Building a People-Centric, High-Performance Startup - Engaging Leadership

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Building a People-Centric, High-Performance Startup

Episode 245 • 26th June 2024 • Engaging Leadership • CT Leong, Dr. Jim Kanichirayil

They were known for being a high performance organization and at their peak, they were known to be pretty cutthroat as well. Today we can see similar examples at companies like Amazon or Walmart, and it gives you a good perspective of what high performance organizations typically run like, but what's common amongst those organizations is that they don't seem to have a lot of heart.

ee time venture backed early [: 00:01:00

He is based in San Diego and he makes the argument that engaged in effective leadership needs to be deeply empathetic. If you want sustainable high performance, you have to embed empathy into what you do. That's a great lead in Jonathan, welcome to the show.

[00:01:21] Dr. Jim: It's going to be a fun conversation and I'm a big fan of talking to founders and talking through their startup journey. Tell us a little bit about what work life does.

We consolidate all that into one platform and enable it to go directly towards what your employees care about most. So think of us as your employees vision board, Plus an LSA style account for them to pay for these things that they care about. Plus a lot of software to help you as a leader and manager [00:02:00] not have to do it manually.

And it's going to also help us inform the lens that you have coming into this conversation.

I was at a venture backed startup just after I graduated and over the course of the next 15 years or so, really spent a lot of time at early stage startups. This is my third one at work life where we're venture backed but it's really been at, mid level director level positions and then this is my first time actually co founding a startup.

[00:03:10] Jonathan Alarcon: Yeah, it's a great question. And, funny enough, I've been in so many different industries like home construction and tech. And at one point, I even did nonprofit consulting as an analyst. And, one of the common themes from high performing teams is that the leadership really took the time to understand why are there people here?

Like what actually gets them up in the morning and gets them out the front door and really perform at a high level. So interestingly enough, when I was in college running this painting business, the model was to, go out, sell paint jobs. Grow your team recruit other college students to run, a business themselves.

a doctor or people that were [: 00:04:00

They had no interest in running a painting company. But what we really anchored on For them was that, hey, there's skills that I need to learn to, be an effective doctor or run a practice later in life or whatever it is that they wanted to do. And it is really interesting kind of seeing that firsthand younger in my career where, hey, really understanding why people are doing what they do is a really important driver of their performance and their ability to weather tough situations at work.

And persist through really challenging environments. And so that kind of set the foundation for a lot of later in career and in what we're doing now at work life.

So what steps did you take? To make sure that those people who are looking at [00:05:00] this position as a stepping stone position still invest a lot of time and energy into the job at hand versus. Treating it as a stop gap, as a means to an end for something else that can often be very difficult in in talent strategy or building out teams to get people to care about the job in front of them when they have bigger fish to fry from a career trajectory perspective.

Yeah, you're getting burned if you're a leader and you develop people and then they go somewhere else. I think the trade off to that is not investing in your people, not understanding who they are and what they're striving for can actually blindside you. So for every person that, does Take your training and go somewhere else.

How many people are just [: 00:06:00

And so you have to look at it as well. How do I actually help people? While they're here at my company, and even before that, how do I find people and set expectations going into the role so that we both know what's going to happen? I think a big danger for a leader is being blindsided by someone leaving and leaving a gap in your team, leaving a gap in your business and what you need to accomplish.

hink of it as being a people [: 00:07:00

[00:07:50] Dr. Jim: That's great perspective. One of the things that I'm wondering about when we apply this to high growth startups Logically, it makes sense. You need to understand everybody's [00:08:00] why so that you can align everything within your organization to what matters to that person on your team.

When I think about the pace of a startup, when I think about all of the expectations and obligations and pressures that Leadership and startup gets, there's often an argument that, Hey, we don't have time for all of this touchy feely squishy stuff. We have to make sure that we are doing what we need to do to satisfy our investors and make sure we're getting deals on the board.

So If you're looking at the contrast between those two priorities or the space between those two priorities, how do you bring them closer together so that they're more aligned? Because it seems like it's, it can often be an either or, and it seems like your argument is it should be an and statement instead of an or statement.

And I think [00:09:00] what's taken on what that word has taken on is actually giving into employee demands. And I actually don't think that's entirely accurate. I think empathy itself is, really about taking the time to understand your people and yes, feeling what they feel, but then also going back to what we talked about earlier, going back to, Hey, if things are tough, And you have a really tumultuous quarter or, year, for example, ahead of you where you need to hit certain revenue milestones, you need to launch certain products to, stay ahead in the market.

