 questions everything — it’s a tough habit to break after years spent earning her PhD in organizational behavior. Now, as Head of People for 

, the membership platform that helps creators get paid, she’s building a rapidly-growing team with that same iconoclast spirit, testing everything she can, piloting next-gen feedback tools, and rethinking what it really means to create an outstanding experience for employees.

That’s how she’s ended up at the helm of a distinctly nontraditional People Ops organization. It's an umbrella that includes the recruiters and HR generalists you might expect, plus a few teams you might not: IT, facilities, and administration. For Guillory, there's a clear common thread — “All of these functions are aligned in their primary motive: caring for our employee base.” So far, this has paid off with 97% of Patreon employees stating unequivocally that they’re proud to work at the company, and 91% saying they’d tell their friends to join.

In this piece, we’ll call Guillory's approach ‘

,’ and the atypical structure of her department is just the start. Below, she describes three key strategies startups can use to maximize the reach of their people and culture-oriented efforts:

•Expanding the scope of what falls under People Ops.

•Planning for an employee’s needs over their entire lifecycle, from hire to exit.

•Creating a culture of data-driven decision-making.

Along the way, she shares lessons she learned during her academic career at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and as an HR leader at Yahoo!. And she urges (especially early-stage) founders who haven’t focused on people operations yet to get on it. Now.

“My goal is to coordinate across all the functions that touch an employee’s experience at Patreon, so that we can support and nurture every employee in a way that equips them to be as happy and productive as possible,” says Guillory. “All of the teams I oversee make an impact on the day-to-day experience of employees, and it makes sense to streamline the handoffs and information sharing between them.”

For example, once recruiting hires someone new, they're passed to HR for onboarding, which includes being outfitted with the right technology by IT, and being placed in the optimal environment for productivity by facilities. 

At most companies, these teams have to interact many times every day, but have no formal relationship

. At Patreon, Guillory wanted to change that.

When you’re overseeing handoffs between HR, IT, facilities, and more, coordination is no small feat. It can be challenging to even get everyone in the same room — but Guillory makes sure she does once a week. “We meet for 30 minutes, so it’s a pretty short meeting.” 

Still, she finds time in that half hour for a few critical items. “We always look at weekly wins. I highlight whatever has really pushed us forward — the person who worked on it — and why it's important.”

Every other meeting, there’s also a round robin on the team’s 

, because we're looking to expand our team quickly. I want all the different functions to be thinking about speed, meaning how can you take what you're doing now and make it happen 10x faster? And alignment, meaning where are there touchpoints between functions, and how can we partner on those as smoothly as possible?”

Creating a clear sense of purpose is one of the key benefits of her org’s unusual structure. “I’ve seen siloed departments at other companies where the IT group, for example, has a lack of clarity around the ultimate deliverable of their function,” says Guillory. “Is it to improve the technology the business uses, to save the business the most money, or to make employees’ lives easier?” With every employee-focused department under her purview, she can broadly communicate the company’s foremost objectives — then pivot quickly when circumstances dictate.

Two quarters ago, for example, one of her org’s focus areas was on cost savings. “Facilities and IT worked together to identify where we were incurring the greatest cost and opportunities for savings. We looked into better aligning our food spend with attendance and the impact of things like duplicate software instances on tech costs when multiple functions purchased similar resources for themselves,” she says. “Now we feel like we’ve resolved most of those cost and redundancy issues. So we turned our attention to speed and alignment to prepare for an upcoming boom in hiring and onboarding.”

By approaching these initiatives in tandem, Guillory’s interdisciplinary team is uniquely equipped to position a rapidly growing startup for success. “The work we’ve done to streamline handoffs between functions is laying the groundwork to make custom onboarding possible,” she says. “We have a high volume of reqs in certain classifications — web engineering, backend — so it's worth it to have some bespoke offerings.” 

Any startup leader knows that getting an engineer to work quickly, shaving even a week or two off their ramp-up, can have a huge impact on a roadmap.

Cultivating a holistic employee experience means not only considering your day-to-day touchpoints with employees, but anticipating evolving needs throughout their tenure.

Think about the full employee life cycle, then ask yourself, ‘What are all the things that this person will need to be more successful today, six months from now, a year from now?’

Guillory shared some strategies her team uses to coordinate their efforts at every stage of the employee life cycle:

For starters, remember that onboarding isn’t actually your first touchpoint with that new team member. For weeks, even months, they’ve been building a relationship with their recruiter. “We want the recruiter present throughout the person’s transition into becoming an official part of the company. Beyond even the onboarding phase, 

our recruiters check in after a couple of weeks to understand how the new employee is doing

 and make sure things are progressing well.”

From there, People Ops oversees a slew of mundane tasks for every new employee: creating their email, determining where they’ll sit and ordering the right equipment, processing paperwork, setting up payroll. This is one area where Guillory’s interdisciplinary team has proven particularly valuable. Through working closely with HR and facilities, the team’s IT engineer, 

, saw that those tasks were ripe for automation

“We’re working on a single form that sets all of those tasks in motion,” Guillory says.

What that looks like is evolving as she and her team continually optimize the tools they use to get employees ramped up quickly and consistently. Initially, the HR lead would go into project management tool 

 to create a task for everything that needed to happen. “It was a template, but it was still time consuming. You had to find out all these pieces of information as opposed to having them in one place.” 

