Vander Thompson

▶0:00IntroWelcome to the Built by People podcast, where we share the stories and insights of the world's top HR leaders. Join us as we dive deep into the minds of HR executives, uncovering their strategies, challenges, and triumphs in shaping today's workforce.

▶0:38HostI'm excited to welcome Vander to the Built by People podcast. Vander, thank you so much for joining us. And as a starting question, I always love to ask if you could share a little bit more about your career journey.

▶0:48GuestYeah, no, absolutely. And thank you, Dave, for having me. I'm excited to talk shop when it comes to people ops. My career journey starts with grad school, right? And What inspired me to pursue my master's in HR administration was prior to grad school, all I heard about HR was hire, fire, discipline, right? That was the function, hire, fire, discipline. And what I started to realize was that the landscape of HR was changing. It wasn't just hire, fire, discipline. It was more so building impactful programs, strategies, systems that align with operational success. That was really important to me. Like, how can I get into this world of coming into a new organization and assessing challenges and building strategies that are scalable and help us grow. That's what sparked that. And through my grad school journey, I learned a lot about the philosophies, the change management, more like the high-level HR people operations strategy piece. So that's where I honed my skills there. It wasn't until my later experience that I got into the granular nuances of all the tactical and mechanical items. It's funny, I thought about you because I was on a plane last week and I was talking to a stranger and she says, hey, what do you do for a living? And I said, I work in HR. And of course she goes, oh, you just deal with all the company drama, right? But I wanted to, it made me think of you because I wanted to call out that we know that's not true, right? We're building things that we're a big part of the engine that helps the company continue to scale and grow. So that's what's been really impactful to my career. So outside of grad school, doing all the mechanical tactical stuff, and then finally I was able to elevate Having experienced all those tactical things to now drive strategy in those areas. And that's what led me to Mangoment, being the head of people operations here.

▶2:30HostConnor, when you walk into an early stage company, how do you assess what's missing and where to start first in people ops? And what signals help you prioritize when everything feels urgent?

▶2:43GuestYeah, so I'll start with the first half of the question. It's really about 3 things, right? It's relationship building is the first piece, right? When I walk into an organization, I want to build relationships with the people. I want to learn about the dynamics that are happening in the organization, right? Massive change without that context can actually be dangerous, right? So I really want to listen and understand where the company is historically. Then the second thing, I want to understand the standard operating procedures, right? What are the SOPs? What exists? What are your operational norms, right? And then what doesn't exist, right? So between the data that I'm getting from those conversations and then the data that I'm getting from the SOPs, the third thing is now I can identify quick wins. Now I can start to come in, make small impacts here and there. And the quick wins to me are important because one, obviously we're making impact for leaders and for the business, but two, it fosters trust in those relationships because now people are like, oh yeah. This Vander guy, he comes in and he can help us fix things and business partner with us to drive our strategy and our mission forward. Those are the things that I use to assess. And then Dave, I'm going to be honest with you when it comes to prioritization, everything feels urgent to me right now. But the real thing is the mantra of building the plane while flying it is what I really hold on to. And the reason that's important to me is because that there's an understanding there that everything doesn't have to be perfect. But building a plane while flying it means we can't crash the plane, right? We have to keep the plane in the air. So how does that work? Again, we talked about quick wins, but it's really about backing into those people strategies. You and I both know what the end-to-end performance management strategy looks like, what the final result looks like of a compensation philosophy or structure. We know what the end result is. So backing into strategy means every little thing that I do Let's make sure that it helps us keep the plane afloat, but it's working towards that end strategy, right? So this is how you don't get overwhelmed with everything has to be done today, right? So that's my mindset there.

▶4:46HostVanner, can you share a story where you had to get buy-in from leadership on a people strategy during a period of rapid growth? What worked well and what did you learn from that process?

