Getting startup employees to stick around & learning from couples therapy — Flatiron’s Alex Buder Shapiro

EP.32 Alex Shapiro

Alex Buder Shapiro. Alex is the chief people officer at flat iron health, a company that focuses on accelerating cancer research and improving patient care. Alex first joined flat iron in 2016 after an eight year stint on Google's people, operations team, where she supported leaders and global teams, as they approached org design, performance management and incentives.

Before her promotion to flat irons executive team this past March Alex previously ran the HR business partner and employee relations team. As the company scaled rapidly. I really enjoyed today's conversation because we explored so many different facets of what it means to both be a people leader and a long tenured employee at a fast growing startup.

We kick things off by talking about an area where people leaders tend to spend a lot of their time. We kick things off by talking about an area where people leaders tend to spend a lot of their time helping others resolve interpersonal conflict. Alex talks us through the pattern she's seen across her career, including what's at the root of communication issues and the heuristics.

We can lean on to reframe our perspectives. From why she loves borrowing techniques from the world of couples therapy to practical tips for deescalating conversations. I really loved the ideas she shared here. We also touch on the challenges of getting employees to stick around. Long-term at startups from hiring your own boss to navigating tough career conversations.

Alex shares, helpful advice. As well as more about her own journey, rising through the ranks from IC to executive at Flatiron. Her experiences mean that she's also seen the growing pains that come with scaling firsthand things like the challenge of selling your new role with an elevator pitch when you first join or the danger of locking into people, processes and frameworks too early.

Obviously there's tons of takeaways here for people leaders at companies of all sizes. But I also think managers and leaders in any function will pick up several really great lessons. I really hope you enjoyed this episode. And now my conversation with Alex first, we're super excited to do this. So thank you for 

Alex Buder Shapiro: [00:03:58] joining us.

So happy to be here. This is a really important resource. I think for a lot of our company, we have been an avid reader of the review, and many people love the podcast as well. 

Brett Berson: [00:04:10] One of the areas I thought we could maybe start talking about is some of your ideas around communication and resolving conflict, which I think sometimes it's maybe a little bit under explored from a people perspective, but I think.

Is the core of the way that we relate, connect and understand each other. And one of the things that you have worked on is this idea of being able to hear and coach the same conversation from different angles. I thought we could use that as a jumping off point to explain what you mean by that and some of the things you've learned.

Alex Buder Shapiro: [00:04:40] Absolutely. So when I transitioned to flat iron, which was about five years ago now, and the company was around 230 or so employees, my role was primarily working with our leadership team and emerging leaders and managers within the company. Well, what I hadn't had the opportunity to do coming from a really large environment was basically get to talk to every single person in a conversation about what they felt like had happened in that conversation.

And some of that was just size and scale, right? We weren't that big. We weren't talking about that many individuals. And so when a conflict happened or a disagreement, everyone would seek out my thoughts on what had happened. And by the end of the day or the week, I'd heard the same story from three or four different individuals

and that was this light bulb moment for me around communication, because essentially I heard three or four different stories, even if it was all the same conversation and it got my wheels turning. Why is it that this conversation has been perceived and portrayed in so many different ways where that led me was really into research around cognitive heuristics and how we process information.

And so for folks who aren't as familiar. Your brain is taking in millions and zillions of data points at any given time and cognitive heuristics or the shortcuts that it's using to process all of that information. So your brain needs to sort through that and decide what's relevant and decide what's salient and figure out how to take away a reasonable amount of information, and then move on to its next interaction.

And every individual is filtering any given experience through their own set of heuristics and anchoring on information that might match some of the thoughts they had going in. And they're seeking. We often talk about something called a confirmation heuristic. They're seeking out the data points that validate the impression that they have. Or they've practiced a conversation, and so that is the more recent information that they have in their mind. And so in their mind, that's what transpired, even if they didn't end up making all the points. And so I'd get these three or four individuals coming back to me and saying, oh, this conversation did not go like I wanted.

And here's what happened. And I had this moment. Ah, but I can see what happened in this conversation because I've now heard that story from every angle. And maybe I can both coach the specifics of the conversation, as in ask some of the right questions to play through what did happen, but maybe I can also start to generalize some of those learnings so that I have my own toolkit of questions that I ask.

Even if I don't have the benefit at every single conversation of talking to everyone involved, maybe I can apply some learnings from this experience. And think through what are the questions that I ask and how do I help resolve conflict or bring things to more effectiveness just based on these insights and these learnings.

So I can share a little bit more about questions that I ask her, things like that. So, first of all, I always try to get people as much as possible to anchor on what was actually said in the conversation. It probably is something that we do very intuitively and without ever questioning ourselves. But you'd be surprised how many people actually, they put things into their own words. And then the more that they retell it, they actually forget what was said. You'd hear someone say, oh, this person said that's never going to work. And I think, huh, that other person has never. Spoken like that that's not their language, but you've probably put it into your own words. And so bringing a person back to like, can you walk me through the points?

Can you walk me through what was said? Not just your interpretation, but can you walk me through what happened in that conversation? And then once you've grounded the person in that you have an opportunity to say your interpretation, very plausible could be exactly what happened, but is there anything else that could have been meant by that?