Now, Pringle, has streamlined the process with the creation of a Google Form that uses backend scripts to auto-populate those fields.

When the initial form for a hired candidate is completed by the HR lead, a task list is automatically generated in Asana with all the onboarding events in Google Calendar. It creates 

 tickets for the tech and supplies the team must purchase. This also triggers emails to the new hire and the internal folks who need to take action. This usually includes the person’s hiring manager, IT, Facilities, and the people who run onboarding and training. These events inform them of what they need to order and prepare.

You can get a sense for what this looks like in Asana here, with every involved team member on the right side, and their tasks on the left:

With clear decisions made at the outset, everyone involved in onboarding can accomplish their tasks with little back and forth on email and Slack. “IT used to wait for clarification and all these emails would fly between them and HR and possibly the new hire before deciding what the computer setup should be. Now those choices are made at the form phase from a clear selection of specs, so we can immediately execute on getting the right equipment.”

Moreover, this kind of single-source automation targets one of Guillory’s overarching goals: 

. “When there were different parties entering the employee's information into the payroll service (ADP in this case) or communicating with the hiring manager, we would get a lot of Slacks across the team saying, ‘Who's this person's manager? What level is this person?’ Now, we get all this information from a single source of truth — the Google form — automatically populated everywhere."

This onboarding procedure has been invaluable in its own right, but it’s had an unexpected impact on Patreon’s broader culture, too, in the form of greater transparency. “Our offers previously included a person’s title, but not their job level. So when we were trying to put them into our systems, we knew that they were a software engineer, but we didn't know whether they were a software engineer at level one or at level two.” The result was either a delay as HR pinged the hiring manager or guesswork based on the hire’s salary level.

As a result of this bottleneck, Patreon’s offer letters now include both salary and level. “That’s actually great for employees, too. They have that transparency coming into the organization, so they know where they stand,” says Guillory. “And it keys into development conversations: ‘Okay, I'm an IC3 engineer. How do I get to be an IC4?’ As opposed to, ‘I'm an engineer. I have no idea where I stand relative to my teammates.’”

When People Ops is encouraged to think holistically — and not focus on one narrow piece of the pie — you’ll reap the benefits of this kind of alignment.

The understanding we gained from automating a broken HR process has actually helped the recruiting process, and that, in turn, has yielded a fuller, better-supported experience for the employee.

Beyond onboarding, Guillory and her team are continually engaged with point people (or business partners) in every department to understand and optimize the employee experience as it’s in progress. For example, they manage a robust slate of engagement and diversity and inclusion programming, led by the group’s HR business partner, 

. To make it as impactful as possible, they need data.

Last year’s survey results made D&I a top priority, prompting Guillory's team to create quarterly learning and training sessions as well as immersive events on the topic. Since then, they’ve seen the D&I score surfaced by the survey jump 17 points, with 93% of the organization strongly agreeing that Patreon values diversity.

To gather as much input as possible, and to honor different people’s tolerance for giving feedback, Guillory and her team leverage several primary feedback tools:

 Every year, employees are asked to complete a survey that covers everything from how connected employees feel to broader company goals to how supported they feel in their day-to-day work. Patreon uses 

 to administer the survey, but there are several services that offer this functionality. There’s a two week response window so that Guillory’s team can rapidly collate this data and present it to the staff at all hands meetings to provide even more transparency. 

, an Officevibe feature that interacts with Slack, messages Patreon employees a quick, open-ended engagement question. Pulled from Officevibe’s repository of engagement questions, these check-ins ask things like “How often do you get feedback on your work?” and “How would you rate your relationship with your colleagues?” 

Responses are anonymous, but accommodate replies.

 “I really enjoy reading the feedback. I go in on a pretty regular basis and respond to employees directly,” says Guillory. Those replies are routed back to the original responder, keeping the exchange — even lengthy back-and-forths — entirely anonymous on the employee side. If it feels like too much, employees can opt out of the questions. “We've also experimented with different cadences and it seems as though it is fine for those who are using it,” she says.

 Existing somewhere between the other two feedback-gathering tools, these surveys (also powered by Officevibes) are shorter than a full engagement study, but more targeted than weekly check-ins. Unlike a third-party tool like the Leo bot, this type of survey also gives companies more control over both questions and timing. “

Part of what makes pulse surveys beneficial is the ability to measure the response to an important event or decision that has happened recently in the organization

,” says Guillory. “Most survey products will ask questions about your manager, or your thoughts on leadership or the company’s direction. But if you want to measure more specific goals — like whether a newly launched initiative has improved employee morale — you’ll need to handle that in house.”

Gathering feedback is just half of the job, though — responding to it with meaningful action is the other.

"If there's something we discover is inhibiting folks in a particular department from being successful, we are responsible for communicating that to leadership and working to resolve the issue," she says.

For localized issues, go straight to the team in question to open a dialogue. “We might go to the product team, for example, and say, ‘Hey, we've been getting a lot of feedback that the team is feeling strained given X or Y deliverable. How is the team broadly feeling about this?’”

Armed with that additional information, Guillory and the executive team can discuss the best solution. “We’ll decide whether we should make some changes to the road map, or if we can do something else to support the people feeling the bulk of this pressure.”

To uncover broader organizational problems, keep an eye out for any peaks and valleys in your data.

