Setting up the people function and training for empathy — Lambda School’s Mark Frei‪n‬

[00:00:00] In programs where over the years I've done the most like a successful deep development of people. It's almost always about catching them at a time when the work that we do in the workplace, leaving aside, let's say technical training, but the work we do in the workplace about showing up well and being a good manager or being a good teammate is just about being a better human being.

We're all in this journey know in our lives of, of trying to be decent people. And the best development in the workplace is often just about exploring what it means to be decent with each other. I know it sounds kind of silly, but it's about how do we just be good to each other work is very stressful.

Work puts us into weird situations where we feel competitive, where we might have politics creep in. If we're going to do development of each other, let's do a development in the way that justice decency and caring and generosity back into teammates and work places. And on that basis, you can make magic happen.

[00:01:01] Welcome to in depth, a new show that surfaces tactical advice, founders and startup leaders need to grow their teams, their companies, and themselves. I'm Brett Berson, a partner at first round, and we're a venture capital firm that helps startups like notion, roadblocks, Uber, and square tackle company building firsts through over 400 interviews on the review.

We've shared standout company, building advice. The kind that comes from those willing to skip the talking points and go deeper into not just what to do, but how to do it with our new podcast. In-depth you can listen into these deeper conversations every single week. Learn more and subscribe today@firstround.com

today's episode of the in-depth. I'm really excited to be joined by Mark Frye across this. Dear mark has gained so much experience in HR and leadership development, doing everything from running his own consulting company to teaching organizational theory as an adjunct professor. But for the last decade, he's been focused on serving as the chief people officer at venture backed startups.

In 2013, he joined return path, a company in the email marketing space in 2017. He signed on as chief people officer at InVision back when they were around 250 people, he spent the next three years setting up the HR departments that under his tenure grew the company to almost 900 employees and rolled out programs around performance management development, total rewards onboarding and people analytics in early 2020 mark joined Lambda school as the chief people officer and head of alumni programs as a really quick side note, several months back, our very first episode of in-depth was with Mark's exec team colleague, Molly Graham.

I definitely recommend giving it a listen. If you haven't. Now, our conversation today was really wide ranging. We covered everything from org design and our sites to employee feedback and career conversations. Since mark has spun up several startup people orgs. I was really curious to hear how he approaches the chief people officer role.

And he shared tons of interesting insights here from why you should match the employee experience to your company's competitive positioning, to why he thinks at its core, it's a data and analytical function. But in addition to sharing his broader people, philosophy and belief, that supervision is fundamentally about development.

Mark also gets really tactical. He gave examples of how to custom tailor your onboarding to your company's mission. Like how InVision has new employees that use the tool to design their own mock-up of a webpage. Even if they're in the finance department and inner discussion about hiring for empathy, mark shares the follow-up interview questions he uses to get around rehearsed answers to the classic.

Tell me about a time you failed question. He also delves into his unique approach to skip levels and the patterns he's seen after doing thousands of them across his career. And he reveals the one thing he never does in one-on-ones. There was so much wisdom in this one that it was really difficult to edit down.

I think that the conversation will be particularly helpful to both founders and early stage people leaders trying to thoughtfully scale this function. But there's also a ton of advice for just being a better people manager. I really hope you enjoy this episode. And now my conversation with mark, thank you so much for joining us.

I'm really excited for this conversation. You bet. I wanted to start our time together talking broadly about how you would describe your people philosophy and maybe how that weaves into. When someone asks you, Hey, what the heck is the chief people officer? And how do you know if you're doing an exceptional job and maybe put those two pieces together?

[00:05:07] So my people philosophy is almost always going to start with the strategy of the company and in many ways, building a great culture is about matching the employee experience to the competitive positioning. Um, of that company and the way that I've operationalized this in the past is you look at a company like envision where I spent a few years.

One of the things that defined a lot of the cultural work that we did was design and user empathy and envision, uh, is a leading design, um, platform. So we took a lot of the approach to use a research, user empathy, and design thinking. And we applied that to the ways in which we built the architecture of the people function.

And ultimately we use design even in the creation of the services that we launched internally for the employees. So one of the things that I always think about is how can. The people team slash HR function create an employee experience that matches what that company exists to do in the world. And there's things that I'm going to do.

