The Chief People Officer as PM
review.firstround.com
review.firstround.com
How many times have we read an article that goes like this: "when I started at X, everything was a mess. I quickly turned things around by doing Y." Well the CEO who hired you at that company now looks like an idiot, and their board of directors is quickly taking notes. You took credit by making someone else look bad. Was that really necessary to get to the point you're trying to convey?
The reality is that the CEO built something out of nothing, and prioritized certain tasks (eg: PMF) while deprioritizing others (eg: the company's expense policy). Eventually there was enough money in the bank for the company to afford a $300k/year hire, who then paid back the administrative debt. How you paid back that debt is orders of magnitude less heroic than how the CEO got to the position of being able to afford your salary in the first place.
I really wonder if all those later-stage senior leaders could be that tone-deaf, or if they are throwing their CEOs under the bus on purpose.
Every company is in the middle of some kind of evolution.
You'll walk into situations you had no hand in creating.
A big part of leadership is getting comfortable with this reality and understanding your role in helping move the ball forward.
Things are the way they are for a reason. Don't start changing everything without first understanding the reasons.
In many orgs things are much more organic and random, and less intentional.
Sometimes there is no fence.
a fence that’s up for 30 years is more likely to have purpose than a 2 year old process set up in a growing company.
generally, you can tear things down the younger they are.
Also, if they had the foresight to a) hire someone who could fix it and b) give them the run room to get it done, they’re ahead of the curve.
You don’t feel bad for calling a sewage specialist when your septic tank breaks and there’s shit all over the lawn. And the septic tank person isn’t calling you out by saying “Wow there’s shit everywhere”
You know there’s shit everywhere. That’s why you called a shit specialist.
The CEO put a PR person in charge of HR, who cut bonuses and probably salaries ahead of a buyout to optimize the balance sheet.
Companies are about change - much of the state of a company is a result of decisions that were made years prior, based on assumptions that aren't true anymore, or as you noted were reprioritized. The best run 100 person company will struggle as a 1000 person company with their old policies (and likewise, the best run 1000 person company's policies would crush a 100 person company).
I will trust the person with dirt under their fingernails that came from building something, long before I'll trust someone in a nice tailored suit (resembling the guy in the Snowden article) who talks corp-speak.
The first wave of people you hire are very strong in certain areas (eg: pain tolerance, imagination), and very weak in others (organization, social skills). It turns out that in the first year, the pain tolerance is a lot more important than organizational skills, and that first wave of people didn't care about certain things, like an employee handbook, performance reviews, etc - all they wanted to do is get shit done. Eventually, things flip, and suddenly we find ourselves spending an entire week doing 360 reviews and similar work. The new people who join the company notice that the 360 reviews are not sufficiently streamlined, and they bring this to the attention of the newly hired chief people officer. That person takes a look at the problem and fixes it. At that point, the story should be delivered as follows: "the company decided that it was the right time to invest in this process, and this is how we did it." That sounds a lot different than "it was a mess and I fixed it."
What works for small projects may not work for large ones.
Equally the overhead of managing a large project will kill most ones if done from the start.
A good 90% of the things he wrote about are still perfectly valid advice today. And it prevents you from reinventing the wheel.
VP of Human Resources
Chief Human Resources Officer
VP of People Operations
Chief People Officer
and now this interviewee, who is actually "Chief People, Places, & Publicity Officer" if you read down to the bottom.
I think it's very telling that this turns out to actually be a "PR" job title. It's really about controlling the message, inside and outside the organization. Creating a perception of valuing employees and customers and satisfying their respective needs.
Also, doing performance review cycles 4x/year is completely insane. What a waste of everyone's time.
So at CK in particular I know they used to have "annual cycles" and you had to "overperform for two cycles to get a promotion." I.E. You had to be outperforming the role you were hired at for 2 years to get a promotion. So unless you were underhired, you basically wouldn't get a promotion in a normal software tenure.
It was a big point of contention.
So the "title inflation" is a recognition that people is a tier-1 function, and needs airtime and visibility at the most senior levels.
As an aside, "Human Resources" is falling out of favor given the Dilbert-esque implications around HR. And "People Ops" always struck me as overly operations-focused and tactical vs. strategic.
I think some people would find my question profoundly fair ("OBVIOUSLY there's SOME amount of work that deserves higher pay"), and some people would find it profoundly unfair ("OBVIOUSLY a manager can only promote so many people per team"). I think this would be a good litmus test for employee-company compatibility.
Regardless, I was never getting promoted there so I work at facebook now.
What I'm saying is in theory if somebody is willing to personally build a huge project that should deliver enough revenue to the company to more than pay for the difference. If everybody is willing to work twice as hard as 9-5 worker the company could 10x or 100x, isn't that the whole premise of startups?
Of course not all companies are poised for hyper-growth and are just in maintenance mode or dying, and those places probably don't have much use for people who will build extra hard.
So to answer your question, really the theoretical upward limit is how much value you can generate. Imo it's the opportunity for any great manager to say "Let's meet all your deliverables for the quarter, then I'll talk to the business team and see if there's an extra project for you"
But more often than not, we see HR as this pervasive, all permeating entity that keeps biting off more than it can chew in trying to justify its presence. There is a process for every thing and this is how we do it. Everyone must follow these processes and we need to standardize. And these processes tend to be complex monstrosities that change all the time because no one ever lost their job for attempting to do a lot of work.
What organisations fail to see is that, the more people have to deal with such complex monstrosities, the more they have to adapt to changing policies and incentives, the more time they have to spend mulling about and carrying out these processes. Time and effort that detracts from work that people were hired for, which was supposed to be the job of HR to ensure in the first place. I think a good acid test for the functioning of HR is to see how visible they are in the environment. If you are having to hear from them a lot, or you find yourself carrying out their mandate frequently, then they are probably not doing a great job.
That's a pull quote from the article that the editor has chosen to highlight. Is tech leadership so intellectually and ethically bankrupt to not understand that if you promise something and fail to deliver it, the people who you made promises to may no longer trust you? Why does that even need to be said, let alone be highlighted as if it's some sort of profound insight?
I just imagine some guy somewhere hitting himself on the forehead and saying "Ohh so I SHOULDN'T be duplicitous!".
I always reflexively lie on these out of a fear that someone will want to talk to me about it.
Maybe it is one of those jargons used by high professions? Or maybe it's just made up to sound like one?
"“I think, universally, founders and early startup leaders underestimate how hard people-work is,” she says."
The person talking may have been using 'people-work' as a jargon term for team management, but otherwise there is nothing out of the ordinary about the statement.