I wish I could say that my journey into working with startup companies was an intentional one. At the time, like many, it was out of sheer necessity that I interviewed with an oddly named, early stage tech company I had never heard of: I needed a job, and they needed someone like me to
find talent for their quickly growing team. And after many conversations, the final interview was one I'll never forget. It was on an evening in the dead of winter just outside of Detroit, Michigan, in an imposing, intimidatingly darkened board room with me on one side of the table, and their CEO, COO, Head of HR, and who would become my two recruiting partners on the other side. I remember near the end of the meeting, their CEO, a soft spoken, yet deeply intense German man saying to me: "In a company like this, just know: you cannot hide." And while this may sound like the tag line of a summer blockbuster thriller or something Keith Morrison may utter to introduce a Dateline episode, what I came to understand is that
he meant: hiring and building a people strategy at that stage of growth means that every hire serves as a cornerstone to a company's prospects at success. Each is as important as the
next in creating what didn't exist, and the intention necessary can make for a lot of pressure to get it right. Years later, I can confirm, he was right, and I was hooked.
What this experience began for me was a previously undiscovered love of tinkering, creating, and working a problem that often had no precedent at companies like these. I certainly didn't have a background to consider these business challenges and their implications, which were, at times, existential. I'd majored in history at a small liberal arts school after all, and my whole undergraduate degree focused on events that had already happened. What I did know about myself, even that early in my career, was that I did have skill in connecting those who also shared in this love of creating in ambiguity to companies that would pay them to do it for a living. What's the saying from Good To Great that will undoubtedly age me? "First get the right people
on the bus and then figure out where to drive it." Yes to this, but I'd also add: We needed people who could build the bus, too.
This notion shaped my career as I gradually moved into roles at other startup orgs that considered how to deliver on promises made in interviews to cultivate, support, and grow the people we were so careful to hire. While the solutions may have been new, the different challenges underpinning them and the process my teams followed never changed: meet each organization where they are today, and continue to iterate as needs changed and the company grew.
So recently, I've started to consider this idea more broadly: what happens if, for companies charging forward with ways to disrupt deeply held convention, or introducing a wildly new concept, we could consider the who, the what, and the how simultaneously? And what if, as a startup-galvanized veteran, I could help to solve these frightening I-don't-know-what-I-don't-know People conce
rns as a flexible partner? And what if, I too, could find myself in a position to "not hide" and build something from nothing myself?
So all these years later, my enduring love story is turning a new chapter. Tune in as we explain in great detail how buses are built. 🚌
Want to get to know the team of People mechanics at Sproutwise? Find us at info@sproutwise.com.
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