on the back-end. I use a combination of lean, Kaizen-style process meetings my teams affectionately know as CAD (Control-Alt-Delete), data analytics, the latest research and studies, and my own proven programs. We collaborate cross-functionally with various teams to build our people organization’s foundational structure. Experience has proven that teams want autonomy with direction, authority with guidance, flexibility with structure, and a small startup vibe with mature programs. It’s a delicate balancing act to perfect this. I believe in building a solid foundation to start, and then living in a continuous improvement environment. We will focus first on building traditional programs and ensuring the table stakes are strong. Then, the fun stuff! We will build innovative, cutting edge programs within our talent acquisition, people operations and development teams to make the Sonder employee experience second to none.
Passion
What I’ve learned through many of my life experiences, both good and bad, is that people don’t truly need what everybody calls “work-life balance”. What people are yearning for is a meaningful life where they are passionate about what they are doing both in their work and personal life. If people are inspired and happy at work it will affect everything else in and around them. People want to work on cool projects with others they respect in an environment where they feel appreciated for their contributions. At Sonder, we celebrate the whole person. We’re excited to welcome families and especially new babies into our family, so much so that we give newborns baby stock options! I’m excited to build programs where spouses, significant others and children are as excited about Sonder as our employees are. When you are passionate about what you do and your family feels connected, it doesn’t feel like there’s a separation between work and life but rather a harmonized balance dancing in unison.
People have called me crazy for being so passionate about company culture, but having another opportunity to build and inspire an entire company where we can work with amazing people, bring our authentic selves, be radically transparent with one another, and do some of the most amazing work of our entire lives while disrupting an entire industry, is a dream come true. I’m beyond pumped for the days, months and years ahead. There’s so much to do.
Want to join me on this epic adventure? Visit www.sonder.com/careers to learn more about our growing, self-sharpening team!