Every single company that I walk into, if I'm in charge of the people function, fundamentally creating a great employee experience is really important to me, but also enabling a workforce that feels seen and heard and feels included. And finally, an employee experience for people feel developed. There's very good reason to believe that one of the things that people value the most when they're in a company is if they're growing, that's something that is in some ways is easy to do.

If you know how to do it. And it provides some of the most high spikes and engagement to people feel like they're learning. And 

[00:06:42] so let's build on a couple of things that you shared. The first is the idea of matching the people function or people architecture to the business strategy, and ultimately what the company is trying to do in the world.

Maybe talk about what that looked like. And you started to talk about this at envision and maybe contrast it with what it looks like at Lambda. I'm sure there's some overlap in terms of the impact the two companies want to have in the world actually, but they're 

[00:07:05] quite different. Yeah, absolutely. So at Lambda, and this is one of the reasons why I was so excited to come to Lambda is we're in the world to educate so things that we have leveraged here, as we start to get the people function up and off the ground is a focus on learning and a focus on both being learners ourselves in the company, but then also fulfilling our mandate to teach.

So on a wide range of topics, the way we're thinking about how we build. No, the architecture of the people function is how does it support continuous development of a group of people who are trying to help the development of thousands of future data, scientists and engineers. And it's a, it resonates really well because we're in the, we exist in the world to do that.

We exist in the world to help people be their best selves and to help people get a career in technology. So in many ways, and then in Austin, I'll read our founder and CEO said at an all hands that should apply equally to ourselves as employees and members of the community here at Lambda is how can we also, um, foster an environment where we're the best version of ourselves.

So it's not that the programming of building a people function in a startup is radically different company to company, but the emphasis and the things you hook the programs off of it can be really important because they're distinctive and ultimately talent. Becomes a critical, competitive edge. You want to leverage the way you think about your company as a way to think about talent.

Similarly, like years ago, when I was running my own consulting company, we had a client that was one of the biggest mining companies in the world. And safety was something that was extremely important to them for obvious reasons, but they were very competitive in the mining market on their safety record.

So when we were doing programs with them, even if it was learning about finance with the managers that we were working with, even if it was learning about how to give and receive feedback, we interwove aspects of safety and safety culture just to hammer home the values that that company had. 

[00:09:06] So if you sort of take this theme of continual learning, that's part of the whole ethos.

And obviously what, in the case of Lambda, the entire company is organized around. Obviously at InVision, you didn't hire people and say, well, we don't care about curiosity learning and development. So sit in your corner and just do your job, 

[00:09:24] but he's wanting to educate their employee basis, but I'm curious how the ethos or the goal of Lambda as a company impacts the way that you actually achieve 

Yeah, no, that's a fantastic question. So with Lambda, you think about what is the talent that we are bringing in to Lambda, to be part of the contribution here that we're trying to make in the world. We have people who are typical folks from a lot of other startups in terms of technology, backgrounds, and product backgrounds.

We also have a high number of people who have a higher education backgrounds or educator backgrounds, and some of the things that we're doing here that are different than what I've done in the past or the way in which we're rolling out programs with a focus on using people in the company. To help roll out training and development that we want to roll out.

It was a great one. I showed up here at Lambda and I think I was maybe my first month and I was looking around and asking some people on slack and otherwise, what are you doing in terms of supervisor develop on things like feedback. And I think I had at least half a dozen managers contact me and say, I'd love to be involved in how think about and roll that out.

So we have people who are on staff who are helping roll those things out to the rest of their peers. So we have particularly trainers that are already employees who have an experience and an interest in facilitation who are doing the facilitation for their peers. And that is something that wouldn't happen at every single company.

[00:10:54] You shared this idea of great employee experience, regardless of where you want to go. That's something that's super important to you. What does a great employee experience look like? 

[00:11:03] Everybody's going to point to companies that they feel have been great examples of doing this.

And I mean, a lot of people have heard of the way Netflix, for example, approaches this. And I mean, nothing against us, like I said, it looks like a minute, always has been a great company, but there's a famous Netflix PowerPoint about what they do to foster talent. And the problem is, is that, you know, company to company, you can't cookie cutter what they do to make their situation work compared to what we would do at Lambda to make our situation work different company, different culture, different value, scheme, different talent.

So there isn't a playbook that is recipe one, two and three that you can cut and paste from other companies it's really about figuring out what drives the values and the culture of the company in question, and then building an experience around that. I would say further, the most important thing is that employees ultimately feel they have a voice.