Were there any other things the person could have been referring to? Or could have been solving for? Is there any other reason the person might've felt that way? and just starting to open the person's aperture up a bit to consider what are the other things that may have been happening? It starts to weaken their resolve, that they know exactly what happened and they have the interpretation down pat, and they start to wonder, like, I don't know, maybe I don't feel as confident or maybe I jumped to an assumption.

And then, so I would say, what else could they have been solving for? And then as the person's wheels are turning, we basically often would come up. Maybe not a multitude, but several different things. It could have been that the person really wanted to own it themselves, but it also could have been that they were really concerned this other problem would emerge. If I was the one driving it, there starts to be some amount of reasonable person principle. If this person is coming at it from a reasonable place, there might be some other things that could have happened. 

And so that I started saying. How would you test out that theory? If the person's not ready to meet you halfway that's okay. You don't have to put yourself out there yet, but is there a half step that you could take a question you could ask or a suggestion you can make? and then you see what kind of response you get. And then that will help you learn. How much is the person actually doing what you originally thought that they were doing versus how much have you interpreted what the person is doing through your own lens and through the way you see the world and asking that clarifying question, it helps you to actually see.

Could have been occurring. And that's what I just started to get to do all the time. And it was so cool. Cause you have this bird's eye view of these interactions and people would come back and say like, oh yeah, it turned out that that person didn't need this thing at all. And I think great. I kind of knew that because I had talked to them afterwards, but it doesn't do any good if I know it, you have to know it and you have to learn how to work through it.

Yeah. 

Brett Berson: [00:10:05] This is one of my favorite topics, which is the story we tell ourselves about a situation or someone else may be reflective of reality, or it might just be a story we're telling ourselves. Absolutely. And it's often at the root of potential conflict and a whole host of other things. And this both exists in the way in which we interface with one another.

But it's also the way that we think about our work or more broadly, our company, you were sort of sharing questions to ask yourself to help increase the likelihood that the story you're telling yourself is in fact, a reflection of reality. Are there other things that you've found are useful for people to keep in mind or to increase the probability that those two things are well aligned?

Alex Buder Shapiro: [00:10:49] So I think I mentioned a little about the reasonable person principle, which I, it's not a principle I invented, but it's a worldview that I fully endorse. I roughly believe that most people have the best of intent. And they have a strong desire to get to an outcome that is good overall and probably good for them, but also just good and right for the company and the organization and the people involved.

And so for me, anchoring yourself on that idea that I think we're all roughly working backward from the same end goal at the early days of a company, it might be success or profitability or the impact you can have on patients in the case of Flatiron, if you're starting with this reasonable person principle, which is that we are more aligned than we believe we are at what we are solving for in the end.

And then you work backwards to understand, well, why is it that that person might be solving for this thing in a different way than I am solving for it? What might motivate them? What problems might they be solving for? What principles might they be using to make their recommendation? I just think that you end up finding so much more areas of commonality in that assumption of positive intent and that assumption that people really do want at the end of the day for things to go well.

You're building a company from scratch. And I think if you can remember that everybody here wants that company to end up at its best. I think it helps to deescalate some of what happens in these conversations very quickly. It helps to reframe what another person might be pushing for advocating. So I use that one a lot too.

Brett Berson: [00:12:31] Do you find that there are times where that doesn't work? 

Alex Buder Shapiro: [00:12:34] Well, I think it doesn't work in the sense that sometimes people are so rooted in either the problem that they are living in. So for them, the salience and what I like to call the availability heuristic of what challenges they're up against, those are so heightened in their mind that the idea of any amount of trade-off feels uncomfortable.

It's harder than to say, like, yes, we all want the same thing, but you're not taking seriously the challenges or the problems of getting there. It doesn't work as much. Um, and that's where I think you start to employ things like first principles and how are we going to make this decision and what are the facts that we are using to drive the outcome we are at?

And I think that similarly, if you're not really aligned on where you're going. Or what that end state is beyond something like success or profitability. Those can mean very different things or have very different time horizons than if you haven't started with that begin with the end in mind, then you're going to make a different set of trade-offs.

So much of life and work is ultimately about trade-offs. And so if you don't know where you want to end up and you don't know some of the guiding factors that get you there, then even the most reasonable person with the most positive intent, they're going to get somewhere different than you are based on the available information that they have.

Are there 

Brett Berson: [00:13:53] books that you've read that have informed your ideas around 

Alex Buder Shapiro: [00:13:56] this? You know, I have to be honest. My favorite things to read are not in the HR or leadership space. I really enjoy reading about couples therapy books, and I really like a specific method. The Gottman method. And I think that in general couples therapy has just seen a lot of these techniques employed for maybe a longer period of time.

So there's just a lot more literature and material out there around how do you reframe a question or how do you put things within the perspective of yourself versus another? So that's probably where I do most of my reading. If at all, I'm probably more of like in general, a pattern recognition gal. What energizes me the most is to.

Digging in and trying to find commonalities with what I've seen before. But if you have books, I would love the recommendation. 

Brett Berson: [00:14:44] The one that touches on this probably the best is nonviolent communication. 

Alex Buder Shapiro: [00:14:47] Add it to the list. 

Brett Berson: [00:14:49] It gets at this idea that we're constantly telling ourselves stories and that may or may not be a reflection of reality.

One of the best examples for me is always, you know, you're meeting with someone and they're 10 minutes late. And in one scenario you were trying to get something done and that 10 minutes was hugely valuable to you. And so you got the thing done and now you can go to the meeting. You're actually thrilled that it started 10 minutes.

