June 14, 2024
By Cameron Ogilvie
Last week, Norman Broadbent had the pleasure of hosting an intimate group of People Leaders in growth stage technology businesses to discuss "Preparing for Growth Beyond Series B".
Jim MacDougall, Chief People Officer at Proximie (Series C: Advent Life Sciences, Eight Roads and Softbank backed) and former VP People at Revolut and Director for HR Services at Amazon, shared key learnings from his time operating at significant scale and transformation through to building from Series B.
Setting the scene
Those reading this will likely be familiar with the transition from start up to scale up: you've successfully incubated an idea and shifted from whiteboards to paying customers; the team compliments the founder(s) and now own business functions hitherto unexplored; culture has been established to create a brand and EVP (purposefully or otherwise!); VC funds have bought into your story and are offering a platform to take this to the moon. But how do we layer in professionalisation and take the next step in scaling to ensure the hard yards are not lost, your momentum continues and both new and existing customers, stakeholders and colleagues benefit?
Day One vs Day Two
Sharing Jeff Bezos's Day One ethos, Jim gave a fascinating insight into maintaining hunger and hussle through scaling. Amazonians will serve each day as if it is Day One for the business, their associated product line or business unit. What does this mean? The thirst for customer centricity driven by customer obsession, needs, and innovating to meet or exceed these customer expectations is not lost despite scale and success. The behaviours encouraged are curiosity, experimentation, nimbleness and being brave enough to fail. Contrast this to Day Two, where the organisation shifts to internal structure and maintenance for scale resulting in slower decision making, loss of agility and less focused on the customer. The result: stagnation, decline in market share and competitiveness, and ultimately the company's demise. This mentality as you scale the business helps to reinforce the ambitious culture. Jim even went on to sign off every email with "Today is still Day One" to ensure relentless focus continued.
Hiring "A" Players
No company wants to attract tier two talent, but some inevitably do. The talent market remains highly competitive despite recent turbulence. Jim shared his experience from Revolut in attracting and retaining genuine dial-movers. Revolut is notorious for maintaining the highest benchmark for team members. Their purpose of democratising financial services and fixing a broken system is complex, challenging and has a material impact on a huge section of society. This naturally turns heads for those seeking meaning from their careers and meant Revolut could be selective from day one. At >2000 employees, it required a nuanced recruitment process, laser focused on genuine "A" players as defined by both skills and values, quality controlled by a small group of interviewing experts as identified by internal performance data. Setting recruitment as a group strategic priority ensures time is carved out for interviewing potential colleagues. Should an "A" player not be identified, Revolut would leave the position open to avoid diluting the employee base. This materially benefits retention and high-performance culture, where continued learning from peers and leaders is possible. Once in the business, using probationary periods as true assessments of performance and fit, rather than a checkbox, gave Revolut the ability to quickly maintain these standards, even when recruitment process safeguards have failed to identify a "B/B+" player.
Effective Communication
How do we communicate across the business to ensure we're understood, priorities are clear and not subject to interpretation given the pace we make decisions as we scale? Jim and others call on the training they had in the military, where they would repeat back an instruction to the instructor, and in doing so, it eliminates opportunity for confusion.
As you make these decisions, how the outcomes are implemented could have significant impact. Sharing the Amazonian "Disagree and Commit" value, the practical application means whilst in the meeting everyone airs their perspective, but everyone must get behind the outcome. With everyone united in action, pace is not lost, culture is strengthened, and fear of failure is removed; if you arrive at an unfavourable outcome, iterate and commit.
Working with Founders
Everyone in the room empathised with the Founder's dilemma - the business has changed since first embarking on the journey. Coaching first time founders and the broader leadership to grow away from an execution focus and enabling the team to deliver with clear strategic direction is never simple. Helping all leaders and managers understand the responsibility they have to the organisation's values, and that their actions can have both positive and negative impact to the business, which magnifies as scale increases. It should never be lost that leading by example, and with authenticity, is paramount to the business's continued success. Measuring the impact of engagement is an essential tool to draw quantitative data to show this.
Summary
Jim was generous with his time and thoughts, with everyone in the room taking something from his speech. We were grateful to have a highly engaged group around the table where ideas and experience exchanged freely. The topic was purposefully broad, no two scale ups are the same, but it was empowering for the group to hear similar challenges around the room. The cliche that it is lonely at the top is felt by People leaders too.