And feel that the company sees them and hears them. If an employee comes into a company and just feels like another employee, a number it's very difficult for them to ultimately have a great employee experience. So the design that's very consistent in the things that I, I tend to build when I go into a company are ways in which we can help someone feel connected to the mission and the values very early on and ways in which they can feel connected to each other.

And that throughout their experience, they feel like they are being seen and heard. If you can achieve that, then there's a lot of things you can do from there. If you can achieve that and people don't feel seen and heard, it's very difficult to build an effective employee experience. 

[00:12:37] Let's take each one of those interns.

So getting an employee connected to the mission and the values, can you share some stories, rituals, anecdotes that come to mind, maybe across a few companies in terms of this specific ways in which you did that. 

[00:12:51] One thing that for me is a fundamental component of the people tech stack, literally from month one, when I joined the company is a strong engagement platform and by engagement platform, I mean a way in which you're going to track engagement and solicit employee feedback, I've used CultureAmp now for multiple companies.

I've I think was one of the early adopters about 10 years ago, but it needn't be them obviously, but it's something that helps you. Get continuous anonymous feedback from your organization. And I say that it's not just the technology, it's the act of making that part of your fundamental tech stack and doing it with rigor and discipline the way I think about building the let's just call it the foundational level of people.

Organization is about the sources of data. So absolutely crucial is being able to get the voice of the employee. You can't get the voice of employee. You just go out and sort of ask people every once in a while. Um, either now of course, on, on soccer zoom or in the past to sort of in drive-bys in an office, you're not going to start to build this feeling of systematic data that's coming to you.

So you can't really design for a company if you don't have a good data source. So that's, that's one thing that. Fundamentally, I would recommend anybody who's going to stand up. A people function is to get their engagement data in order very, very quickly in terms of things I've done at Lambda, we've designed our first version of new employee onboarding and the things that we have, the, the folks who are joining encounter during onboarding and week one include, you know, being exposed to our company values.

But also, especially with some of our key senior hires, we ask them to be a student for a week. So you get through employee onboarding, and then we ask you to go and sit in the seat of one of our students for at least a week to really get a sense of what happens for our students. And that's something that obviously wouldn't happen in a lot of companies because we don't have that kind of system.

We can't toss them over to the customer side, but that's the best approximation. Similarly at envision, one of the things that we did during employee onboarding was we actually had the groups of people who are onboarding, use the envision product suite to design their own mock-up of a web app. And week one, even if they were coming into like the finance department or the HR team, and even if they would never touch the platform again, we wanted them to walk in the shoes of a customer.

So you can see the pattern. I mean, it's, can we really deeply empathize with those who the company impacts and if we can get them to, to feel what it's like to feel the experience on the other end of the company, that's going to translate very powerfully back into understanding what the company is all about.

So those are just examples of how we've tried to really, really hit very early and very deeply people identifying with how the company is different because ultimately company culture and company values, no matter what words you have, it's about the experience of those. That's unique to a company in question.

[00:15:49] there other examples of how you weave mission and values throughout the life of an 

[00:15:54] employee? Totally. So, I mean, I just touched on onboarding, but in other company environments, when you start doing rhythmic performance development and performance evaluation, one thing that I did at envision, and I would hope to do here at Lambda pretty soon as we sort of get everything set up is bake in literally the value statements that you have defining your culture and components of the mission and make them part of the way in which people are assessed on their performance.

Make it part of the way people are selected when it comes to new hires. We actually at Lambda, we already do have our values as part of our assessment criteria and our applicant tracking system and our ATS. So every candidate who comes through our recruiting and hits the hiring manager, and it hits the people who are screening that candidate have questions to fill out the key exactly to our values.

So, you know, one of our values is go for it. We want people who are just going to take risks, innovate, and try things out. So how does this candidate. During the point of hiring, do they show evidence that they can do that? Or are they a little bit more cautious? So if you think about making the values of live in a company, you think about adding them to every touchpoint of evaluation of succession, of the way in which you both develop and evaluate people.

If you weave them into all of those touch points, the values will really have strength and solidify around the culture. If they're just up on the wall and the missions that are up on the wall, they don't do a lot of work for you as a culture. And so 

[00:17:20] when you look at the values of InVision versus the values of Lambda, are they so different that the types of people that would thrive what's rewarded are just entirely 

I wouldn't say entirely different, but there's going to be differences at envision. We had a very, very strong design bent for obvious reasons. At Lambda, we have a very strong student band and we care that people are student obsessed, that they really care about the students. So while you could say both things are of value around being customer centric, There's different kinds of people that you might hire at envision.

