In this episode, Dr. Jim interviews Thomas Kunjappu, CEO and founder of Cleary, about getting your people ready to lead. Thomas shares his experience as a startup founder and offers valuable insights on building a well-balanced team. He emphasizes the importance of understanding your weaknesses and intentionally hiring to fill those gaps. Thomas also discusses the misconception that top performers must move into people leadership roles and highlights the value of technical paths for growth. Tune in to learn how to set your team up for success and develop future leaders.
Key Takeaways:
recognize and actively plan to address the skill gap within the founding team of a startup.
Intentional talent strategy is key—hire to shore up weaknesses and consider the broader team dynamic.
There's a distinction between climbing the management ladder and developing technical expertise; not all growth needs to be managerial.
Transparency about the differences between individual contributor and management tracks is crucial for technical teams.
Early-stage startups might face the tough decision of letting go of talent that limits the team's functionality; a strong recruiting strategy is essential.
Chapters:
00:00 Welcome - A Talent Strategy Talk
00:24 Meet Thomas: The Startup Founder's Journey
01:56 From Immigrant Roots to Startup Success
02:37 The Leap from Big Tech to Startup Life
03:55 Building a Team: Recognizing Strengths and Weaknesses
04:49 Mastering the Go-to-Market Motion as a Founder
Music Credit: Shake it Up - Fesliyanstudios.com - David Renda
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Transcripts
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So joining us to steer the conversation. We have Thomas, the CEO and founder of Cleary Thomas. Welcome to the show.
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[00:00:19] Dr. Jim: I'm really interested in getting some of your perspective, especially through the lens of a startup founder. So before we get into the main part of the conversation, I think it's important for you to share a little bit about your story and Cleary's story, and then we'll build from there.
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And my last experience before starting [00:01:00] Cleary was leading an internal team at Twitter, where we built products that the employee base was using on a daily basis. And the idea of Cleary really formed from there, where we thought, how can we take this idea of creating this centralized employee experience for modern companies where you have a lot of potential.
Bottom up power dynamics and flexibility and basically the precursors of what we call the modern workplace and that's what we brought to market with Cleary, which is think of it as a modern Internet, especially with a big lens on culture and internal communications for people leaders and I.
T. leaders that we work with to build the great organizations of tomorrow, which especially with hybrid and remote work will look quite different from the initial stages of evolution
that we're in today.
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You and I are from the same village in India. So shout out to Kerala. So one of the things that I'm wondering about is, [00:02:00] given your immigrant background and and the cultural aspects of that upbringing, how did that shape? Your philosophy when it came to building teams, building organizations, were there any relationships there that you think is important to share?
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comfort and ease working with people of all types. I think it's just become a part of who I am really
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[00:03:00] Thomas Kunjappu: I would give advice probably to first time founders because second time founders, know, better but for the first time founders out there build a company takes a skill set much greater than what any one person possesses, so you will have weaknesses and it pretty much gets summed up into the skill sets that you and your co founders have together.
And you think about all the things that you need to have, operational skill set knowledge about your particular market, go to market, product development, engineering, what, if you add up all the things, you will know the things that you are naturally weak at, and that's something that you need to have a plan for, where either someone on the founding team is learning actively, or you'll have a recruiting plan, either with employees, co founders, or advisors, because whatever, you're Skill set that is least expressed on the founding team will show up as the biggest weakness that you need to proactively curb to be successful.
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How did that drive you forward in terms of your talent
strategy?
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You need to build and sell right when it comes down to it in the beginning. So the selling motion, that's where really was upon me to figure it out. And we had advisors as well as, part time employees. People are like helping in different ways for several several quarters, really, which really helped me set up the basics.
rst few customers coming out [:
And I just put myself in as a student, like I could be coming right out of college, learning the first things of like sales and marketing, but that's what I have to do to be successful.
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Now, Cleary has been around for almost seven years, and you've seen and gone through a lot. And when you think about setting your team up or setting the organization up for growth in the right way, what are some of the best practices that you discovered that helped you get The people that you brought in ready to lead
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So I think a lot of things are fuzzy and unclear in terms of work, [00:06:00] but that's the role of leadership and management, right? So how can you be very clear, as clear as possible, especially when you're working with junior employees, about expectations? And by that I don't mean hey, you're, ship this feature, work on it.
But it's all the micro steps that go into that and getting to very Being very clear on what you expect from a particular person and what the standards are for the company. So once you start there, you get to a certain stage where you need to have multiple managers. And typically it's like in a software company, you're scaling out the engineering team before you scale out like other functions.
And then once you have two or three people in a particular function, it's this different stage where you need to figure out, How do you harmonize? So we went through this very difficult phase where we had to, where we realized our processes were going down to the least the least functioning employees, which actually made it harder for us to function as a high performing team.
ly needed. And that happened [:
[00:07:13] Dr. Jim: So there's a lot of interesting things about what you just mentioned that we could dig into if if we had more time. But there's one particular area that I'm curious about when you're a product and engineering led organization and you're thinking about your talent development strategy. Oftentimes in many I T organizations, your top performing engineers are put on the manager track.
Is that what happened with your organization? And if it did or didn't, Tell us about how you constructed your development and promotion strategy given that you're a startup and oftentimes in startups, your top performers move up the ranks into people leadership, and that's not necessarily the best model.
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a great question. I think the larger tech companies, including some of my ex [00:08:00] employers, have really figured out by now, I think, in the last decade, especially for technical talent, but you could arguably say this about every type of talent. Yeah. That's a very distinct track. You can be an extremely senior and experienced individual contributor and stay that way for life.
And it is a very intentional decision for any individual to become a manager. And in our case, it's been something that my co founder and CTO like took on as a challenge into several year journey to really get great at it. And it took intentional development and. No matter the function that you're coming, but especially for technical functions, it should be very clear that this is a whole new skill set that you need to learn and be prepared to do.
xt step up could be that you [:
Getting technically more in depth or working on a more challenging project or with more scope as opposed to leading other engineers or I. T. talent.
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It's perfectly okay to be a top performing individual contributor because there can be technical paths that are created that gives you the growth that you want without having to move into people leadership. So I think that's really valuable advice.
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[00:09:46] Dr. Jim: So I know there's a lot more that we can say about this and it's a much deeper conversation. If people want to continue the conversation with you, what's the best way for them to get in touch with you?
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email. Thomas at gophery. com G O C L E A R [00:10:00] Y. com. And I'm also on LinkedIn, Thomas Kunjapu.
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That's how you build a well balanced team that performs at a high level, because if you ignore the things that you're not good at, that's going to pop up at the most inconvenient time. So I think it's important. When you're thinking about your talent strategy to keep that in mind.
So appreciate you hanging out for those of you who have listened to this conversation, we appreciate you listening. If you haven't already joined the HR impact community, make sure you do that. You can find that at www engage rocket. co slash HR impact. Tune in next time where we will have another leader sharing with us the game changing insights that helped them build a high performing team.