 “When I see dips, in particular, I become really interested in whether or not that's being caused by something that's actionable,” she says. More than absolute scores, shifts in trends can be particularly revealing.

A few months ago, for example, Patreon’s Leo bot surveys were declining in one area: wellness. “When it comes to wellness, we look at how people are doing at home and how people are doing at work,” says Guillory. “A lot of the comments people were leaving in the survey indicated they were feeling stressed and that they weren’t able to exercise, eat healthy, and focus on the self-care that they’d like.”

The People Ops team sprang into action. “First I brought it up in an all-team meeting. ‘Hey, I saw this dip in our overall engagement. I attribute it to wellness, because we’re doing particularly poorly there despite positive scores on other factors.’” That meeting was quickly followed by smaller brainstorming sessions. “We wrote down everyone’s suggestions of resources that would contribute to wellness, then we picked a couple to implement.”

Chief among them was getting everyone in the company a gym membership (or a subsidy for those who chose to join a different facility). “We also made checking in on wellness part of every manager’s role and goal setting. Not only do you need to monitor your teammates' performance and projects, you also need to check in on their well-being on a regular basis,” says Guillory. “After making those changes, our aggregate wellness score has improved significantly.”

An employee’s departure marks another valuable moment to gather data that can be put to use optimizing their experience and that of future employees. So Guillory doesn’t settle for a cursory chat. Her interviews touch on every dimension of a person’s experience with the company, asking employees to describe:

•Their day-to-day work and responsibilities.

•The support and resources they received to execute their role.

•Their relationship with their manager.

•Their understanding of the company’s mission.

•Their experience of the company, and what did or didn’t contribute to their decision to leave.

•The opportunity they’re leaving for or considering, and why that's compelling.

Patreon offers departing employees two ways to share feedback: a more traditional in-person interview or a survey they can complete in private. (Either way, the process always includes a sit-down to discuss the mundane details: benefits, COBRA, returning office supplies.)

Analysis of the data has to wait a bit, though. “Due to our focus on maintaining the anonymity of folks who are exiting, we aggregate the data. We wait until there's a critical mass, usually more than five folks, to look for any trends in our attrition,” says Guillory. For a young company like Patreon with low rates of attrition, that makes it difficult to act quickly on exit data; larger companies typically have more to analyze. But it's a high priority for the team to maintain the trust and confidence of existing employees. Knowing they won't be singled out when they leave sends an important cultural message.

Finally, a holistic approach to People Ops means not just getting data from your team, but sharing it very publicly to everyone in return. You shouldn’t just use data to back up what you want to do, you need to pay attention to the story that the data actually tells.

People Ops is an art and a science, and the science should inform the art.

While plenty of startups devour DAUs and churn metrics, too many manage their employee experience according to whim or legacy practices. “Observe, experiment, measure. Understand whether something actually works, and don’t be distracted by the fact that it’s been done before," says Guillory. "Substantiating key people policies and choices with data helps organizations understand and align around their approach." 

HR leaders need to take an interest in the individual, no doubt, but managing the employee experience holistically also means understanding and disseminating the story that’s unfolding in aggregate. Sometimes that means identifying a necessary change and communicating it to leadership, like the introduction of Patreon’s gym memberships. Other times, that means giving employees a window into the data-driven decision-making that shapes their work life.

For example, the company recently completed a review of compensation, perhaps the most fraught territory an HR professional can tread. When the process was complete, though, team members weren’t simply handed a new number in a vacuum. They also learned how and why the organization had arrived at those numbers.

“I like to be very transparent about the way tests are done and the quantitative data is produced,” says Guillory. “I was able to say, ‘We looked at all of this data. We looked at these target statistics. We moved folks in this direction, and this percentage of folks are in this placement within the distribution.’ There was a quantitative justification for every action that was taken, so teammates weren’t simply left to accept things on the basis of my personal opinion.”

Effective people management means opening a meaningful dialogue, and a successful People Ops leader needs to demonstrate what that looks like. For Guillory, academia offers a model for how to do that. “Because of my background, I'm more inclined to say, ‘Hey, this is my perspective. This is the evidence for why I believe this is the right thing to do. But I'm more than happy to hear what anyone thinks about another approach we should use or additional information you'd like to see.’"

Don’t Save People Ops for the Growth Stage

At Patreon’s current size — 85 employees — Guillory still knows everyone by name and gets a lot of actionable signal through day-to-day conversations. But she knows that won’t always be the case.

“Were we twice the size, it would be much harder to keep a pulse on everything. We would have to rely even more heavily on feedback-gathering resources. Organizations that are building people functions should start early with using scientific methods and understanding the role of data in their functions. 

With each additional teammate, the need to have a bird's eye view, to leverage data, becomes greater.

Now that she already has her organization with its various teams in shape, it will be that much easier to expand resources in each area as needed. The IT, facilities, HR, recruiting, and administration teams will each inevitably grow, but it will be clear where those people go, how they interact, and how they can integrate into the company to make the biggest impact. Right now, the tiny teams in each area are essentially stem cells that can easily scale in an organized and clear way.

“Startups often delay the inclusion of people ops resources in their organizational structures, and they delay it too long,” says Guillory. There’s a notion that when you know the dozen or two people you’re working with — and spend long hours in the same spaces together — there’s simply no need for the more formal processes of human resources.