We had a lot of people in who had a design background of some kind, even if they weren't properly a designer at Lambda, we have a bunch of people who have an education background of some kind, even if they aren't the people teaching the students for example, long, long before I became the people executive, um, I almost became a prof.

So deep, deep in my own background is an interest in teaching and learning and working with students. One of the main reasons why I was super interested to work with Lambda is I got to be in touch with that side of myself. Again, 

[00:18:26] you talked about connecting to the mission and the values, and you also talked about connecting to people or I guess, connecting to each other.

And so one of you spend a little bit of time talking about that and maybe some of the rituals that you use to make that happen, particularly in this environment where most of us are working remotely. 

[00:18:40] Absolutely. I think human connectivity is tantamount to having people feel like they're having a great experience at work and there's various ways to do that.

The thing that's really important to me is making sure that people understand that one of their most important roles, for example, as a supervisor, is ensuring their people feel listened to and make sure that people feel like they're empathized with. And it's harder over the screen. It's harder over zoom or over slack, but as possible, what it takes is a little bit of a focus on, uh, selecting for that when you're hiring and training for it at envision, during employee onboarding, I used to say, Hey, welcome to envision.

You know, you're about to embark on a, whether or not you've been working remote all your life or whether or not this is your first time. This is a challenging environment that takes a little bit more effort to punch through the two dimensional screen and connect with people. On the other end, you've got to start with an interest in getting to know your coworkers.

And lean into that. I would say the same thing is true of a working person. We want to be our whole cells at work. We want to be treated like a person, sort of our name first, our role second. And that just requires cultural reinforcement and it requires leadership reinforcement. So one of the things that I think I probably preach and talk about every single company I go in is how can leaders model empathy and how can leaders create places where their teams can feel like they're truly themselves.

And so how do you do that? Good question. Well, one is you need to hire for it. There are leaders who are very talented at this naturally there's leaders who aren't there's leaders, who don't care about it. And leaders who do I can help a leader who cares about this, but maybe isn't naturally gifted at creating a safe.

Environment for their employees get better at it. I haven't yet figured out a way to get someone who doesn't care about this to care. And the most important thing is practice. So almost, almost always within the first, say six to 12 months. When I joined a company I've already launched a management development series that I often start by leading myself.

And then when I get up to scale, I pass it on to somebody. If I'm able to hire a manager of L and D. But what fundamental to me is getting that first round of management training going where most of what we focus on is empathy. How we listen deeply to both each other, into our people, and you can practice it.

You can practice it in a whole variety of ways, but fundamentally what you're doing is you're having people slow down and listen, before they judge, as a friend of mine says, you, you can't be curious and judgmental at the same time. So how can I get you to stop your normal managerial mindset, which is all about judging and decisiveness to listen to someone and really get curious about them before you start jumping to the decision point, I can train for that.

I've seen people really blossom in that, but it does take commitment. We're 

[00:21:31] really interested in this topic. So can you share more if I were to be a fly on the wall and watch, let's say Mark's intro. To teaching managers, how to have their teams be seen and heard, what else would I be watching? Or what kind of content would you be sharing to help me as a person that wants to grow in this area?

[00:21:54] yet. I'll give you some very specific examples. So at Lambda, within the first six months, I had booted up my first management session with a number of managers here at Lambda. And I dug out of my really old. Chest of goodies, these videos that I recorded when I had my own consulting company, they're now coming on, boy, I don't want to say exactly cause that ages me, but let's just say it's a couple of decades.

Luckily there's definitely there, there were fielded pretty high fidelity. So they're still VHS. Excellent. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Thank you, Brett VHS. No, but they're, they're still digitized. And what I asked, some people that were working with me to do, I said, look, I'm going to record you. And I'm going to ask you to tell a story of when you were really blank with blank, being a strong emotion.

So we know what, tell us a story of when you felt really angry or tell us a story when you felt really sad or happy or, you know, when it doesn't matter. And what's really interesting. And this comes out of a research basis on emotionality, is that when people recount a strong emotion, they usually begin to feel it again.