▶4:56GuestYeah, Dave, I'm, I'm glad you asked that. So put yourself in my shoes. You're launching the first ever performance review for a company. Right? And in the leadership team meeting, you're going over the process, the questions that'll be asked, the rating system, et cetera. And leaders are getting really squeamish about this first-ever review, right? It's like, oh, I don't know. It's, it's kind of scary. You know, what, is it fair to rate employees for the first time? Like, I don't know. Maybe we should back out of this. And David honestly really shook, it put the entire launch in jeopardy. We're supposed to launch in 2 weeks here. So I tried to reframe it. Then it hit me that it wasn't about the strategy. It was about what people thought about the outcome of the strategy. So in their mind, after rating someone high or low, is this going to lead to some sort of impact? When you go to a gym and you ask for a personal trainer, the first thing that personal trainer is going to do is they're going to assess your squat. They're going to assess your movement, assess your bench press. And the purpose of that assessment is to get a baseline understanding of how you move, your mobility, your strengths, your weaknesses, right? That's the same thing we're doing with the first ever performance review, right? So when I framed it that way, you could see this light bulb going off. Oh yeah. Okay. I get it now. There aren't any outcomes attached to this first review, right? It's not like you're going to get, not get a merit increase if you score low. We really want to actually identify areas where you can grow and then cultivate that development and growth over time so that the next time we do this assessment, we can see where you've progressed. So what I learned, two things that are really important. The first thing is sometimes partnering with the thought champions in the org on the leadership side is actually really helpful before sharing to the broader leadership team, right? Hey, what if I went to the VP of finance and said, hey, this is what I'm doing for performance reviews. How would this impact your team? Or if I went to the chief technology officer and said, hey, this is what I'm thinking about for this strategy. How would this impact the engineers in your group? That's the first thing. And then the second thing is my director, Kiana, from my last company. We used to actually intentionally sit and strategize on the questions that we thought would come up, right? Like, what do we think leaders are gonna ask? And we would intentionally think about all the questions, and then we would make sure that, A, we didn't have gaps in our strategy so we could answer those questions, and B, just think of thoughtful responses to, again, help reframe and retool the way the mind is thinking about some of these systems and strategies.

▶7:15HostBetter, what are some of the most effective practices you've used to build performance management systems that actually grow with the company and how do you ensure they stay relevant across different stages?

▶7:26GuestYeah, so the, one of the most effective practices that I'm really a big fan of is performance stages, right? Performance stages is really the idea that at different stages of performance of your ICs, what kind of conversations to have. So Dave, think of a waterfall, right? If one of your team members was heading towards a waterfall on a boat, you wouldn't wait until they got to the edge of the waterfall to start giving them feedback, right? So that's what performance stages are about. So really high level, if someone's a hyper-performer, really performing exceeding expectations, then the type of conversations you would have are about their career growth or their next path. How do they get to the next level? That's far away from the waterfall. The next stage is, hey, this person's performing just fine. Regular coaching, regular development, everything's going well. They're still away from the waterfall. But let's say you have one employee that's heading towards the waterfall. They're not in a danger zone yet. It's totally correctable, but now maybe you need to have a more informal development conversation with that person, right? And then finally, you're really near the waterfall. This is where more of the more formal development conversations come into play, where there has to be an immediate change in a certain amount of time in order for you to reverse course and get back away from that waterfall. Performance stages, I know that was long, is the first strategy that I love to use. And then the second one Impactful performance reviews. It's like my big mantra. When we do performance reviews, they have to be light and impactful. How many times have we sat and had 20-question performance reviews? It takes an hour per employee. It really takes away from your day-to-day. My strategy is making them light, 200-word count limits on open-ended questions and really concise, non-ambiguous performance markers. And the way that you make that impactful is you focus the those processes on the actual conversation. So if your performance review takes 20 minutes per employee, that's great. The real meat and potatoes of the program is to have the conversation with the employee about that, what you wrote, right? Have the conversation about what they wrote for their self-review, and that's how you make it impactful. So performance stages and then light and impactful performance reviews are like two of my like really like proudest effective performance management practices.

▶9:35HostVander, what parting advice would you like to share with our community?

▶9:40GuestYeah, you know, my experience has been in startup SaaS companies, and my biggest piece of advice is threefold. The first thing is no one size fits all, right? So I see this mistake being made a lot of times. You come into a company, you take everything from the last company, and you're like, hey, we're just going to put this right in this company. You have to recognize that every situation is different. Every company has different needs at different stages.. And really, you have to adapt your programs to fit those needs. The second part of that is really being a builder and not an operator. Again, it goes to the same thing, right? You're tailoring solutions to the needs of the company. That's what a builder does. An operator just, again, copies playbooks and just comes in and plugs and play. And the last thing I want to just call out is my company's— one of my company's core values right now is first principles thinking. And first principles thinking is an engineering concept that's really popular in engineering circles. But really what it means is we make decisions and solve problems and build strategies based on fundamental truths rather than established playbooks and established best practices in quotes. So if you worked at IBM, which is a multi-thousand global company, you wouldn't take those same systems and habits and tools and bring them to a 300-person Series C startup to try to make that work, right? So there's no one size that fits all. You have to be adaptable. You have to build those relationships, gain an understanding, gain the context, and then you can move.

▶11:11HostBanner, thank you so much for joining us today on the Built by People podcast. It was a pleasure to have you involved.

▶11:16GuestThanks, Dave. Can't wait to do it again.