Ultimately, there are engagement costs, performance costs, and attrition costs to running lean on functions that support your employee base. And once the organization has experienced that damage, it's really hard to work your way out.

“I tend to have an agnostic approach to the size of specific teams within my organization," she says. "I think of the function growing organically as it relates to particular needs. So if it became the case that we had extensive technical challenges, then I would expand IT. If we moved into a bigger space, I would think about whether we need to expand facilities.”

Holistic People Ops is agile because it’s not about filling open reqs to keep up with company growth or unthinkingly checking boxes on a to-do list. It’s about taking the broadest view of what makes a person’s work-life productive and healthy. As Guillory puts it: “It’s about context. Grouping multiple teams together under People Ops, or operating with the employee lifecycle in mind — it's all about getting the context necessary to make choices that put employees first.”

Lucia-Guillory_101RT.jpg

Patreon's Lucia Guillory is pioneering a new approach to People Ops that creates an end-to-end employee experience AND scales. Early-stage startups take heed.

A New Approach to People Ops That Puts Employee Experience First

Google. Apple. Dropbox. Twitter. If anyone has had a hand in helping build phenomenal teams at powerhouse companies in their prime, it’s

 At one point in her career, she admits she thought she was one of the best people in the world at creating amazing teams. That was, until an executive at Apple showed her how she’d been systematically undervaluing some of the most important people on her teams 

. Even worse, she’d not been living in accordance with her own personal humanity.

It was a big drink of water, even for someone who has become one of the greatest champions of 

, has built her career around creating bullshit-free zones where people love their work and working together. She’s seen it from every management vantage point: as a founder (Candor, Inc. and Juice Software), advisor (Dropbox, Twitter, 

), instructor (Apple University) and operational leader (Google). So what did the Apple exec say?

Inspired by her talk at First Round’s CEO Summit, Scott shares her epiphany about management — and the mindset and framework it takes to really build a kick-ass team, starting with deciphering the distinct attributes and incentives of high-performers.

There’s a lot of jargon to describe superior performers on teams: 10x engineer, sales wizard, growth ninja. “Superstar” and “rock star” are also thrown about liberally, but Scott is on a mission to reclaim them —not as labels for people — but to understand what mode people are in at any given point in time. “When I spoke with the Apple executive, she was trying to convey the difference between a person in superstar mode and one in rock star mode — terms which have been appropriated and have lost meaning. But when it comes to building teams, she felt it was really important to understand their distinct roles and needs.”

: the people on your team who are going to change everything; responsible for 

; a force — and source — of growth on a team.

: the people on your team who don’t want their boss’ job; very talented at their role and will keep doing and digging into it for years if a boss doesn’t screw it up; a force — and source — of excellence and stability on a team.

The distinction between superstar mode and rock star mode hit a chord with Scott. “When she told me this, I started to think about dozens of people who had worked for me. There was one guy in particular, Derrick, who was the first customer support hire at a startup I led years and years ago,” says Scott. “The customers loved Derrick — they just adored him. They’d send him homemade donuts! Forget about NPS score. The real test of a great customer success person is: Do you get baked goods in the mail? This guy got baked goods galore.”

People in superstar mode want a world they can change. Those in rock star mode seek a world they can stabilize. You’ll need both.

As the company grew, Scott naturally presented Derrick with an opportunity for a leadership role. “I asked him if he wanted to head up the support team. Derrick declined. He said to me, ‘No. My real ambition is to be a Broadway actor. What I really want is to be able to leave work every day at 5pm so that I can get to these off-Broadway productions that I do.’” says Scott. “And here is where I made the mistake. I wrote Derrick off. Right at that moment, I totally wrote him off. I went out and I hired the person I thought I was supposed to hire: this super-ambitious guy, who really didn’t care at all about customer support. What he really wanted to do is be the CEO. But that’s how you build a high-performing team, right? You over-hire.”

It wasn’t long before Derrick came charging into my office. “He launched into 

, saying that you need your architects to change the world, but you also need people to turn the lights on. For that, you need great electricians. He went on to say that you don’t want to hire a C+ architect, you want to hire an A+ electrician,” says Scott. “His analogy kind of made sense to me, but Derrick wasn’t leading the team — the other guy I had hired was, so I let him do it his way. Soon, the inevitable happened. Derrick quit, the homemade donuts stopped coming, NPS dropped and revenue followed suit.”

By not recognizing the contribution that Derrick was making to the team, Scott wasn’t building a high-performing team. “This instance made me realize that the way we tend to think about talent management gets it exactly wrong. Performance is a key factor — it’s important to distinguish excellent performance from low performance. That’s fine,” says Scott. “But often when we think about so called ‘talent planning’ — we use the word ‘potential.’ ‘Potential’ is 

The problem with “potential” is that when you mark someone as low-potential, you devalue your rock stars off the bat. “Instead, use the word growth trajectory. There’s nothing good or bad about a steep growth trajectory or a gradual growth trajectory. It just references different phases in our career,” says Scott. “When you look at your team this way, you identify five different modes that people can be in. They can be in superstar mode. They can be in rock star mode. Or on various paths to reaching or recessing from those modes.”

