Go Slow to Go Fast: Strategic Steps for Startup Success

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Getting your directors and line managers on the same page and ready to lead in this sort of environment is extremely difficult. That's the project that our featured guest today, Evan Wittenberg has been taking on in his role as chief people officer at pivot bio. So what's Evan's story to tell you a little bit about Evan.

bio. He joined pivot bio in [: 00:01:00

At the same time, maintain its unique, high performing culture. Prior to pivot bio Evan spent four years as EVP and chief people officer at ancestry, the world's leader in genealogy and consumer genomics with over 1500 employees and over 1 billion in annual revenue. He was a member of the senior executive leadership team.

He helped guide the privately held company through a. Period of fast growth by securing and developing amazing talent and ensuring a fantastic future Now in addition to all of the stuff that he's done in the world of work. He's a world traveler an athlete He's been to all seven continents.

He's a [: 00:02:00

[00:02:15] Evan Wittenberg: Thank you so much for having me, Jim. Great to be here.

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That's got to have some sort of impact.

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So [00:03:00] sometimes it can feel overwhelming the amount of things that all need to be fixed at the same time in any organization, especially, as you said, a startup going through change. And I think it's given me a certain resilience that we can get through that.

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What was the process or the lessons that you learned throughout your career that helped you build that discipline?

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And I think the same idea, yes, everything's urgent, everything's important, but you have to go slow to go [00:04:00] fast sometimes. And that's the one piece of discipline that I think is particularly helpful in a startup world where everybody, everything's here on fire and everybody's moving quickly.

So that's one that includes, I think in mountaineering planning your route. Not just executing your right. Where are we going? What are the conditions? Can we actually do it in these conditions today? Or do we need to come back and try again next time? And and some of that is resource planning as well.

What are the resources available to me? And it would be nice if I had different ones, but this is what I have. So what's what's the right strategy given the resources we have in front of us.

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How did you build that capacity in the leaders underneath you so that they were taking that same [00:05:00] posture instead of what typically happens is that as soon as you see a problem, you rush in to solve.

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I always hire people to leverage their experience, not to do the same thing they've done before, but to help them think about what needs to be done in this particular situation with this particular set of products and people and environmental factors, etc. And so leveraging experience is never to do.

And again, it's always to do what's appropriate now. And so I could leverage my experiences in different industries or, I've worked across various industries and healthcare, not for profit education. I can leverage some of the learnings from other industries into what I'm doing today, even though it's not the exact same thing.

the latter part of my career [: 00:06:00

They're not so that is a long way of saying you use what you have and what got you to that point. And then you learn what you need to learn and leverage those around you to figure out. And what's unique about this that I might not be thinking about before I. Okay. Then go and act, and that's part of why going slow to go fast is useful.

So you don't start down the wrong path and then have to change.

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When you have some institutional knowledge that's built out, and maybe some years underneath you as a business, how do you translate that into, what you're dealing with right now? Pivot bio is a pretty unique organization. So when you're looking at the discipline [00:07:00] of slowing down in order to speed up.

But everything's so new about the organization. Give us a sense about how you tackle this specific challenge and what makes it particularly unique.

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I've never been a line level recruiter, but I've run recruiting from a, Executive level several times. I'm okay at that part. I'm really good at the learning and development leadership development piece. So what are my strengths? What are the areas I need? I may have blind spots that I have to look out for.

is learning agility because [: 00:08:00

It's always changing. And if you have some learning agility, you're going to be able to adapt to that. So I like to think I have learning agility. I need to learn a new industry, a new set of people, if you will. A field team versus a science team that's in the lab. All the different pieces and agriculture industry that was going through A downturn in the last couple of years.

So Ag's been down for a year and a half now or so. So all of those pieces come together and say, okay, this is the world I live in. And then the number one thing I do is go to first principles, right? What am I trying to solve here? And what are the theories or principles I'm going to use to solve them?

And those probably are not going to. Change those tend to be less, more enduring, less changeable, regardless of industry and situation of what are your core principles? What do you believe about, humans and how they should be treated? What do you believe about business and how it needs to be sustainable over time, etc?