Another one is that you were sitting there for 10 minutes and the story you're telling yourself as this person's an asshole. They don't respect my time. They don't respect me. They think they're more important than me, the same behavior that happened to you, but you're processing it in entirely different ways, based on nothing it has to do with the actual individual.

And the book really explores these ideas, which I just think is profoundly important into your point in every facet of life. In your exploration of couples, books, and couples therapy and how couples can build thriving relationships. Are there other concepts that you've picked up that you find yourself applying all of the time?

Alex Buder Shapiro: [00:15:57] So I think the interesting thing for me about couples therapy is that it presumes that both individuals have at least an initial commitment to be together. And so where I like to tease out some of the application is workplace relationships are so interesting because as much as we can do in an interview process, we still learn most about the people that we are working with once you get there.

And so one of the things that's interesting for me about couples therapy books is that they ground a lot in, what did you see in the beginning? What was it that brought you here and why does that drive the work that you're doing in the session or in the dialogue? And for me, that is the translation of first principles that you will see now, I think govern a lot of how companies end up working.

So some of the strategies that I've seen are actually, you know, how do you kind of return to what's core and essential, and sometimes that's easier to do. In conversation using some of the tactics I've read about. So what drew you here in the first place? What were the things that you most saw in the first place?

Sometimes it seems kind of funny for folks or at least like when I first started asking some of those questions to people, one person even said to me, Oh, gosh, this is like couples therapy. And I was like, actually, yes, that is exactly what I am doing right now. I am trying to improve the relationship dynamic that you have.

And I don't have a ton of literature on how to do that in the workplace. I think there's honestly been an explosion in the past five, 10 years in this space, but especially when I first started really getting energized by this, I would have to just name for people. Yeah. This is a relationship. And if you think about the tropes of couples therapy, even if it's just framing something as from yourself and not as a fact, that's going to work really well in this conversation as well.

So I'm not sure that they were anything that was unique or revolutionary, but I actually think contextualizing what it means to actually be in a relationship with somebody into a workplace dynamic and understanding that the sheer amount of time that you're going to spend talking to that other individual, well, might in some weeks outpace that of your spouse or any other individual in your then I think returning and grounding to what brought you there in the first place and bringing yourself in as that individual.

I think that becomes really useful. 

Brett Berson: [00:18:13] One of the things that's so funny is that there's often these conflicts or issues or frustrations or dissatisfaction at work. But what we forget is that most people in every other facet of their life have the same thing. Statistically, half of marriages fail. So most people or a meaningful percentage of people are not in functional, healthy relationships.

And so it's interesting how we often separate these things, but it's no surprise that if half of marriages fail, then there's going to be a lot of issues or angst or dysfunction in the workplace. And a lot of times I think we're more harsh or less forgiving in our professional context than we are at times in our personal context.

But at the end of the day, it's, we're all coexisting with other people. We seem to forget how interlocking those things are and not even bring yourself to work, or if you have issues at home, how does that come and show up at the workplace, it's more just these concepts of communication. How do we work through things together that are probably nearly identical, but we don't see them that way.

Alex Buder Shapiro: [00:19:12] Right. That is the heart of what I feel like I do for a living. If people could communicate effectively together, we'd have world peace. We'd have a lot of things. Maybe not world peace. I sometimes joke, why do I have job security? I have job security because people just inherently tend to misunderstand each other.

And I believe that the things that will get us to the place of engaged and effective workplaces are really the same things that would get us to world peace, too. It just so happens that no one's entrusted me with that yet, yet. Instead I have my own little micro universe that I get to try to make the best place possible.

Brett Berson: [00:19:47] You're own civilization, switching gears a little bit. I thought it would be interesting to talk about long tenured employees at a startup and the different pitfalls or ways in which that ends up working and. Because you've been at flat iron for a long time since the early days. And I'm sure you've seen a lot of people come up and a lot of people leave over time.

I was interested in kind of your reflection on when, when someone is at a startup for five or six years and it goes through rapid growth and they're still there and it's working well. What are the conditions or what's unique about what the company did or that person. That makes that work. 

Alex Buder Shapiro: [00:20:36] It's a great, I actually think I saw it at Google too.

Not that I would have ever called us a startup, but from when I joined to, when I left, we also grew about four or five X. I think there's a lot of expectation alignment that has to happen for it to work really well. And when I say that, I mean that the company's growth is aligned with where the employee wants to go in terms of new amounts of impact or challenge or personal opportunity. And so just to put some more specifics around that, there are some people who really enjoy early days of building something from scratch, and once it needs to be scaled or maintained, or once it needs to be sustained in a way that other things can be built on it, that doesn't feel as energizing for them, both in terms of what they do, but in terms of how they see themselves, so it conflicts with their identity. And where I've seen long tenured employees really enjoy flat iron is where they see that each time you master one challenge, it unlocks a new incremental challenge. And then for them it's like they can stay put and continue to have a bigger hairier thing to solve and see their own career grow from that.

I think that's actually very true of my own career and my own expectations in terms of the evolution over the years. 

Brett Berson: [00:21:58] So if a CEO is coming to you and saying, we're growing really quickly, we want to create an environment where our early employees can thrive for many years. What advice would you give them or how do they set up the system that increases the probability that what you just said actually happens 

Alex Buder Shapiro: [00:22:16] a huge amount of it is communication.