Scott has seen — and been a part of — some great teams, and they aren’t all superstars and rock stars. “If you look at this chart, the majority of people on your team, of course, will be doing good work, but not great work [noted by the yellow rectangle],” says Scott. “There are always going to be those puzzling people who ought to be doing great, but aren’t [orange rectangle]. Then of course there’s the people who you ought to be firing, but you’re not [red rectangle].”

Before you start to write your team into these buckets, let this one lesson sink in: don’t use a permanent marker. “I can’t stress this enough for managers. There are no permanent markers. Don’t write people’s name in a box and leave them there,” says Scott. “Don’t use this as a label for individuals. Use this to understand what a person wants at a moment in time. Remember, these are modes, not personality labels. Use this to understand what the dreams are of the people who work for you and to help them take a step in the direction of their dreams, 

This is not your grandfather’s talent planning. It’s simple and powerful. It should be done once a year.

Scott recommends that leaders work with their managers and teams to fill out this framework once a year. “Take the time to help every single person on your team grow in the way that they want to grow. I don’t know any leader who would disagree with that, but I know many who say they are too busy to take the time. So this is very fast,” says Scott. “Basically, all you need to do is create a shared document, get everybody who reports directly to you to put the names of their people in the box that best describes what mode they feel they’re in. Then calibrate. Then make a short, bulleted list of what you’re going to do for each person to help them grow appropriately.”

You’ll have different definitions of excellent performance, where steep growth trajectory becomes gradual growth trajectory or how these definitions apply to your company. “Use this opportunity to make sure you're all on the same page. Once everybody is calibrated, take a few minutes — and make sure everyone on your team does this — to write down some clear actions that you are going to do for each direct report. Do it for 

 of your direct reports, and see that they do it for 

 of their direct reports. And don’t mix this exercise up with performance reviews if you do performance reviews.”

The specific actions managers take for people in each of these modes not only clears the way for distinct employees to thrive, but also leaves a significant imprint on the company culture. Here’s how:

 For the people who are in superstar mode — those who are going to drive growth on your team — what you want to offer them is new challenges. You want to keep them learning. The last thing you want to do is squash them.

“Shortly after I joined Google, Larry Page told me a story about a time when he had a summer job and his boss gave him a project that was supposed to take him the whole summer. Larry, of course, had an idea of how he could get it done in 12 hours or less,” says Scott. “His boss said, ‘Oh no, no, no.’ He wanted to clip Larry’s wings. ‘We’re going to do it the way we’ve always done it. You have to spend the whole summer on it.’ It was a source of enormous frustration for Larry.”

When Page recounted this story to Scott, she could see how formative this moment was for him.

. No clipping the wings of the superstars — and that’s part of the reason why Google is such a great place to work I think,” says Scott. “They’ve done a really good job making sure that they’re helping people grow and define a path to promotion. They invest a lot in coaches. For smaller companies that maybe don’t have Google-sized budgets, it’s still possible find people who can teach your superstars new things and who are a few years ahead of them. It’s going to go a long way to help you retain them.”

Lastly, take note of the lifetime of superstars. “Make sure you identify a successor because you often can’t retain your superstars. They’re going to leave you better than they found you. Make the most of them while you get them, but don’t assume they are going to stick around forever because they often don’t,” says Scott. “Whatever you do, don’t confuse management and growth. Don’t automatically manager-track the people on a super steep growth trajectory. Often, especially for engineers, the last thing in the world they want to do is be a manager, but that doesn’t mean that they are not on a super steep growth trajectory. Make sure you’re giving the right kinds of challenges to the right people.”

. People in rock star mode want a pasture, not a runway. You’re not giving them a route to take off, but making space to settle into their work. What they need is freedom to do their superb work, not a path to promotion, which may distract them. “Read 

, a management book that reminds you of something that ought to be obvious but often isn’t: don’t promote someone into a job that they aren’t good at — if they are great at doing something, don’t promote them beyond their level of competence,” says Scott.

Also, there are times in life when people don’t 

 a promotion. “Don’t promote people when they are in rock star mode. This advice often gets met with enormous resistance. I know it seems like a punch in the stomach or like I’m telling you to punish your rock stars. I’m not,” says Scott. “Take the case of 

, Nobel Prize Winning poet. Before he could make his living as a poet, he was a clerk at Lloyd’s of London. His boss famously said, ‘I see no reason why, in time — in time, mind you — Elliot might not be an assistant branch manager. But you know what? T.S. Elliot didn’t give a shit about becoming assistant branch manager at Lloyd’s of London. What he wanted — if his boss sought to retain him — was to get home an extra hour early so he had more time to write his poetry. The same was true with Derrick. He wanted his current job, not a ‘bigger’ job.”

The choice of the manager here goes beyond just one rock star’s role. “Don’t create an organization that is so obsessed by promotion and status that it feels humiliating for the rock stars to stick around,” says Scott. “Set them up as internal experts. Your rock stars love their craft and are great at it. They’re better than anybody in the company and they can help bring the people in the middle along. They can help turn good performance into excellent performance from others. If they have an interest in teaching, by all means, let them teach.”

Finally, give them respect. “Don’t do to your rock stars what I did to Derrick. What I did to Derrick was not just bad for him. And not just bad for my team and the entire company,” says Scott. “But it was also bad for me. I wish I had known that earlier, because there came a time when I was the one on a more gradual growth trajectory. In 2008, I found myself in the following condition: short, old, and pregnant with twins. It was an extremely high-risk pregnancy. Right at that moment in my career, one of the board members at Twitter visited and asked if I wanted to throw my hat in the ring to become the next CEO of Twitter.