It's going back to that line, going back to why they're here in the first place that enables you to weather some of those storms. And when I think about, okay, as a leader, how do you navigate a really challenging environment? It goes back to you have to set the right expectations early on.

ss, you have to decide okay, [: 00:10:00

Is this still the right fit for you? And if not, we need to exit the business and bring someone else on. Or we need to develop skills or bring in others that can help with that. To, to your point, it's in a very structured and mature business that's, maybe a series D and they're just trying to execute on a pretty rigid strategy.

Not as not as hard to figure out because people have clear job descriptions. There's clear, like salary bands, all that kind of stuff. Whereas early stage, you have to actually get people that are okay. Yeah. With those type of environments that have maybe shown that they're resilient and ever changing environments previously, it's actually just attracting a different kind of profile of person to take on those roles.

So if you do that as a framework, you're in good shape to pull this off. When I opened the show I made the distinction that, we know what high performance organizations look like. You can look at GE, you can look at, Amazon, all of these organizations are known for having high.

Performance teams, but they're also known for a lot of churn and they're also known for being fairly cutthroat in terms of the culture and, one of the things that you and I were talking about before we got on the show is that if you want to build a high performance organization, that's sustainable.

You need to be deeply empathetic and build that culture to those things seem to be at odds. So I guess what's the starting point of making that happen? Maintaining focus on high performance while still having a deep level of empathy beyond sort of the surface level stuff that we've just talked about.

Is when a company hasn't taken the time to understand for themselves. What is good performance? And what does that look like at a company level? And then what does that look like at an individual level? And so from that, it doesn't have to be a super complex formula, but a lot of companies just look at surface level metrics.

And fast growing startup might just look at revenue in. But they might not look at things like turn. They might not look at things like, how are we serving customers? All those types of things. And so I think it first starts out with understanding okay, from an annual basis, what are we trying to accomplish this year?

director will just call it. [: 00:13:00

And so I think when it comes to, okay, how do you balance? Good performance with having, people first approach or having an empathetic approach. It starts with just having the empathy to give people give them good expectations. So they're not floundering or feeling like they're floundering.

I think from there because this is managed at the manager, we'll call it mid level kind of layer of a company, it allows for the conversations to be human. If you think about any manager, let's say running a team of 8 to 10 people, they're doing one on ones. They're having check ins with their team.

They're having stand ups. They're exposed to their team on a continual basis. That creates a lot of opportunity for interactions to really understand. First off, what each person on your team cares about. Like we talked about earlier. Why do they show up? Why are they still in your company? Even what is that doing for them?

really feel strongly in our [: 00:14:00

So it just makes it a lot more obvious on. What does good performance mean? And what do I get to do? And how does that help me in my personal life? But it all comes, I think, comes down to managers being able to bridge that gap, which unfortunately, not a lot of companies are great at training this internally.

And then if you're looking at that same type of organization, you don't have the layers within the organization where managers and directors can bridge the gap between strategy and execution to the team. It's [00:15:00] often, a much flatter organization. So if you're confronted with that stage. Of development as an organization, as a startup, how do you still pull that off when you're talking about a much smaller team and a lot more variability in what you know?

And really what you don't know

You have, the potential to turn that into something sizable for yourself and potentially make life changing money, right? A year into the company. As I was talking to the CEO about, Hey, what's the plans for liquidity? Or Hey what are your goals, dude?

Like you're the CEO. How do you, like, how do you think about how you want to be involved in this business? He's like, you know, I just, I want to do this forever. I want to run this company when I'm 70 years old. And to me, it was just like, that doesn't compute because you're giving away stock options.

that doesn't make sense. And so there's, That's like a pretty glaring example of how not knowing what you want at the leadership level or not knowing what you're going for at a leadership level impacts the employees. There's varying degrees of that, right? And if you're a seed stage startup or like a series precedes stage startup, you've already attracted venture funding.

f so that you can, maybe you [: 00:17:00

There's different approaches that you can take, even at those early stages. And I think sometimes like leadership gets more difficult. Founders get pulled in different directions. They haven't defined that for themselves. So it's not necessarily that Oh, they don't have historical benchmarks on the data in their company.

It's just knowing that, okay, the direction that we're taking the ship is this, and we're going to set up a plan and let everyone know this is the plan. This is what we're striving for in the next six months or 12 months to get to this point. And not just seeing how it goes and then hoping the people under you figure it out.

So that, that's more of what I mean in terms of what they're actually striving for metrics.

How do you create the space to have those re centering conversations about, Hey, this is where we're going. This [00:18:00] is what good looks like. This is why we're going there. When you have so much other stuff on your plate, what are the things that you've done? To allow for that sort of communication that reinforces the big picture.