This will be my broken record breath. The whole time we talk, how you talked about the expectations with the person from the day that. So do they think that they are joining to do exactly what a company is doing at that moment? Do they think they are joining this aspirational end state? Or do they think they're a part of getting it from here to there?

I think if an employee doesn't think that it is their job to create the reality that they want to live in, then there's going to be misalignment because the reality that they're in right now is going to change and the end state may take a really long time. And so they need to feel really bought into the idea that they want to get from here to there.

And they want to be that person every step of the way who sees things change. As a result of whatever has been accomplished to date. So I think again, from a communication standpoint, if they feel like the job that they're doing today is perfect. Then if that's hard, cause that's going to change. And if they feel like the job they're doing today is not right for them, but maybe one day it will be, then that's hard because we don't know the future.

And so we don't know where we're going to go, but if they feel like for a certain period of time, I have visibility into the types of activities I'll be doing. And then if I'm successful at those things that will unlock a new set of things that I get to do and so forth. And so I think you have to both design your recruiting process with that incremental evolution in mind.

And then you have to think about once a person gets to the company, how do you follow through on that? So how do you keep a fairly open dialogue around what the person is looking for expecting and interested in? And I think so much of it is the conversation with the manager. I think there are frameworks up the wazoo, but it doesn't make any difference if they're not followed through by a pretty active dialogue.

So I think from a CEO standpoint, you can create that culture where it's okay to talk about things that aren't happening yet, or things that a person wants that might not happen. I think the long-tenured employees who feel really energized after having been there for awhile, they've pulled through the threads of those conversations year after year or change after change, they've accepted where some of those things won't happen, but they've continued to see that the company's success is their own success and that the more that they work towards something that's right over all the more, it would create a new ability for them to impact something at that next level for themselves as well.

Brett Berson: [00:24:44] So when you think about. Communicating in a very high quality way around this. Can you think back in the last couple of years, maybe a conversation you had with someone where you thought you did a really good job of this, and what did that look like? Or what were the contents of that conversation 

Alex Buder Shapiro: [00:25:01] as an individual leader or for me coaching another organizational leader.

Maybe I'll start with coaching another leader. I think one of the things that's really interesting for me is how much people feel the need to like what they are currently doing. And so when I've thought about the contents of a conversation that opened up, what are your expectations? Some of it had to start with the permission in that given conversation to not like things that you are currently doing.

Sometimes that has to start by creating some shared vulnerability, but sometimes that can just be, we're not solving for tomorrow in this conversation. And I appreciate that you understand that I don't have a magic wand or a crystal ball. And so if there are things that you don't like, that doesn't mean that they're going away, but let's have this conversation based at least a 10% more aspirational way. I think that's like really core to the beginning of the conversation. Otherwise people often come in and they just say, oh, well, this is great. And that's great. And I want to do more of the same, one thing that I like. So that permission in the very beginning to be that 10% more aspirational, that's like a very starting point of it.

And then I think some of it is this idea that the conversation itself is really rooted in active listening and that the manager has to be willing to hear what the person is saying. Play back to make sure that they understand it. And then pull on some of the threads and say, like, in this example that I'm thinking of in my head, For example the person actually needed to line up two of the statements that the person was making like, Hey, I know you want to have more ownership and drive these things forward, but I also know that you find it sort of draining to be the single accountable leader on that.

And those two things don't have to be in conflict, but they can be. So I want to line up those two statements for you and. What is the energizing part of owning it? That doesn't exist for you as much, if you feel like you're the only point of accountability and play those things back. That's active listening for me because I think a lot of times managers want a template of questions that they can ask in advance — and the conversations will feel really formulaic as a result. You know, what are the things you like and what don't you like? And then what if we did more of that thing and less of this thing. But I think that if you're not digging in on what the person is giving you and using it to hold the mirror up in that conversation.

So usually when I'm coaching, I say like, I don't want to tell you too much in advance, but I want to tell you to listen out to where there are divergences and what a person is giving you, or throwing out strongly held notions that need to be unpacked a bit more. A person might say, I want to be a people manager that comes up in a lot of conversations.

And if you don't spend a bit of time on why that person wants to be a people manager and is that driven from reasons that are within control or out of control, and you don't get the opportunity to go that next order deeper than I think you end up as a manager coming out of the conversation with your own confirmation bias of like, okay, I got exactly what I needed out of that conversation and I know exactly what to do, and it might not match up with what the employee hoped that he, or she would get to say during that conversation.

So again, thinking back to this one that I have in my mind, I think what had had happened in the past is that the employee had prepared herself to give certain data. And when they weren't coming out organically, I don't think she really had told herself in the past that nobody knew what those things were.

And so it was really an art of, Hey, is there anything you wish I'd asked or you had wanted to say, or that we didn't cover today? When I'm hearing back from you from this conversation is that you want more of. But without this. So we need to think about a way to disperse this and if I go forward and make that happen, like I want to make sure that actually matches what you were hoping to get out of today's conversation.

And so that for me is roughly how I often coach on 

Brett Berson: [00:28:57] that. That's great. I quite like this conversation rapidly scaling startups with an eye towards early employees and their life cycle as the company grows and you're getting. If you think about the three or four patterns that come up. One of the ones that I noticed that happens all of the time is you're a 30 person company.

