The Executive Responsibility: Owning and Calibrating Top Talent

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[00:00:18] Katya Laviolette: Thank you. Pleasure to be here. Dr. Jim.

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[00:00:31] Katya Laviolette: Let's just start with 1Password.

password manager and up until: 2018

A couple of years later and a third round series C funding in [00:01:00] 20 end of 2021 and we are We're really in the mode of scaling, hyper growth we basically take care of protecting people's identities and making sure that people are safe from hacking and cyber security attacks. I take care of the people function at One Password, I am the chief people officer, I've been there for about two and a half years now, and my mandate when I came in was to help scale the I really take care of anything people related.

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And then when you look at growing from 500 to over a thousand and more. Your mindset and some of your practices need to change. So what are some of the things that you put into place that helped facilitate that growth while still maintaining the core culture of the organization?

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[00:02:00] When we were like less than 500, that showed up in very Very verbal ways, nothing documented, nothing intentional or codified as I would call it. One of the first things was really there's a lot of programs and tooling that needed to be put in place to scale.

But one of the really important things from a cultural perspective was actually codifying. What we expect of people, what we value at 1Password from this 18 year history, and making it live. And as you scale rapidly and you bring people in, you can quickly dilute that. And we went around, we did focus groups, we had diverse really diverse people in the focus groups, in terms of backgrounds, in terms of tenure, and so forth.

hen we're onboarding people, [: 00:03:00

[00:03:03] Dr. Jim: So I'd imagine if you went 15 years without anything or very little being codified. And then you make this pivot, even with feedback that we're going to write stuff down and put a standard operating procedures in place. You encountered some resistance. So what were some of the things that you did to overcome that resistance?

Because the DNA of the organization is It sounds like it was run fast and break things and not have anything written down. So that's a pretty drastic switch.

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But Yeah. Perfect example was codifying what the culture and the values look like. Our first cut, we took it back to the founders. The founders are really the keepers of the culture. And about, I'd say, 45 minutes into that deck, as we would call it, as to what we were proposing, I just took a look around, remote environment, on [00:04:00] Zoom, watched the body language, they were lost.

We were using all sorts of fancy words, business words, all sorts of jargon as I would call it, and I was like okay team, let's take a break, let's take a step back we're gonna come back to you, we're just gonna regroup here, and the next iteration we came back to was, like, language that resonated with the 1Password culture.

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[00:04:31] Katya Laviolette: Yep, and that was a great lesson, it's okay, we, you come into businesses in your career and you, I always say to people.

So don't just take what you have taken in the past and just implement it. You have to come in and you have to look around and you have to continuously adapt. And so yes, absolutely needed to adapt to what was expected here.

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Let's get into the the core [00:05:00] discussion. One Password is an organization that grew to 500 and now it's over 1, 200. One of the things to facilitate that growth has to involve building a leadership pipeline and also making sure that leaders, once they assume the role, are ready to lead.

What's your best practice? For other listeners out there, when you're looking at building that leadership pipeline and getting leadership readiness embedded in the organization, what are some of the things that should be best practices that other organizations put into place?

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What do you expect out of being a leader? And what happens a lot of times is you build these tracks, these career tracks, and people just assume that I need to move from IC to leader to build my career. Not true. This is a myth. You can have a perfectly great career as an individual contributor. You can go all the way up to being and a very strong principle in a tech company that, that, you're building the tech stack and we count on [00:06:00] that.

And basically, I think that before you do any design and so forth, you, people coming into that leadership responsibility, why do you want to be a leader? What drives you? Why do you think you would be good at it? And have that baseline before you start just assuming that everyone wants to be leaders.

There's some people. Operate better in an icy space and some people just inherently they want to lead. So you should ask that question.

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I asked that question, but I also ask what's your comfort level? When it comes to having no control over your results. Your results are driven by the people underneath you and what they're able to deliver. Are you going to be okay with that? Because you're not in control. And that often triggers a switch in some people who decide, Hey, that's not the path that I want to go because I'm not comfortable not [00:07:00] being in control of my own results.

I want to piggyback on something that you just mentioned. And that's the idea that Career trajectory as a ladder is a myth. I often talk about you should think about your career as a lattice, not a ladder. So I'd like some more detail in to how you built that across the organization and made it real.

So people realize that there is more than just a vertical path for them.

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So it doesn't necessarily mean that you go up laterally, you can shift over. The beauty about scaling an organization, and I always refer to our customer experience department, Is this is actually a great feeder pool for talent in the security space, because we have people who come into 1Password who love the security space, they might not have the technical software development experience, but they understand how to offer technical assistance to customers and so forth, and they can evolve into technology.

So you have this whole ecosystem of opportunities, and as a company scales, now we're at 1, 200, aiming to be at 1, 500 at the end of the year, it just provides more opportunity for people. The whole idea of just hierarchy is all changing.

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So if you encountered that. How did you get around that sort of thinking for the betterment of the overall organization?

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So you say Dr. Jim, you are The chief engineering officer. You don't own all your talent. We as an executive own talent and we calibrate the talent. We assess, we watch the collaboration and so forth. So we can ensure that we're not holding people back and not hoarding people. And that's a leadership responsibility from the CEO and the C level team.

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[00:10:01] Katya Laviolette: So we've started to really look at what we require from a level perspective and what competencies and when someone's fully functioning when they're in developing mode when they're in I would call it outstanding mode and we're starting to bring that down into I'd say director and manager level and you typically would find this in a very well established organization that's been one and done like that's a common thing but in a scaling organization you're actually you're Very focused the first days of just getting your talent in.

Okay, big part of our talent is in Our product strategy is set. We're building product. We're selling to the market. Now we have that talent pool and we have to identify and make sure that everyone is functioning at the right level and the expectations. And as you scale a business, those expectations change.

e outside for some technical [: 00:11:00

[00:11:10] Dr. Jim: Like your point about connecting the dots. Great conversation so far Katja. If people want to continue the conversation, this is a teaser, so we're not getting super deep into the discussion. What's the best way for them to get in touch with you?

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[00:11:23] Dr. Jim: Thanks for hanging out with us. For those of you who have been listening to this conversation, we appreciate you hanging out. When I think about the short conversation that we had the thing that impacted me most about this conversation is the question that you asked, why do you want to lead? And that is a critical question that should be asked at all levels of the organization because you want people in positions of influence for the right reasons. So uncovering what those right reasons are.

ership pipeline, when you're [: 00:12:00

And that's going to inform you on what is the right role for that person. So thanks for hanging out with us. We appreciate you tuning in for those of you who have heard this episode and want to hear more. Make sure you're joining the HR impact community. You can find that at www. engagerocket. co slash HR impact and tune in next time where we'll have another great leader joining with us and sharing their game changing insights that help them build a high performing team