They're helping you and your team make progress towards those outcomes that you want. And so how I look at it is that what gets celebrated gets replicated. Let's say, for example, you're on a sales team. I'll just use that. And one of the biggest challenges you're having is setting meetings.

ld look for those things and [: 00:19:00

And then over the course of, let's just say, the quarter, celebrate those things with your team, talk about them with the individuals on your team. You would acknowledge them, at stand ups, you would, maybe have Various incentives are awards available for those people. And so I think that, the most overlooked and probably lowest hanging fruit for managers is to just recognize and acknowledge the things that are going well on your team.

So what are some scrappy ways that you can still celebrate those small wins without having a sort of a big financial drain when you're looking to do that?

If and if you're able to above and beyond that, have a pool of funds for things like spot bonuses for incentives for, anniversaries for, stipend type wellness programs, if you're able to have a pool of funds for that. But it doesn't mean that just saying thank you and appreciating people for their efforts and accomplishment is meaningless without a reward.

Like people really value appreciation. Yes, but someone crying because you said thank you to them is actually an indication that they're starved for that appreciation. It does. It's not a sign that like that appreciation was like amazing. Actually, what it means is that it's not abundant enough in the organization that they're getting what they need as a human.

They're getting that fulfillment work. And as a leader again, the easiest low hanging fruit you can do is look for ways to acknowledge the efforts and accomplishments on your team and look for ways to celebrate those if they prefer individually, if they prefer in front of the team in front of the team, however, it makes sense to them.

Is that you might run into an accountability gap. So how do you build this type of organization while still having a strong focus on accountability? Because like you mentioned earlier, oftentimes certain empathy has been overused to the point where people will roll their eyes. Because they automatically assume having an empathetic organization means that you have one that doesn't have accountability.

And that would extend beyond just the workplace that would extend into their personal life as well. In that regard

you have to understand that [: 00:23:00

And not feeling like they're accomplishing what they want in life and them just feeling like they're spinning their wheels in their workplace. And so I think it starts with kind of understanding and holding people accountable to what is it that you want to accomplish personally? Then it's bridging the gap to how does working here help you accomplish that?

And when you think about great performance, it's as a leader or as a manager, helping align people to, okay, in your role, maybe you're a specialist, or maybe you're an analyst, or maybe you're a coordinator position. Those are typically more junior roles. It's helping them see, okay, over the next six months, here's what you're responsible for.

oming up with and helping to [: 00:24:00

If they're not getting that in the first year or two, they're probably going to be looking somewhere else. I think it makes a lot of sense to free up. One, 2 percent of their salary, for example, as as rewards that you can give them across let's say the course of the year, and it doesn't have to be for just performance can be for things like if you're trying to hire quickly, do an employee referral program.

If you're trying to close more deals if they're a non salesperson, give them part of a referral fee if if they can help. Bring in a lead, for example. So there's a lot that you can be doing as an organization that ties performance to clear outcomes in the business that doesn't have to do with just their role.

And we've done some work to disprove that. One of the things that's going to be valuable for our listeners is if other people want to build that sort of high performance. High empathy, high accountability environment. What are the key principles that they need to put into place in their organizations that will help them do that effectively?

Why would they be willing to endure that and have the resilience to do [00:26:00] that? So as a leader, what you have to do then is understand that across your team at the individual level. So that when things are challenging and you are trying to accomplish really high marks of performance, what's a fall back on and what to refer to and how to motivate your team.

There's no especially in a very high growth startup or, a chaotic startup environment. There's no, like every single day is the same. There's almost never like an even keel period. Each week is different. Sometimes each day is different. And by definition, motivation is going to be different.

People's desire to do certain things within the business are going to vary. And so you have to be able to understand how to motivate your team, which again, requires that you understand why they're there in the first place and why they're willing to endure those things.

[00:26:53] Jonathan Alarcon: Can find me on LinkedIn names Jonathan Alarcon, co founder at Worklife, or you can head to worklife. io and check out what [00:27:00] we're doing there.

It's set clear expectations. Recognize small and big wins along the way. Be empathetic and understanding when and if things go sideways. And if you do all three of those things you'll have a high degree of execution. And what's interesting about the relationship among those three things is that you can still get high performance just by setting clear expectations, but I think that the key thing that stood out to me when we were talking is that layer of empathy and understanding that you as a leader, as a manager or director put into place in your interactions with your team. That's what gets your entire organization over those tough times.

le don't feel like you're in [: 00:28:00

So really appreciate you layering that out. And I think it's going to be pretty valuable for our listeners. So appreciate you hanging out for those of you who have listened to the conversation. We appreciate you hanging out and listening to the discussion. If you liked. What you heard, leave us a review on your favorite podcast player.

If you haven't already done so make sure you join the community. You can find that at www. engagerocket. co slash HR impact, and then tune in next time where we'll have another great leader sharing with us the game changing insights that help them build a high performing team,