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[00:09:15] Evan Wittenberg: I once hired an executive and I'll talk about executive hiring or senior hiring because that tends to be more what I spend most of my specific time on. I once hired an executive and they came and they said, I said, what are those things in your bag? And they said, Oh, here's, PowerPoint decks from my last five companies.

And I said, Oh, we've made a terrible mistake, right? Because the point I just made, I'm not hiring for you to do the same thing you did before. I'm hiring for you to leverage that experience, to be able to see around corners, to be able to anticipate, to be able to when I'm, Hiring executives, it's hard for executives who tend to be so expert in what they've been doing for so many years to get back in a beginner's mind and learning agility requires the comfort with being in a beginner's mind again.

me the last time you. Learn [: 00:10:00

I have two left feet. It's ridiculous, but we laugh a lot and we're figuring it out. It's. Okay. That tells me you have a comfort at least after being so expert, you have a comfort at least with becoming a novice again. And that's the first step. That's not everything about learning agility. You have to have, intellectual bandwidth and curiosity and a bunch of other stuff to have learning agility.

But at least as you get more senior, the comfort with not knowing and not being an expert is the baseline piece that I look for.

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And. I think the intellectual curiosity piece, the reason why it's important [00:11:00] for me, I want to understand how flexible is their mindset, how can they roll with the punches and adjust with limited information and still come up with something that's at least Prototype level that they can push out and test and work on improving.

So that's what I look for. So that's a great question. And I appreciate you sharing that. So when I opened the conversation, I talked about all the different things that you're tackling all at once. You're in a new sector, potentially a new category. It's in a startup environment. And there was like three other things that I mentioned.

And the question becomes when you're trying to figure out, Where do you start from a people strategy perspective? That's a tough question to answer. If you're dealing with one variable, when you're dealing with all of those variables, it becomes near impossible. So where did you start?

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We could spend hundreds of hours designing exactly the perfect approach, assuming there is one that probably isn't, but for our environment. And then if managers can't have a good conversation and look somebody in the eye and connect with them and have active listening and care about them as humans and care about their development and understand that work gets done through the team, not just by themselves, the whole thing will fail.

It won't matter how well that, that program or process was planned. And so that's a critical input to being effective, both as a senior leader in a company and as a people leader is, do you have the management capability? And I found that in most environments, the answer is no. And there's two main reasons for that.

ople manager. You do it. And [: 00:13:00

Number one, and the way that most people really learn that is mentorship by looking up at their own manager and probably their own manager never knew what they were doing either, right? Because they also had been battlefield promoted at some point into a role they hadn't planned on. And so management capability is by far the most critical thing that I found it in almost every environment of having to get right first.

And I always test that. I came here to pivot. For example, I checked, do we have that management capability turned out? No, I could see that in promotion conversations or the lack of them. I could see that in all kinds of people processes, Oh, I want to hire. I have a, this role open, but I found somebody like three levels above who seems really great.

ts that was a challenge. And [: 00:14:00

[00:14:05] Dr. Jim: So that makes sense. And one of the things that I'm thinking about is when you look at making that pivot, if you're in an organization, that's had a series of battlefield promotions, and you're saying, it's gotten to the level that it is. And they're doing fine. What was the exercise that you went through to convince all of those battlefield promoted managers that we need to shift course to get to the next stage?

So how do you manage that pivot when everybody's so used to this particular way of doing things and they're not connecting the dots on how. The new initiative is supposed to serve them and have them be more effective going forward.

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So that part's easy. There's low resistance [00:15:00] to that. But once you're past the basics, which is, yes, you should do one on ones yesterday should be regular. Yes, you should, my view is they should be owned by your direct report, not by you. It's not just a to do list of all the work.

It's a different, substantively different kind of meeting. Once you're past those basics, then it's about, Hey, you're an agent of the company. You need to think about. When you want to promote your direct report because they've been enrolled for a year and you think they're doing a good job, you have to think about, does the company need the next level role, right?