“Now, a year before this offer, I probably would have cut off my left arm for that opportunity, but now I wasn’t so sure I wanted it. I asked my doctor for advice. She said ‘Well, just ask yourself this question: what’s more important, that job or the hearts and lungs of your children?’ Easy question to answer, right?” says Scott. “Before you attack my doctor as an anti-feminist, let me just remind you: this was a high-risk pregnancy. There are plenty of women who are pregnant with twins, who can charge ahead without missing a beat. But that wasn’t my situation.”

Scott opted to stay at Google. “I felt great about the decision that I’d made. It was obviously right for my family and my life, but even then I was still sort of ambivalent about what that decision had done for my career. It wasn’t until I learned about superstar mode and rock star mode that I understood that it had been good not only for me, but also for my team at Google. My team got better opportunities and our work did great things for Google,” says Scott. “Jumping ahead, it was also good for me, because it was while I was on bed rest when I realized how much more I cared about management than cost per click. Instead of becoming the CEO of Twitter, I coached the CEO of Twitter. It gave me time to write 

 and eventually co-found a startup, Candor, Inc.”

The bottom line is that it works out, but only if you respect your rock stars — and keenly balance your need for growth with stability on your team. Early-stage and high-growth startups will over-index on superstars, but they’ll need to add in rock stars as they grow, guaranteed.

I’ve seen the wheels come off the bus more than once when teams don’t have enough rock stars. Balance growth and stability.

. So what do you do for people who are just doing adequate work? “I’m going to assert that there’s no such thing as a B-player. Nobody’s capable of doing 

 so-so work. Everybody’s capable of doing exceptional work,” says Scott. “Never write a human being off as mediocre. First you offer them 

 or good feedback — both praise and criticism. Give your rock stars the opportunity to teach them how to do exceptional work. Challenge those doing satisfactory work with ‘stretch projects’ that give them the chance to soar or fail. If they continue doing just adequate work, you’re going to have some hard conversations about finding them another role where they 

. Those in the upper left quadrant are people who ought to be doing great but are failing for some reason. “I call this the look-yourself-in-the-mirror quadrant. As a manager, this is when somebody else’s poor performance may just be your fault. You may have them in the wrong role. That’s the most common reason,” says Scott. “You may have given somebody too much too fast. Founders and CEOs often grow really fast in their careers and sometimes make the mistake of assuming that everybody else can do what they did. They may not be able to.”

In this scenario, ask yourself the following questions:

•Have you made expectations clear enough?

•Do you need to give these people clear feedback?

These questions should get to the heart of the issue. “Sometimes people just don’t get along with their boss. Are they having a personal problem that’s temporary that you can just help them get through? Maybe it’s just a bad fit,” says Scott. “Sometimes people just are not a good fit for a company.”

Low performance, gradual growth trajectory mode.

 There will be people who aren’t doing well and aren’t getting better. “What about these people? It’s not nice to these individuals to ignore their low performance,” says Scott. “They are capable of doing something great somewhere and it’s profoundly unfair to them and also everyone else on your team who is doing great work if you don’t move these people along. Just do it.”

The Best Type of Manager For High-Performers

One of the biggest mistakes that managers make with the people who are doing the best on their team is just get out of their way. “They know they’ve hired talented people, and they don’t want to micromanage them. So they just step aside so the high-performers can do their thing,” says Scott. “That’s like deciding that the best way to build a good marriage is to marry the right person and then avoid spending a single second with him. It would be like my calling my husband right now and saying, ‘I’m not coming home for dinner tonight or any other night for that matter. You’re doing a great job raising those kids and I don’t want to micromanage you.’ That’s not going to go over very well with him — or our family!”

Don’t do that to the people who work for you either. They want to work for you because they want to work 

 you. “Keep your top performers top of mind. Literally, top of mind — as in, in your thoughts. What you want to be is a 

. This is not just a abstract title, like ‘thought leader.’ It means approaching their work with curiosity and with an aim to be equals in discussing it. They know when they need to know more. You are thoughtful. And you are a partner,” says Scott. “From a reporting point of view, you may still be their manager, but, for these high-performers, you help manage their curiosity, not their work.”

If you’re not a thought partner, you may easily fall into two other buckets when you manage high-performers: the 

. “You obviously don’t want to be an absentee manager, but you also don’t want to be a micro-manager. Absentee managers lack curiosity. They really don’t want to know and the micro-manager, of course, pretends to know it all,” says Scott.

Reference this simple framework to make sure that you’re landing in the right place as a manager for your top people:

Building a kickass team starts with something incredibly simple, not a big company process, but something you already know how to do: get to know people at a fundamental human level. This is one of the most important — and also the most enjoyable — parts of your job as a leader. Understanding what kind of growth trajectory each person on your team wants to be on and what motivates them at work is a concrete first step.

“All too often people undervalue taking time to understand what motivates their people and the importance of knowing their long-term dreams. Instead of really understanding each person on their team, they have unsatisfying conversations about the next promotion So they fail to come up with career action plans that give context and meaning to their work,” says Scott.