Or at least they have to. Handle it again. So I have these videos of old colleagues of mine, narrating stories of when they felt in this case, I did to people who were narrating their anger, and you could see one of them in particular got angry, again, got worked up and the other who was much more in tune with her emotions, didn't get angry, but you could see her processing a little bit.

So Al and especially in a remote environment, I showed these videos to my. Alyssa Scarlet my management class. And I asked them to get curious about what they're seeing and to begin to offer explanations of what they see of these two individuals who recorded talking about the motions. And what I really do is, is focus on stopping them as soon as they want to judge.

So I remember even in the Lambda class, when we have great managers across the board and within that group, there were great managers who still could not quite resist the urge to start diagnosing and fixing. So, oh, I know exactly how to deal with this person. Uh, he needs to blank by biotech. Like, hold on, you're already to the, you know, I'm going to solve his problem before we even understand what might be the problem.

So let's back up a second and just talk about what we're seeing and what we're hearing. And sometimes I metaphorically talk about manager's ability to read emotions as a little bit, like training yourself, to be Somali, like learning, to taste wine or learning to taste something. You get a whole new language about it.

Like, how is that anger? Is that just frustration? Is that person in touch with their emotion right now? Or is it to seem like they're not? So you're developing a little bit of a vocabulary and that vocabulary helps you step back, not judge. And if I can start to get people to really work that muscle, the curiosity before judgment, the listening before.

Uh, developing an action plan. I know I can get them down a road where they become amazing at empathy with their team and amazing listeners who will create very safe, transparent, and environments for people feel seen and heard. 

[00:24:50] Are there any books or articles that you share as people are developing 

I like Bernie brown stuff. It's very accessible. And her Ted talk stuff is both famous and very good in terms of books. There's a lot of things Goldman's work on EEQ is one that's standard and a very strong piece of work. I think the thing I probably fire around quickest is Bernay brown talks on empathy and listening that I just think are so compelling, not just because of the content, but how she tells stories.

She's an amazing storyteller. So that's one that I would give a, a, an easy, strong thumbs up on 

[00:25:26] one thread I wanted to pick up. The, you talked about a few minutes ago is the simplest place, or the place that you tend to start is in the hiring process and hiring for this. And you said you don't necessarily only hire people that are exceptional.

At having their teams feel seen and heard, but it's something that they have to care about. So if I'm on a loop and let's say you're interviewing me, or I'm watching you interview someone what's going on in the interview, maybe what are the questions you're asking? Or what are you looking for? 

[00:25:49] What you would see or feel if you, if I was interviewing you, Brett would be, you probably wouldn't know unless you have been through a lot of interviews of this kind that I'm looking for, evidence of this, rather, you would find that I try to get us into a conversation very quickly.

And by that, I mean a natural conversation. So trying to get to a point where rather than feeling like you were onstage to do an interview, instead, we're just having a really. Good back and forth conversation. And some of the elements of that conversation would include questions that ask you to self-assess yourself, both your performance, maybe a little bit about your career history, maybe about things you learned by succeeding.

Maybe some things that you learn by failing or failing and trying again. And I remember very specifically when I had a hand in designing a sales recruiting process, we baked in a set of questions that were specific to failure and good SAS. Salespeople are people who are going to have a lot of confidence, but I also wanted to see evidence that those people were capable of self-assessing with humility, that I tried this thing, it didn't work, it failed.

And then I had to pick myself up and try again, or I just had to learn from it. And you will see people if they are able to pick a story. Be authentic on what they learned in their, in their struggles and learning it. You know, you have somebody who at least is capable of being humble. If they're humble, they're almost certainly going to be empathetic or capable of empathy.

If they are effectively incapable of talking about things that they might've done wrong. So it's a warning sign, at least for me, the way 

[00:27:25] that you phrase the question or structure it, that helps you get to truth there. Meaning like what I find is, is when somebody is preparing for an interview, Everyone has their failure story ready in the back of their head.

Tell me a time that things didn't go your way. So obviously the interview can be gamed and one of the foundational problems with traditional interviews, but curious to understand more about how you poke and prod to sort of get that information. 

Today’s episode is with Mark Frein, the Chief People Officer & Head of Alumni Programs at Lambda School and former CPO at InVision. As we dive into how to set up this essential startup function, Mark shares advice on everything from org design and onboarding, to development, skip levels, and hiring for empathy.