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 or services you're offering, understands the sales cycle, the challenges, and the opportunities. They know the leaders and team members well. The PBP helps leaders, employees, and teams organize, execute, and develop. They coach people at all levels of the organization and run critical People programs such as performance reviews, talent reviews, and leadership development. |
| Organizational Development | Leadership Development | Initially filled by the PBP, will eventually own overall leadership development and change management. Works closely with PBP on execution of both. |
| People Operations | Talent Acquisition | Working closely with hiring managers to understand talent needs, they write job descriptions, do competitive market analyses, and look to the future for gaps that need to be filled. They aren't just putting “butts on seats”: they are helping to build teams. Talent Acquisition also manages your employment brand, which can help your company attract the right people. |
| People Operations | Onboarding | Responsible for the full onboarding lifecycle, from pre‐hire through to 90 days. Often responsible for the overall plan, and helping Operations, Talent Acquisition, and Managers to execute it. |
| People Operations | Operations | Manages all the systems, repeatable practices, processes, and compliance. Depending on your size and complexity, this role can be combined with Talent Acquisition and Onboarding initially, although they are fairly different skill sets, and if you don't hire specialists soon enough, your team will be overwhelmed and unable to keep pace with your growth. |
There's one caution here for companies that are experiencing a lot of growth: it's easy for any team in your company, including People Operations, to become so maniacally focused on their part of the business that they become insular and siloed. That sets the stage for subcultures to emerge. You'll need to ensure that the People team has a really strong operating system to ensure they are focusing on the most important and impactful work, that the team collaborates effectively with each other and the rest of the company, and that all team members keep each other informed.
As your team grows and develops, you'll want leaders for each of the different functional areas. If you're growing rapidly it's easy to justify bringing in a senior manager to work with a functional area, and if you're relatively small, it's easy to justify not hiring a manager. But what if you're stuck in the middle? Too small to hire someone but too big to be without managers? One solution I've found to that problem is to designate a leader for each functional area and keep everyone reporting to you—the leader and everyone on the functional team. While it can be a little confusing at times, I recommend having every function explicitly owned