It's not just time based promotion. Does the company actually need the capabilities of the next level role? Is that is the role at the next level? And then it also is the person at the next level. As an example, right? When you think about development of your team, when you think about giving out resources, right?

listically as leaders in the [: 00:16:00

That if, yeah, it makes sense to you to do this thing you want to do. But if every manager in the company did that thing, we would be in big trouble. And the manager was like, Oh yeah, I can see why that would be a problem. Okay. So how do you uplevel and think as a systems thinker, as you're, even as you're approaching the challenges in front of you. Again, the resistance tends to be lower. The kinds of skills you develop get harder as you start to knock some of those down.

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[00:16:44] Evan Wittenberg: Yeah, I'll

rammatic solutions that were [: 00:17:00

Who are those people they were people managers who scored the highest in the company at whatever that topic was of the five that let's say the first one was developing your people just put them up there and have a good q and a with them for an hour what do you do how do you do this whatever they may not have been so insightful about what they were doing themselves and so the questions help draw out what they were doing but the benefit was everybody else in the room knew two things they knew that.

am that looks like mine, but [: 00:18:00

So there were, the learning was sticky and that people realized they had an issue or a problem that could be solved and that they had to solve and that somebody else, one of their peers had solved. The other benefit was. People realized over time, all those people managers realized the answers are in the room, right?

I was asking some hopefully skilled facilitation question to get the answers out, but they realized they have all the answers already among them. And so over time they would just get together themselves because they realized or they'd pull up, three managers they knew in a room together and said, I'm dealing with this challenge, any ideas, right?

And they really, so it created a Cohort of people who could be self developing as well, even then, as I started rolling out some of those programs that I built some time in to be able to develop. And so it creates the right learning culture going forward, regardless of what kind of I'm doing centrally as HR, but it also sets up for success.

can solve multiple problems [: 00:19:00

[00:19:03] Dr. Jim: So there's a couple of things about what you described that I really like one of the, one of the elements is that it sounds like you're by leveraging or at least spotlighting internal SMEs, that might be an overstatement, but really identifying who might be internal SMEs on a particular topic.

You're actually helping standardize and build systemic best practices in a given area. So I like that aspect of it. But the other aspect that I like is that one of the challenges within a lot of startups is that you would think with a startup being relatively flat. It'd be highly collaborative. And what I've heard from other folks is that it tends to be actually pretty siloed in those environments.

So breaking out the leadership team to be much more collaborative across the enterprise is really effective in terms of building those best practices. Am I misreading what you did there? Or is there more to it?

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And then there can be one for everybody else. And I said, no. And it was like, what do you mean? No. Because organizations over time and sometimes early, as you said, Build silos, right? We're all just busy working. We all, we tend to be in these silos. And if you make sure that your development is cross functional and you bring people together and they go, Oh yeah, I remember how cool legal is.

I haven't seen you in months, but I remember that's right. That we have cool people over there. And so it helps build those bridges that maybe are being broken down by just the normal pace of work. And that building those bridges and embedding in everybody that We actually have a lot of the answers.

ly one who's ever dealt with [: 00:21:00

And so that's another reason to build that community.

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[00:21:17] Evan Wittenberg: So I was giving examples about people managers specifically. That's a role people manager. We always thought about leadership as not necessarily role related. So I want everybody to act like a leader, no matter what level they're at, when the opportunity presents itself. And some, in some environments at Google, we have the resources that we started developing people right out of college to be leaders.

Because why wait the 10, 000 hours that Erickson says it takes to be expert in something, why start that when somebody actually gets their first quote unquote leadership position? If there's a leadership gap, I want anybody to be able to step into it, whether you're an IC or your job actually requires leadership.

ip it's, it involves a whole [: 00:22:00

Of course, but the behavior is I have to step up and step in and say, Hey, I've identified that there's this issue going on. I want to be part of the solution to help solve it. That's the behavior. And so I've told my teams for years, yes, knowledge, skillset, mindset are critical for leadership. But at the end of the day, leadership is about action and behavior.

That action, by the way, may be an inaction. It might be a pause just to be clear, but that's a choice. It's intentionality and action. And building in the idea that this is not about your position or your role. This is about whether you choose to behave in a way that pushes the ball down the field or whatever analogy you want to use or whether you sit back and don't, right.

individual succeed. And that [: 00:23:00

We see companies that only think about the company succeeding and nobody wants to work there because that's a terrible environment to be in. If they don't care about the people. What I see as Nirvana is if you can create a solution that both the company and the individual are, win from, then that's what we should be trying to do all day.

