What are the key milestones on your path to leadership?
There are so many milestones that were impactful in my growth but a few really stand-out when looking back at my career. My first hypergrowth role was working at a start-up called VUDU. I started as a Sourcer, and due to my success with bringing in passive diverse talent was offered the head of talent role within 3 months. I knew nothing about management but I knew talent. We hired like crazy, and worked with incredibly smart people. The relationships formed there took me on the path to Twitter which eventually led to Slack.
I joined Slack at the end of 2015 when there were a little under three hundred people and the company was a little over a year and half old. No PDE recruiting team function and definitely no “official” executive recruiting. In my first three months at Slack, I built out the PDE recruiting team, hiring recruiters, sourcers and RCs. I also created a roadmap for technical hiring for the year. That was Slack’s biggest year of growth, we grew 360% in 2016. We now have over 2500 people worldwide. In 2018, after coming back from maternity with my second child, I wanted to do something new that would have an impact and allow me the space to be a present mother to two young children. When first taken on this role we didn’t have a team, or any historical data on the resources needed to recruit leadership. I realized that to build this, I would need to live and breathe it. The first 6 months was what I called exploratory, and the second half was building the infrastructure. Fast forward to today and we have a strong team of 3 recruiters, 3 researchers, 2 coordinators - and I’m loving every minute of it.
What are the key challenges you have faced as a leader?
A famous management quote is “hire slowly, fire fast.” Because I build authentic relationships with the people who report into me, this has always been a hard lesson for me to learn as a leader. My second biggest challenge has been knowing when to allow things to fail. When I’m resource constrained, my natural tendency is to personally take on more work rather than have my team be overstressed or spread too thin. Ultimately this has put me on the verge of burnout, more than once, and it leads to an unbalanced life. I’ve learned that sometimes the way to get additional resources is to fail, and for me this continues to be a hard lesson.
Describe your leadership style / what are your core values as a leader?
The job of a leader is to remove obstacles and to hire people that are strong in their craft, are able to pick up new ideas, and are able to grow with an organization.
A team is only as strong as their weakest link. I don’t believe in brilliant assholes - they can be the most destructive thing to a high functioning team. A high functioning team needs people that know how to work together, collaborate and upskill one another. I get a lot of joy out of developing people and I measure my success by the success of the people that report into me.
The way I build trust is by creating authentic relationships and building trust. I want them to know that I care about who they are as a whole person, not just who they are at work. It’s important for leaders to have a strong moral compass and a sense of integrity. When you build trust, there’s a level of loyalty that you get from not only people on your team but also your peers - and that level of loyalty is very motivating.
What advice do you have for women who are trying to establish themselves as leaders?
Everyone has something to teach everyone - each person has their own superpower. There’s no one path to leadership. There are ways to grow in your career without ever managing people. At the end of the day, doing good work is what it’s all about. Find opportunities to lean in where you can shine. All you have control over is yourself and how you show up and how you focus on your work. It’s important to remember that when you’re uncomfortable, that means you’re growing. So putting yourself in situations that go outside of your comfort zone is always a good thing to do.
How would you advise organisations who want to foster diversity and gender equity in leadership?
I think there’s a lot of large organisations trying to move the needle, and really investing in women and racial diversity (obviously Slack too). When you’re the size of Google, it’s going to be harder to change this systemic problem because not everyone is going to see the lack of diversity as a problem. The people that feel inequity might not feel empowered to speak up. To really move the needle it really needs to come from the top down. There needs to be a diverse board with women and people of color as well as male allies. Then you need operating principles that are clear on what’s acceptable and what’s not as well as evaluation criteria and competencies. All of this needs to have executive leadership buy in. Many smaller companies are starting to think about this early on which is wonderful. Slack is one of the first companies I had heard of that wanted to prioritize diversity very early on. And being really open about the fact that they wanted to drive different programs and hiring philosophies to build a different type of company.
I’m so excited about Slack and the hiring practices that we have here. The way our leadership thinks about hiring has been historically non conventional in tech. We look at people from bootcamps, or state schools or ivy leagues - we have diversity in education, gender, race, backgrounds. Talent does not discriminate and can come from everywhere and it’s not based on gender, race, or privilege. The smartest people I've ever met in my career or are lifelong learners and that's what makes them brilliant.
Do you think things would have been different if you were male?
The nature of unconscious bias is that it’s unconscious. As a woman of color, I’ve experienced suggesting ideas in meetings that are then regurgitated by male colleagues who take the credit. I’m sure things would be different if I was a man, and a white man. On the flipside, I love the fact that I’m a woman, that I was able to create two beautiful human beings, and operate as a heart-centered person. Not to say that men don’t, but the nature of being a woman and being a woman of color on top of it all is a wonderful perspective. I’ve got indigenous first nation blood in me on both my paternal grandparents side. I have black blood, I have white blood. Many of my ancestors that came before me have these beautiful and tragic stories, and they all made me who I am. So I wouldn’t trade that for the world. I feel like that gives me the ability to have such a broader picture than other people who identify to a more dominant culture. Even with the obstacles I’ve faced in my life, there is no doubt that I’m extremely privileged - with two parents that love each other, that provided a wonderful home for me growing up, and my grandparents and a community of family filled with love is something not everyone gets to experience. So I acknowledge the fact that I’m also more privileged than many regardless of my challenges. To me, my career has always been about the work. Building teams, hiring great people, developing talent is a strong passion for me. Focusing on my work has made me a stronger person and a stronger leader regardless of identity.