And let's say you have a marketing manager. And she's doing a fantastic job. You're then rapidly scaling to 150. You open a rec for a VP of marketing. And this person says, I want to be the VP of marketing I've contributed in this way. And they don't have the competency to do that at that given point in time.

And what tends to happen most of the time is they get hugely de-motivated and they end up leaving the company where the ideal scenario, at least for in the eyes of the company, maybe not in the employee is that they continue to have an impact in their area. And so they're a marketing manager. They do that.

You hire a great VP of marketing above them and everybody co-exists and it's all kumbaya. So that normally tends to be less often than that happens. And so I'd be interested. Are there ways that increase the probability that that is possible? I assume it's related to some of the concepts you were just sharing.

Alex Buder Shapiro: [00:30:04] Yeah. And if you want, I'm probably that success story. I can even tell you my own personal story and those moments for me, I joined Flatiron in 2016 as the company's first HR business partner and within about a year, it felt evident to myself and some of the other leaders on the people team that we needed, chief people, officer.

And we were all roughly around the same leveling, definitely different expertises amongst us. And we actually drove that search ourselves and hired in a chief people officer ourselves. And then you can of course, fast forward, three years later when she was ready to move on for her next thing, it. By the time that I felt that I was ready and I guess others felt that I was ready.

That would be the more accurate way to describe the chronology of events. But if I think back to why did that work? One, I think there was so much openness around what that role needed to have. And really honestly, the ability to provide input into that process. I have seen a trend in certain companies where there is like an external leader plopped on a team for lack of a better way to say that.

And I think that really knowing how to engage and bring in the team on the. In a way that recognizes that there is something genuinely awkward about hiring your own manager. But I think that the input of the team being solicited and reflected in the process feels actually like it's a really critical self-awareness moment for the leaders of that team.

So in your example, Brett, you've got that marketing manager. And what you didn't tell me is he or she is awesome, but how awesome did he or she thinks they are, how much does that person understand their own path, but also their own gaps. And by participating in soliciting the input of that individual, about where they're looking to grow or where they're looking to develop, is there an opportunity to focus on what this new hire could bring to the table that they genuinely don't have. And I'm not saying you use it against the person. Like they give you their development areas. And you're like, yep. That's why you're not ready for the role. But I think that that conversation and that dialogue of what that next order level is that's needed.

Where this person is not just being hired for the company to be able to grow and develop, but for them as an individual as well., like I think for me, and it's a little bit different in that I actively sought out wanting us to bring on a chief people officer. But I think that for me, some of it was, Hey, if you ever want to be a chief people officer, wouldn't it be great to get someone in here who can as much show the company what is needed as show me and my peers, what that looks like and what good feels like.

I think that by including the team and having them. Participate in that process, you're able to actually highlight that the person's in part being hired to develop them, not just to build out what the company needs. When 

Brett Berson: [00:33:07] you reflect on your own journey. Are there other things that flat iron did or that you did that contributed to this long tenured path all the way up to the top spot in your function?

Alex Buder Shapiro: [00:33:24] I think the biggest thing that flat iron did at least. For me, it was care about the work that I was doing. And maybe, I guess I had a hand in that in terms of helping people to understand it, but I honestly think that a huge part of. Opportunity is continual investment. And so for me, I think it didn't bother me as much to not have a top seat at the table.

When I knew that the role that I did have was valued and had impact. And then I was able to drive the type of work that I wanted to drive from where I was sitting. For example, This is sort of inherent in the way that the people team operates. But in other teams I'll ask what is the role that we are carving out for this other person?

Where's their sphere of influence or their platform for impact. And how is that materially their own? 

Brett Berson: [00:34:11] One of the things you just mentioned is helping people understand the value of your work. What does that look like? Or what did you do to help people understand. 

Alex Buder Shapiro: [00:34:23] Oh, my gosh, Brett, I have to tell you, because I often say this when we bring in like new specialists or people who are building out new disciplines, part of it is just steeling yourself for like three, sometimes six months of sales.

Because I had come from an organization from Google where everybody knew what the job was. And every time I moved into something new at Google, it was. A little bit of a benefit of the doubt. Of course, you're here in, like, you might do the job a little bit differently than the last person, but here you are.

And then I start at flat iron and Zack as a co-founder who is sort of managing the people function. And a few of the leaders that I met in the interview process really persuasively convinced me that they understood what the job was. Sold me on like, okay. There's value of coming to an early company. And then I show up and most people are, I have no idea what you do.

And also by the way, I think that I can do what you're doing myself and better. So I don't really know why I'd ask a new person to get it involved. And so, so I think the first three to six months were what's your elevator pitch, right? This is ultimately about helping people to understand. And then the other was what are the unmet needs?

And I give this advice to specialists when they start all the time, you don't unfortunately get to just come in and assume that people know not just what you do, but want you to do it. You have to look for the places where there is a space or an opportunity or something that isn't being done and start there and build the credibility and then come back and say, so for me, It was in the communications and change management around when new teams were being formed.

That's where I noticed everybody is doing really foundational organizational design work all the time at Google. What we used to do, like once a quarter, you're doing once a week at a small company, what is this person's role and responsibilities, where do they report? How do I change their focus areas, but how do you communicate about that and how do you make sure that people are informed and brought in and brought along?

Okay, everyone's moving really quickly for that here. So starting with like where you could find like a receptive leader. It was kind of like how about I put some of this down on paper. How about I help us build the case for it? How about I sketch out who needs to be talked to and when, how about I draft some of those things you just started with where's that unmet need.