 — life story, dreams, and career action plan — is a much better course of action. It’ll help you decode who’s in superstar mode, rock star mode and — most critically — who is changing modes,” says Scott. “Taken together, these three conversations, with each person who reports directly to you, will help you balance growth and stability so your team can scale. It’ll give meaning to your work, help build the best relationships of your career, and keep the baked goods from customers coming.”

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So you've heard of radical candor by now, right? That's just one of many tools you'll need to be a better boss, according to Candor, Inc. co-founder Kim Scott. You also must master the different modes of performance on your team — especially for your top people. Here's why.

Warning: This Is Not Your Grandfather’s Talent Planning

Imagine a colleague sitting across from you. She just got leveled over instead of being promoted into the role herself. She’s seething. For months, her manager wasn’t open with her about why she wasn’t considered for the role and what she needed to get promoted. Instead, he avoided having a difficult conversation and pushed it off, optimizing for his own comfort. And now his report has come to you, the head of people operations, seeking answers or a resolution. What do you say?

When you’re dealing with people’s livelihoods and their egos, tensions can run high, no doubt. But HR is also, in many ways, the beating heart of an organization; it’s the only department explicitly tasked with making every team member more successful. People ops leaders are in fact uniquely positioned to foster a culture of authenticity—a critical precursor to the agility successful startups demand.

 sees it. And as a human resources leader for startups big and small—from a four-year stint as Zynga’s Vice President of HR during a period of hypergrowth to her current role as chief people officer for 

—she’s navigated her fair share of gnarly performance conversations. Makalou also is the people ops expert in residence for First Round’s companies.

In this exclusive interview, Makalou looks at three of the toughest conversations an HR leader faces, and explains how to take them from adversarial to mutually beneficial. She shares tactics for catching the most challenging performance problems before they start. And she makes a plea for the patience and clarity that Silicon Valley too often lacks. Let’s dive in.

Managers, your lot is the easy and hard conversations. If you value your comfort over your team’s success, you are in the wrong job.

THE THREE THORNIEST PEOPLE OPS CONVERSATIONS

Delayed terminations. Companies outgrowing senior leaders. Compensation rumor mills. These challenging scenarios can perplex even veteran HR leaders. While it may sound basic, the key to all of them is to find the entrypoint to bolster relationships, because the harder the situation, the more challenging it is to find it. “I find that I get the best results if I come from a place of support and 

,” says Makalou. “I encourage anyone in an HR role—whether you’re the first people ops leader in a startup or a founder who’s pinch-hitting for now—to focus on building trust.”

What follows are three of the biggest challenges HR leaders face and the mindsets and tactics that will chip away at them:

THE CHALLENGE: You’ve known that things weren’t working out with a team member for over a quarter now, but avoided dealing with the problem. Now other people have noticed, too, and morale is taking a hit.

If you’re experiencing this one, take heart: “It’s very, very common,” says Makalou. Simply put, it’s hard to tell people they’re not doing well; most people dread that conversation. “Really seasoned executives need support to get it done, and get it done well. It’s even trickier for startup leaders, because no one really teaches a class on how to performance manage and potentially fire someone.”

Makalou recalls working with the CEO of a young organization who faced this archetypal startup challenge: Manager is hired on the basis of relevant experience, a strong resume and good interviews. Despite leadership’s high hopes, manager doesn’t get after it the way the role demands. CEO is slammed, so he puts the problem on the backburner. “The leadership team had a million things going on, as people in startups do, and so it didn’t become a priority to address this issue. It's also naturally something many avoid because it's a difficult conversation that could be confrontational.”

: One, because the underperformer was a manager, his reports grew disillusioned. Several had raised concerns and seen no changes. “You had people who were brave enough to say something about having a manager they were struggling with, which was followed with no action whatsoever. It was disenfranchising this whole other layer of the organization,” says Makalou.

Second, there was the impact on the employee’s peers. “They were left to think, ‘I'm working like crazy, giving everything I have to this startup, because that's what early-stage organizations need, and this person is clearly underperforming. Why are they still here?’”

Retaining an ineffective employee is never healthy for an organization, but it’s particularly dire for startups. Not only is there the risk of setting a dangerous standard at a time when you can’t afford slacking, every underperformer represents serious opportunity cost, too. “Founders are spread too thin. You’re dying for people to come and take over some of the millions of direct reports that you end up having. So when you get to the point that you’re hiring a layer to manage some of that stuff, it's really painful when one of those bets doesn't play out favorably.”

It’s a lot easier to avoid this scenario than to fix it. Makalou’s first piece of advice for navigating this conversation is to do everything you can to keep it from happening:

 Underperformance is often a matter of overstated—or misunderstood—experience. Mitigate that risk by defining expectations more explicitly than you think you need to from the moment you engage with a job candidate. Spending the time to write a well thought out job description helps - this is an area that many spend little to no time on. This is handy not just for honing in on the right candidate but it also forces you to really think about the full scope of the job and what skills and capabilities you need to find.

Once you’re getting serious about a candidate, it’s time to have an honest conversation about which expectations they’re comfortable with, and where they might need some extra support. And that’s a two-way street—don’t give into temptation to sugarcoat the role. If you know there’s a particularly difficult element of the job, you might even go so far as to spell it out.

