Startup CXO. Matt Blumberg

learning organization and culture that optimizes the contribution and experience of employees and their impact to the company. Trust me, as someone who has experienced traditional HR and also worked with CEOs who are only business‐ and not people‐focused, strategically driving a people‐focused company is much more rewarding and impactful. If your founder/CEO has interest in building a values‐driven company, you'll find this Part relevant to your success. I've been lucky to work with Matt at both Return Path and at Bolster, and his mentorship and guidance helped me be more impactful in my People roles, and also expand my impact. At Bolster, I'm working with two sides of our marketplace: members (executives who want to work in on‐demand roles) and clients (CEOs who need to bolster their leadership teams with on‐demand executive talent).

I started my career in a very traditional HR role as the HR Manager at a 100‐person truck stop. I did everything you'd expect in that role including hiring, processing payroll, writing an employee manual, dealing with workers' compensation claims … if it was remotely connected to compliance, I did it. The truck stop was hierarchical, had traditional gender roles, and no one was consulted on any decision since the CEO made all the decisions himself. Although I knew I couldn't thrive there in the long term, I did learn everything about transactional HR that they don't teach you in college, like how to actually run payroll, negotiate benefits, manage difficult employee situations, and manage risk. My role was to focus on the company first, by making sure that we mitigated risk and reduced costs. Many HR people started their careers in similar environments, and, without the benefit of a more open‐minded CEO or company, they become the HR Directors of comic strips.

      Luckily, my career shifted after that and I later had the opportunity to work with technology companies whose cultures were focused on people—on trusting that you've hired adults who don't need “managing,” and focused on providing development opportunities for people. At these companies my role was to focus on both the business and on people, and help us make good business decisions that were best for people.

      Both business‐first and people‐centric/inclusive companies exist today. If you're an early‐stage startup, and have a CEO who cares deeply about people, help them create a people‐centric/inclusive environment. Building a sustainable company that people love to work for will drive engagement and business results. When someone feels included, and can bring their whole self to work, when they don't have to worry about being judged for having different opinions or ways of working, they do better work. They can focus on the task at hand rather than worrying about what people think, or whether they will be heard if they have an opinion.

At Return Path, we didn't explicitly start with building an inclusive culture. Luckily, the founders and early team members did have a bias toward inclusion and they built a lot of practices and processes that led toward an inclusive environment. At Bolster, we are intentionally building inclusion into our strategy and culture (and in our case, it's related to our actual product offering, too). You'll see people‐centric and inclusive practices throughout this Part that are different from those you've seen at many companies and you'll see how they lead to a more inclusive environment. It's not easy to be inclusive without the support of your CEO since you'll continually have to educate and influence leaders and employees to embrace a different way of working. Having your CEO embrace and lead that education and influence with you is powerful. In my experience, there are more CEOs right now who want to build an inclusive culture than there are HR leaders who have the skills and experience to do this, so the quicker you can embrace the mindset and build the skills required, the more impact you can make at your company and in the world!

      Payroll, benefits, and people operations are, of course, urgent in a startup. I'll touch on those later in Chapter 39. These are table stakes and don't highly differentiate you, so I'll start with what I think is your most important role: building an inclusive culture.

      As Chief People Officer, you will have far more tasks to complete than time available to you, and I have highlighted the critical things needed to scale: articulating your values, building diversity, equity, and inclusion into your foundation, building your team, setting up structures and practices that lead to the culture you desire, leadership development, recruiting, people operations, onboarding, talent management, organizational design, and team development. Each chapter provides ideas, tools, and issues for the startup and scaleup phases so you can both learn about your current situation and also see what's on the horizon. I realize that the journey from startup to scaleup is not linear and there are times when you need to reduce headcount and I have a chapter on best practices for doing that (Chapter 35).

Chapter 24 Values and Culture

      Driving alignment on values and culture will guide you in nearly everything you do. Your values help you find and hire the right people, reward and recognize people and behaviors, influence your organizational structure and operating system, and help you make decisions. Your values also shape the things you don't want to do, or shouldn't do: they prevent you from hiring people who don't fit your company, they guide you on the markets you'd like to enter, or ones you don't want to enter, and they frame how you select vendors and customers. Your values also influence the culture that you build.

      Culture is the sum of the everyday behaviors of employees—how work gets done, how people interact with each other, and how they exemplify the values. For example, if leadership team members make every decision themselves without including others, you'll soon find that the culture of the company is one in which everyone waits for a leader to make a decision before they take action.

You may run into a CEO who just wants to build a business and isn't interested in the culture. They may believe that business takes priority over culture, that culture is just “soft stuff,” or that it doesn't add value. There's a quote attributed to Peter Drucker that “culture eats strategy for breakfast”; as Chief People Officer, it's important for you to help people understand the importance of culture to support the business strategy. I don't advocate for culture over strategy. It's just that many executives focus only on strategy, and you can help them add culture to their perspectives. If you're in this situation, you can help paint the picture of what the company will look like if you aren't focused on culture and values from the very start. You are going to have a culture, and the options are to build it intentionally or let it happen by chance!

      Every person you hire at an early stage has an outsized impact on the culture. If their values don't match those of the CEO or executive team, they won't be successful in the organization, or they will build a toxic subculture that is hard to dismantle. Until they leave the company, there will be tension and unproductive conflict which wastes time, resources, and impacts productivity and engagement. For example, suppose you have a CEO who values transparency and direct conversations and you hire a leader who is more political and is not transparent with their colleagues. That individual is unlikely to be successful, and the reverse is true as well.

      Being able to hone in on the values and culture your team wants is an iterative process, and the starting point will differ depending on how strong a vision the CEO/founders/leadership team have about culture. The number of people involved in the initial process can make a difference, too. If you have three people, you can become aligned more quickly than if you have a dozen people. To get things going, have conversations with a small group of people, just the CEO and founders or, if the team is small, the full leadership team. Start with a conversation about what matters to the stakeholders: What do they care most about and what's the best culture they can envision? Or, you can start by asking what legacy the CEO/founders would like to see the company have. Here are a few topics you can ask about:

       How do you think about hierarchy and decision making? Do decisions need to be made at the top, or do you want people to feel empowered to make decisions themselves?

       What is the level of transparency that you want? Do you hold this as a value? Would you rather be fully transparent about everything, or operate on a “need‐to‐know” basis?

       Will