And then you trot over to somebody who didn't necessarily get why you were hearing that you were doing something. They knew how to do themselves and be like, Hey, I did this. Can I do that for you too? Could I make your life just a wee bit easier? If I stepped in here sometimes they said, no, you had to knock on the door a few more times before you were let in.

But other times people would be like, okay, I can kind of see what you're talking about now. Maybe that elevator pitch planted a seed, but it didn't really grow for me until I got to watch it in action. And then I find once you're. A conversation or once you're in a relationship, it becomes a lot easier to say to people like, Hey, that's something that I can help with.

Or, Hey, I have expertise in that, but it's hard. The first three to six months, I thought to myself, what on earth was I thinking? Because there are places where, you know, people just they're like, that's okay, I'm all set. And you have to keep chipping away at that. Do you 

Brett Berson: [00:37:31] remember what your original elevator pitch sounded?

Alex Buder Shapiro: [00:37:34] Yes, except I'm almost ashamed to tell it. I think that because nobody knew what my child was. It went something like. I solve problems. Like if you think about people as a product, I'm kind of that product manager for the people. And so if we can think through some of the things that are challenges that you're facing in the organization, then I'm going to come think about what the products are that I could either build or create, or some of the market research that I could do.

And I think it, people were like no way that doesn't make any sense. I can solve my own problems. And I understand my own people. And you just showed up lady, like, what would you have to add? And so I had to refine it over the years as the organization grew, there was a lot more that went into that elevator pitch around the rest of the work that the people team was doing and how I could provide connective tissue between all of that different work.

But we didn't have that in the beginning. I had to improvise. So 

Brett Berson: [00:38:28] maybe to round out the conversation we were having just sort of broadly on people's stuff. And rapid scaling stuff. There were some other ideas that I don't think we explored of yours. Things like considering the complexity of any process that you introduce early on, because you're liable, you stuck with it forever.

And so maybe we could explore that specific, be careful of this thing idea, and maybe a couple others that come to mind as you think about the intersection of people, stuff and scaling stuff. 

Alex Buder Shapiro: [00:38:59] Happily. This is like top of my, if I could go back in time and tell 2016 Alex anything, this is like my number one, watch out in, in some ways I certainly feel really privileged that I've gotten to build and grow and scale a company to the place where it gets to be so successful.

I shake my fist at 2016, Alex, but I think. There's been this change in, and we've sort of talked about this in little pockets, but there's been this change in my mind, around the role of people, operations within a company. And one of the positives of that is that there's a lot of energy and intention around topics that used to be, I don't know, dismissed by business leaders as extra work topics, like how you build leveling or ladder frameworks, or how you think about performance reviews or what structure you put in place from development and progression standpoint like that, those topics that used to be dismissed, or certainly much more top of mind for early founders.

The trade off of that is that a lot of people look at the frameworks that they are used to from larger organizations where they've been, or what they understand larger organizations to do. And their first instinct is to replicate that for their organization. And that certainly was the mindset. And maybe even why I was hired in some ways, coming from Google was, Hey, can we do that thing that Google does?

Can we do that here? And at the time, I think I sort of dutifully was like yeah, let me reinterpret and reimagine frameworks and processes that I used at Google for this new company. And let me bring this level of maturity and infrastructure to a smaller place. Let me do it early because it'll be easier to do it now than to retrofit a bunch of people into it later.

So if we just build that from the beginning and the ground up, I'm just going to be so happy with myself that we invested in this early on. And there's like a ton of literature that basically says this. It says like, oh my God, if you can do this early, it's so much easier to introduce titles or leveling or promotions or reviews.

It's so much easier to do that before people have gotten used to the chaos. It's not. that introducing these frameworks early on isn't really helpful. It's just what I've also come to see is that you change so much when you're in hyper growth and scaling mode, your needs change, your participants change.

You don't have the same set of facts guiding you at every stage of the process. And if you've built in really complex infrastructure, the change management and the work that goes into updating that for each new set of facts or needs, it tends to just deter people. So they live with these decisions that they've made.

So speaking really specifically. I look back at some of the frameworks and competency ladders that we put into place. And I watch how we thought that it was really useful to go into a ton of detail and have a really structured process around what it meant to be operating at the next level and how you could progress.

And now I look at some of the challenges we face now, where we want to think about what evolution looks like and how career growth looks like. And we're locked in to this framework that we put into place in the really early days. And I actually think if I could go back and tell 2016 Alex something it's that nobody in 2016 knew what this really complicated framework needed to look like.

And if I had done more root cause analysis of what was going on at that time and built something that was. Simple and fit to purpose for where our needs were and thought how I could iterate and grow and create more structure and process. If and when each of those cases needed it, I would save myself so much time.

And in some places  trying to suggest that things could or potentially look different or might need to feel different. Like I think there is probably any infrastructure you build. There's just a trade-off of changing it versus when you're creating and building on top of it. 

Brett Berson: [00:43:02] It's a super valuable point, I guess I'm really interested in, well, what should you do?

And you're sort of getting at this, but take a simple problem. You're a 50 person company and there's no formal review process. You show up, there's no formal review process. You're coming from a larger company. You know how it's done at scale? Where do you go? Or what do you do in that situation? 