I'm in the business of trying to make people feel comfortable being upfront, because my job is harder if they're not,” says Makalou. “And I need to do the same myself. The worst thing that can happen is that we're not forthcoming with each other—I misstate expectations about this job, you leave, and we’ve wasted each other's time.”

Onboard your people into your industry — not just company.

 You probably know the basic elements of good onboarding: integrating new hires into their team, introducing them to people who will have helpful institutional knowledge, sharing your company’s values. But it’s also critical that you teach them the ins-and-outs of the space you serve. “Don’t miss the opportunity to develop, right out of the gate, each new hire’s business acumen about what exactly the company does. It helps put everything else into context.”

So often onboarding is about institutional — not industry — knowledge. Don’t make that mistake.

At The Climate Corporation, for example, that takes the form of an immersive two-day class on the basics of agriculture. The average software engineer knows little to nothing about growing crops. But once they’ve gone through the exercise of running an imaginary farm—from buying a tractor to dealing with uncooperative weather—they are much better positioned to develop the products their end users need.

In other spaces, your training might be even simpler. Makalou was previously an HR manager for Andale, which developed auction-management tools for eBay sellers. “Munjal Shah, the CEO at the time, knew that people needed to get what we were doing as a company right off the bat, so he required that everyone sell something on eBay. It could be things that we had in the office. You didn't have to go find items, but you had to experience being a seller on eBay and what that required.”

 But the HR leader’s work is not done when hiring and onboarding are complete (or, really, ever). To spot performance problems before they erode team morale, you need to stay engaged and observant. In smaller companies, that might be as simple as making it to happy hour from time to time or swinging by people’s desks for casual chats.

As companies get larger, pay attention to the energy of any team integrating a new manager. 

One of the things I like to do is round up with the team and do new-leader assimilation,” says Makalou. “We get everyone together so they can ask questions of the new manager to get to know them. For me, facilitating something like that gives me a sense of the dynamics in the room.”

Ultimately, though, emotional intelligence is often your most powerful tool. You don't have to be an HR professional to know when you walk into a room and something's not right. It’s okay to weigh different people’s feedback differently, too. “It’s not that you want to read into everything people are saying. But if you’re doing a check-in and somebody who’s normally quite reticent discloses a little more than they normally would, listen to that.”

When you do catch wind of a problem, whether through your own observations or others’, sit down with the person in question right away. “Your first conversation doesn't have to be disciplinary, but it can be a really candid one where you say, ‘Look, I care about your success here, so I'm always going to be honest with you about what's going well and what's not. Part of that is to help you be successful, and part is to hear from you where you need support.’ I get the best results when I approach people from that standpoint,” says Makalou.

Realistically, though, it’s not always possible to avoid performance issues before they start. So what do you do when a more advanced problem lands in your lap?

Initially, Makalou recommends patience—which is hard to come by in a company’s early days. “I find that in Silicon Valley we're quick to give up on people. When you're in hypergrowth or you're in crazy startup mode, working more than you should, it can be really hard to take the long view on people. The default becomes: ‘I just don't have time for that.’”

Don’t forget: you hired this person for a reason. Patience, though, isn’t leaving a problem unchecked.

To diagnose the root of the issue—and look for paths to a solution—Makalou walks managers and CEOs through three questions:

Start with this straightforward query for two reasons: One, to get managers thinking in an exacting way as early as possible about where the employee is falling short. And two, because people ops leaders often have information to share that would help explain the dissatisfying performance.

“Not all information gets to the founder or CEO, as you can imagine. I might be able to add context that changes their point of view on whether this person is the problem or a different set of forces is acting on the situation,” says Makalou.

2. Is there another role in which this person could be successful?

“Hiring people is time consuming and expensive. If you could recast them into an existing position—now that you know more about them and their skill set—that's worth considering.”

This advice doesn’t just hold true for new employees; existing team members who are outgrowing —or burning out in — their roles may also be good candidates for an internal move.

3. Do you think that there's something we could do for or with this person that would help?

When it comes to performance improvement plans, Makalou is of the mind that they should be used as sincere tools for improvement—not just as a formality when the writing is already on the wall. “Performance reviews and performance improvement plans (PIPs) are tools to mitigate risk. I don't necessarily think that you should put everybody through that, because not everybody is high risk,” she says. “Is there a path to success, or are you feeling like you have to go through this process in order to terminate them at the end? If that's where you are, fast-forward to the end and avoid putting everyone through that process.”

In some cases, the question is less about can a person change and more if they want to. So if you’re not sure, ask. Be direct. Candidly address where their performance falls short, and give the employee the choice to work on it or not. “I usually say, ‘Look, if you still have the energy and are excited about this opportunity, we'll head down this PIP path. This is not a construct that we put in place so that we can fire you at the end,” says Makalou. “It is genuine effort to help you, to get you on a path to success, and you have our commitment to do that with you. But if you don't feel like you have it in you or you don't feel like you could be successful, door number two is a conversation about how to gracefully transition you out of the company."

If you're a startup's first people leader:

A New Approach to People Ops That Puts Employee Experience First

Warning: This Is Not Your Grandfather’s Talent Planning

A People Ops Veteran on Navigating the Gnarliest Conversations

This Company Retains 95% of Its Employees — Here’s Its Secret

The Only Onboarding Timeline You’ll Need: From Offer to First Friday

This is Why People Leave Your Company