It's not one versus the other.

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The challenge that I see is that as you go further. Towards the front lines, people are so busy at the task level of what they're doing, whether it's a director or manager or an individual contributor that they're just focused on executing and delivering on tasks, and they don't necessarily think about those leadership opportunities.

s that you did to build that [: 00:24:00

[00:24:05] Evan Wittenberg: And I'll just start by saying it's a yes. And right, because everybody in every organization I've ever worked in is a player coach. Nobody's just a coach. Nobody just has a job as manager and they sit back and manage people. That's old school. I think at this point I have never worked in a company like that.

e good example of this for a [: 00:25:00

And so that's the way you have to think about it. Yeah, maybe we won't get perfect on this thing, but over time, the team is going to get better, which allows us to take on more and grow with the company and startups. That's super important. We need most of. Most of the population and startups have to keep growing and learning.

You can't just turn everybody over when you get to a certain scale. So that, that is one piece, the mindset of what is your job as a leader. In this case, it was specific role specific as a people manager. It's to get the work done through your team, but also develop your team's capability at the same time.

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And then just now you mentioned that a lot of a lot of the current structure in a lot of organizations is that you're a player coach. So when you look at both of those things, being a player coach, In a startup environment that's promoted you based on battlefield promotions. I would imagine one of the challenges that comes up is defining what good looks like.

Now you talked about having those round tables where people are excelling in certain things, and that provides for collaboration. What are some of the other ways that you put into place that really help define for managers and directors? What good looks like in an environment where maybe there isn't that context that exists.

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I can show you Enron's four values. They look great. Obviously there was not a lot of good stuff beneath that. And so really it's about what are the behaviors that you can see that align with the values that you want. And that's a way of both educating and holding people accountable. A manager has to be focused on those behaviors.

They have to model them and demonstrate them themselves, and they have to reward them and their team, not instead of the what, which is getting the work done, but in addition to, and so I like, if you're talking about process and how do you institutionalize this, I like a process, a performance process that has both the what and the how that are.

Pretty much equally rated at the end of the day, I'll let the manager decide if they were excellent on the what and an okay on the how, what the final rating will be, if you will, those both have to be important. They have to be held together at the same time. They have to be modeled and embodied by the manager.

hings or not, whether that's [: 00:28:00

And so we'll guide people to remember that you're managing in this unique context, and this is who we are, and this is what we believe. And so that as a foundational piece is super important. It also helps with people who are great on your team and they want to be promoted and they're great at getting stuff done, but they're not good at some of the how part, then you know where to coach them.

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So how did you apply an and philosophy to developing your leadership and strength, but also building technical expertise and continuing to grow that within your organization?

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I want to give people, I want to avoid the battlefield promotion, right? I want to give people a chance to be intentional. And so what I'll do is once I create that foundational leadership or people management program, I'll invite people who think they want to be managers as attendees. And I'll tell you, I've done this many times.

It's amazing what happens because if you don't wake up in the morning with at least some part of you thinking about how am I going to help somebody else be great, you're never going to be a great people manager. You might be okay going through all the steps, but you're never going to be great at it.

And so I want to know that. So I'll invite people to the program the first half day at lunch. It's amazing. Half of them will come up to me and say, Oh my God, get me the hell out of here. I can't believe you people are spending time talking about this stuff. And great. They're self selecting out. They should be ICs for their career.

, I found my people. This is [: 00:30:00

And great. They get some skills and abilities. And the next time you need a people manager because of growth. They're a perfect person to tap on the shoulder. They clearly have the interest. They have hopefully some ability and capability and their heart is probably in doing work through others, which again, is not true of everybody.

What I really hate, and I worked at an org that was like this once, is you promote people into people management battlefield usually, and they're not good at their job. There were great ICs, which is why you promoted them. They're not good at people managers. This organization would fire them 'cause they weren't good at their jobs.