Alex Buder Shapiro: [00:43:25] I think the first thing you do is you ask a lot of questions: What is missing through the lack of our review process? Is it the dialogue between an individual and their manager around how they're progressing? Is it the ability to make a consistent set of decisions across an organization about what advancement looks like? Is it a fair way to distribute compensation funds?

What is your first and foremost thing that you are solving for? And part of the reason that you need to ask these questions is because if I said what I just said to any leader, they'd say yup. All of those things. Can you build me something that does every single one of those things? But I think if you start out by asking questions, you can begin with what is most at need. And then you can add in the other components because you'll have started that foundation. And so when I’ve talked to founders of smaller companies and they say, oh, can you walk me through Flatiron's performance process?

I'm like I could, but I would start by asking you a set of questions before I anchor you on anything that you'll assume is really great because we do it. And in some places it works so well. There's things I'm so proud of. And in their other places, I'm like, ah, I'd love to move the needle on this, but you know, it's probably not going to happen this year.

Brett Berson: [00:44:45] Whenever you discover a specific people problem, how do you figure out if process is needed, education is needed or a person needs to be added or removed from the team? because certainly as you begin to scale, it's easy for any of these, to the point that you just shared. You can come up with any list of people problems, and you could put a process in, put a tool in, put a new procedure in, but then you quickly are a relatively small company doing 1700 different things that tends to be not particularly effective at the same time.

It would be easy to say. Let's treat everyone like adults and have everybody use their best judgment, but that has a whole host of problems, even when you get into the dozens of employees. And so maybe there's a story that comes to mind or like an internal sorting system or way that you think about, okay, here's a given problem, given a range of tools and approaches.

Here's how I might consider process versus training versus, you know, maybe leave it alone. 

Alex Buder Shapiro: [00:45:44] I think in general, I have a hard time ever believing that training is a standalone solution, because to me, training is a way to drive behavioral change, but you have to know what behavioral change you want to drive first.

So there's like a little bit of a start with the why for me around what is it that we see that isn't working. And once we've sort of started with what that is, We also get to determine what our desired end state is process for me in places where the main thing that you are trying to achieve is like genuine consistency.

And I think that's become that much more important as we think about equitable access to opportunities. There are places where the structure is worth it because you can really feel confident that everybody is going to do it the exact same way. I'm big fan of structure, for example, in compensation, because I think that compensation is something that you should be able to look at more objectively and run analysis on and track how things are working and progressing.

But in general, I tend to like orient more towards frameworks for behavior because many problems I think actually involve meeting the individual or the set of individuals or the organization, meeting them a little bit more halfway. And you can't do that. If you've already boxed yourself into a process or approach.

An example for me would be, this was a really challenging conversation for people, teams everywhere, when we thought about a number of the concerns that came up through COVID around flexibility that different individuals needed to meet a set of personal concerns that were arising because of the challenges of the pandemic.

We had some really tough conversations as a people team about let's call it process versus framework: Is there a one size fits all approach that is going to work that we can set in place, like a set of checklist or criteria for what people who need support can get and not get from the company or. Is there a world in which we can lay out.

And what we ended up doing was a conversation guide: Here are some of the questions that you should be asking yourself. Here are some of the questions a manager can ask an employee. Here's some of the levers that you can pull in terms of thinking through how a person spends their time or the way that work gets allocated.

And ultimately there's just too many novels needs that are playing out. That if we only do one set of things for everyone, we're going to end up missing out on more people and more things that are not even within our field of radar. So how do we create that structure, where it's acceptable to talk about what you need and it's encouraged to make adjustments.

To create the right set of flexibility, but we're not telling you exactly what that looks like or what that needs. And we're not creating some complicated process where a bunch of people need to weigh in on the right answers. And I like frameworks like that in a lot of places, especially in early companies.

If I think about going back to career growth or conversations like that, I like places where we can empower and enable some of those conversations within individual level. Even if it's provided with a support and infrastructure and. Infrastructure involves training, even if it's rolled out through a training that helps you understand the behaviors that are expected of you, but it's not necessarily training in itself.

That's the solution. It's not necessarily a process that has to be one size fits all at the end of the day. You still have the opportunity to lean in and have the conversation about what makes the most sense for that individual and what he or she or they're looking for. 

Brett Berson: [00:49:27] Can you give a couple more examples of what you mean by frameworks for behavior?

Alex Buder Shapiro: [00:49:32] So just speaking to conversation guides, I'm a big fan of conversation guides because I think I'm a big fan of open-ended questions. I guess, any time what you're doing is actually encouraging active, listening, and dialogue. You end up giving a manager or an employee, a set of tools. To feel like it's okay to talk about something, but you don't necessarily need to have the answers.

So a good example, I think, would be an approach to career growth conversations for some people, I think like templates are really valuable or having like a company approach to career conversations. Feels like it encourages compliance, but for me it's really like, how do I help people? I actually listened to what's being said in those conversations.

And so for me, a framework example would be have this conversation guide around some of the questions you can ask either yourself or somebody else and encouraging people to listen to the responses and think through what their follow-up is to that rather than having like anything that feels like a checklist where people are like, well, I know the answers to those questions.

Therefore I must have solved the problem. 

Brett Berson: [00:50:34] What are a couple other examples of conversation guides and maybe a little bit more about like, what do they look like? Or what would I see in there? 

