As an investor and Board member, I sleep better at night knowing that our portfolio company has a star HR and People leader who is extraordinarily trustworthy and reliable and will make the CEO, team, and company better every day.
Chapter 25 Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DE&I)
I noted earlier that building an inclusive culture will reap many rewards in the long term. In every aspect of the People function you can build practices to interrupt unconscious bias and create a more inclusive workplace. Intentionally building DE&I into the foundation of your organization is much more impactful than trying to retro‐fit it later. I use the term “DE&I” rather than just diversity or inclusion, because it's not enough to bring in diverse talent to make sure that your organization is representative of your location. If you don't compensate people equitably, then you won't retain or engage your newly diverse workforce. If the people you hire don't feel included, they can't have the psychological safety that is required to be the best team member they can be. It's a lot of work to uncover and interrupt our cultural biases, but it's critical for a number of reasons:
It's the right thing to do.
There's a business case for diversity, demonstrating that more diverse Boards and leadership teams have higher valuations and growth, and diverse teams are more innovative.
Building a just and equitable company where people have access to opportunities is becoming more expected by the people you want to hire. It is the new standard for being a great place to work.
DE&I won't just happen on its own. Even with the best intentions, there is systemic and individual bias. To overcome these, you must be intentional about adapting traditional methods of sourcing, recruiting, compensation, promotions, and performance management. You need to counter the biases in our systems and help people understand how to proactively engage in inclusive behaviors.
If you don't start out with DE&I as the core cultural value at your company, what can you do, as Chief People Officer, to get there quickly? One tactic we found helpful at Return Path was to partner with an organization that was an expert in shifting to a DE&I‐focus. We partnered with the National Center for Women in Information Technology (NCWIT), which is where we learned a lot about DE&I (and not just about women in technology!). Our partners at NCWIT, and especially Jill Reckie, helped us to think about DE&I strategically and comprehensively. Leveraging our learning and partnership with NCWIT, we built an internal DE&I team that was incredibly impactful. A senior People team member led the overall initiative which included volunteers from across the organization split into work groups, focused on different parts of the employee lifecycle. In many cases, the People team functional lead participated with the work group so they could implement the programmatic recommendations. Even with strong systems set up, we always looked for ways that unconscious bias was filtering in. Given that we all have our own personal experience and journey and it's hard to deeply understand another person's journey through our own personal lens, it was really important to include diverse voices and perspectives in these work groups.
See www.Startuprev.com for a chart showing our work groups and examples of the work completed in each.
Chapter 26 Building Your Team
As a startup you'll need to be scrappy and hire people who also can wear multiple hats. Your first hire should be someone whose skills complement yours, and they also need to understand that startups don't have processes and procedures in place that can be followed or modified. There is more uncertainty and things change rapidly, even with the best planning. And your first hire needs to understand that the People role is every bit as entrepreneurial as any other role. While you'll create a strategic People plan that aligns with the company's strategic plan and covers recruiting, organizational design and development, and operations, your first hire must be comfortable shifting between roles, embracing change and uncertainty, and have values alignment with the company. Ideally, you can provide a pathway for growth and opportunities to expand their skills, allowing this individual to grow with the organization and be your right‐hand person as the company moves from startup to scaleup.
As the organization grows, you'll need to continually evaluate whether you are sufficiently staffed for the next stage of growth, and able to achieve your strategic plan. I recommend that your team's growth plan be tied to the growth in the number of people in your company and not revenues. In an established company with a repeatable revenue stream, it's easier to plan for people growth, but in a startup the need for people usually outstrips revenues. If you wait to hit revenue milestones, you'll find that you are severely understaffed and when you do hire people, they will spend their time catching up on things left undone rather than being focused on growth. You'll also need to hire people who can be scrappy and not be perfectionists. I hired a really smart woman once who cared a lot about her job, but didn't move quickly and needed everything very orderly before she could switch tasks. She spent days putting all our employee files into folders that required two‐hole punches in the top of each page, and a separate tab for each type of paperwork, which then also meant a lot of time per file setup. That type of heavy organization doesn't work in a startup, even though her responsibilities included ensuring that we had the right paperwork for each employee.
After your first hire, you should think about scaling your team, and building for scope and breadth by hiring specialty roles. Your second hire is just as critical as the first hire and I recommend that you consider hiring someone from inside the company, someone who understands the business and demonstrates interest in people—maybe someone who connects with others at the company, welcomes new people, and offers to help them understand the company. This person may never have thought about a People Operations role and most likely is not trained for it. That's OK! You will be better served at this stage of growth providing your own training on the technical skills.
Early on at Return Path, we promoted our office manager, Amanda McDermott, to run payroll and benefits. Her predecessor stayed at the company in another role, so was able to provide training and support, and Amanda also completed some online courses to learn more. She had the right customer‐focused mindset and process orientation, and she also knew the employees and the business. Learning payroll was easy for her and she continued to grow in the People Operations role as the company grew. If you're not ready yet to promote from within, keep that in mind for when you become larger. I've done it both ways: hiring a traditional HR person and shifting them to a people‐focused role, and hiring a people person and training them on technical skills. I was more successful with the latter, as I didn't have to help people “unlearn” their old habits of being more compliance focused. If you've been creative about your People practices, I would recommend this approach.
As a startup with a small team, you'll be managing many roles and responsibilities. As you grow, these roles will need to be filled by others, including People Business Partner, Talent Acquisition/Recruiting, People Operations, and later Onboarding and Leadership Development. You'll generally maintain your role of building an intentional culture, building values into your DNA, coaching the executive team, and building and growing your team. The following roles are critical for success (Table 26.1).
Table 26.1 Critical roles.
| Function | Role | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Organizational Development | People Business Partner (PBP) |
The lynchpin to the organization and a critical role to fill if you want to scale the company. A strong PBP understands the business, knows the products
|