I think that's a crime and I've in, since I've left that organization, the next couple of organizations, I've always made sure that we move people if they weren't good as people, managers create a nice path for them to become an IC again. They were really good at that. Obviously they'll be good at that.

ganizational capability, but [: 00:31:00

And I tell you, those people are immensely happier being ICs if they're not, if they're not wired to be people managers.

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So one of the things that I'm curious about is how did you break that mindset as you went throughout your career? Because oftentimes or even employees are often under the impression that they need to be continually moving up the ranks when. Their ideal role might be right where they're at. So how did you bridge that?

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That's fine. Leave them alone. Keep feeding them, giving them good access. Let them have an impact, but leave them alone unless. They're a blocker, right? And once in a while, it happens that they're happy with what they're doing, but you have roles beneath them that need to grow up through the org and are interested.

And it's in the org's best interest. And they're sitting there blocking that it's rare. And there should be other ways to design around it. But unless they're a blocker, I would say every org needs that group of people who are just expertly good at what they do and are happy with their position in life.

And that's great.

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[00:32:51] Evan Wittenberg: And it doesn't go against growth mindset, just to be clear, because for them to remain an expert, they have to keep learning and growing and getting better, just to be clear, the world keeps changing, right? So they're not [00:33:00] static, but they're staying as the top expert in whatever they're good at by learning and growing.

So it's not anti growth mindset in any way.

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What are the core elements of the framework that another leader needs to be thinking about to tackle a similar type challenge in their organization?

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They want to feel valued. And they want to be able to have an [00:34:00] impact that they will be recognized and rewarded for. So everything we do as a company, as it relates to our own people should be based on those kind of three core foundational assumptions. And that's true for all employees. Yes, maybe your salespeople tend to be.

Coin operated versus your engineers. Okay, fine. Maybe your engineers tend to want to do different things than your scientists. Okay, fine. But those are just the core pieces of being valued, how human beings want to be treated. So start with that. The next thing is make sure that whatever you're designing is good.

For the company and for the people, not one or the other, because you will tip over at some point. If you solve for only one or the other, you'll either create a great company that nobody wants to work at, or you'll create a very happy set of people that the company goes over a cliff. So that's number two.

more problems in any startup [: 00:35:00

And so I think in a, as a people leader or as a leader in general, you should focus 80 percent of your time on those issues and problems that are, I'll call it ripe, meaning everybody understands and acknowledges there's a problem. The pain of solving it is less than the pain of keeping it. It's not a blind spot for your CEO or your senior team, right?

Everybody said, yeah, that's a problem. Let's fix that. You should spend 80 percent of your time on that. There are a whole set of problems that are not right. It's a, I'll use this corollary, it's a blind spot for your CEO, or the pain of solving it is worse than the pain it's causing today. Even if you see that in six months, it's going to be a big problem, people are just not going to give you time, resources, energy, attention, and focus on solving that.

e because you will bang your [: 00:36:00

So that, and when you're thinking about what do I do first, second, and third in this organization that has so much going on, pick the things that you actually can solve. And then for the ones you can't, even though they're important, even though people might be screaming about them, put them in a brown paper bag, write to them faster, but get to them when you can actually make a difference.

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[00:36:27] Evan Wittenberg: Sure. I'm on LinkedIn, of course, and then my work email is E W I T E N B E R G at pivotbio. com.

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So if you're looking at building leadership depth across the organization, For a startup organization or even any organization that's dealing with multiple challenges, it's important to identify those people within your organization who are specialists at solving a particular set of problems and then give them the spotlight so that you can collaboratively learn and bring others in the organization along when you're looking at.

about leadership capability.[: 00:38:00

So I thought that was a really important segment that of our conversation, and I think it could be broadly applied to any number of organizations. Evan, appreciate you hanging out with us. For those of you who've been listening to the conversation appreciate you listening. If you liked the discussion, make sure you leave us a review on your favorite podcast player.

If you haven't. And if you haven't already done so, make sure you join the community. You can find that at www. engagerocket. co slash HR impact, and then tune in every week where we'll have another leader joining us and sharing with us the game changing insights that help them build a high performing team.