Alex Buder Shapiro: [00:50:41] So my first conversation guide that I wrote at flat iron, which has morphed over the years and probably is due for an update, but it's sort of like a difficult feedback conversation guide.

So it starts with a fair amount of. Here are some of the things that might lead you to need to have this conversation is a document. So it has to have the right level of depth and specificity that it resonates enough with people. So you've got to help people see what would make something ready to have this next level of more difficult conversation about feedback with somebody?

Is it the first time they do something that I raised my eyebrow about. Here's some of the questions you should ask yourself. How many times have you seen this and what is the reaction been and starting with that context and that ability to set the stage. 

And then I think thinking through really opening questions or starter questions, places where you can begin the dialogue in a way that feels less anxiety provoking for you as an employer or a manager that you don't have come from scratch and start this really challenging conversation because in my experience, at least half the battle is steeling yourself to start a conversation, right. Because a lot of it then flows from there. So there are some sort of starter open questions that you can ask to get the dialogue going.

And then when I try to do is provide not entirely prescriptive talking points because I do think the act of listening is a huge part of it. But commonly asked questions are, what are some of the things you could see? And that's actually, it's honestly less for usage in the actual meeting in conversation.

It's more in my mind for usage in the preparation, because part of the reason why I think people talk themselves out of having really challenging conversations is because they're anxious that someone's going to ask them something in that conversation they can't answer. Even if they end up doing fine when it's really presented by them.

If you take a bit of time in advance to say, well, what if the person says, is this me getting fired? Or like, do you hate me? Or just in the example of a difficult feedback conversation, what if you start to play out, Hey, here's some talking points to get you started, then it doesn't seem as intimidating, I think, to go into that initial conversation, because now you kind of know I got in my back pocket, a few things that I can go to if I really need to.

Often at the end, we'll do something like examples or scenarios to help bring that to life. Whether or not that's completely sort of de-identified and anonymized like hypothetical scenarios or things that we've seen that we present in a Q and a format. We'll often try to say this is pretty reasonable, or this is common, or this has happened somehow.

Do we close that through bringing that to life and getting to actually show people what that looks like in practice? Again, all in the name of helping people to feel like they have the capability to drive the next step themselves. They understand the context, they have a few questions that can get them over the initial hump.

They know what to say in some of those really tricky things that could come up and they see what that looks like in practice, those components together, take them out into the world to actually drive the behavior because ultimately it's not a process or a framework that's necessarily going to end.

Leading to the most fruitful conversation, it's actually the dialogue and the engagement that happens once actually gets going. 

Brett Berson: [00:53:44] Are there other conversation guides that are quite often used at Flatiron? 

Alex Buder Shapiro: [00:53:48] I don't know if we've all labeled them that way, but I do think it's a huge component of how we have done our manager training.

How do we sort of set forth the behavioral goals that we have and give people ideas of how to get there? Maybe I should go back and rebrand them all explicitly as conversation guides, but I think that's the mentality a lot around, we have like a really amazing talent development team and they're really focused on.

Behavior and skill and capability building, not just at the manager level, in all of their principals. We try to think through how do we help people learn those skills. And so it's an approach that I think we've used in a lot of our development literature. I think, like I said, it's an approach we've tried to use when it comes to some of these more novel situations.

Brett Berson: [00:54:30] One of the ways that I like to wrap up is to have you share some of the people that you've worked with in your career thus far that have had an outsized impact on the way that you either think about your role or frameworks and philosophies, what did they teach you or what has stuck with 

Alex Buder Shapiro: [00:54:45] you?

Absolutely. My early managers and leaders at Google. HR business partner land. I think they really set me on track that I'm currently on because I think both my direct managers and functional leader, they had a vision of HR. And we talked about this a little bit earlier as having a seat at the table and an influence in the landscape of the business and the work that needed to be done across the organization.

Not just the explicitly people land. That was where they started and, uh, gave me a really clear role model that probably allowed me to more confidently go into other situations that followed with the recommendation of like, you need me and I can help solve that. And here are some of the things that I've seen for me that was just like a game changer to have at such an early point.

First, like few years of my career to see that like end state being lived and breathed in front of me and say like, I can get myself there. So that was really formative. And then the other thing I'd say is. The early leadership at flat iron, for me, many of whom are still at flat iron, but just like that leadership group, when I was first joining had such passionate, deep engagement and excitement for.

People, if I think about that initial role model that I had of like, oh, I can do that. It really formed for me the impact that a people team can have and our old chief technology officer, and also our new chief technology officer who was kind of his second. I remember the times they said to me, like, do you need more head count?

We'll fight for more HR business partners, because they are force multiplier for this organization to have business leaders who. Not only see the value that you bring to the table, but actually would go to bat, make that championship for the function that also, I think gave me a perspective, the responsibility of the role, you sort of think to yourself, like, okay, If we're doing this, we have to think through what that means.

But also there has been this arc of people, teams in an organization, and part of what's shaped so much of mine is the organization itself wanting all of the things that I was most excited to get to try and to get to do that curious through certainly Nat and Zach as co-founders and our new CEO who's started around the same time.

I did just such an appreciation for. How communication and change management and your ability to work through these challenges with a people lens. That's always been like the dream and I recently got into love it my whole career. So how lucky am I? Awesome. 

Brett Berson: [00:57:26] Well, that is a perfect place to end. Thank you so much for spending all this time with us.

Alex Buder Shapiro: [00:57:31] Thank you.