Why You Should Hire a Chief People Officer

I'm good, thank you for having me. Excited to have this conversation, it's probably my favourite topic to talk about, so I think we'll have a really good chat today.

Yeah, sure. So like you said, the Chief People Officer role can mean lots of things to different people. But for me, it's a super interesting role where you're almost like the co-creator of the culture with the CEO. So you're dealing with everything that would fall within what you'd expect within a people function, but you're also thinking a little bit like a designer and a product leader around what is the experience you want people to have, and what is the people system you need to build for this company to succeed, to win, and to scale. An interesting way that we position it at Griffin is that the people function is the "cultivate" function, which I think captures the essence of what we see ourselves being here to do. And then in our team, we adopt this product mindset, so we're always thinking about the mission of our team. The way we articulate that is: how do we make winning inevitable? Which might not be the typical mission statement you'd expect for a people function, but for us it drives our focus and our activity towards how do we make the organisation more effective, not how do we improve bits and pieces around the edges. So it's a really, really influential, fascinating role to have. I always feel very lucky that I get to do this role, but also specifically that I get to do it at Griffin.

It's an interesting one, because it's something that does come up often. But I would say a good Chief People Officer brings the same discipline to people decisions as a CFO would bring to financial ones. If you think about the decisions a Chief People Officer makes, they are financial and commercial decisions. So if you're spending 70 to 80% of your monthly burn on people cost, you're going to want to make sure that investment has some kind of return, that someone's looking after it, that you've created the conditions for people to perform at their best. And I think if you look at it that way, it's hard to imagine why you wouldn't want to have a Chief People Officer. What I've also found is that when you talk to founders, they often rank culture in the top three things they care most about. So pretty much everyone believes it's a source of competitive advantage, if not the greatest source of competitive advantage there is. So I don't think it's necessarily about convincing founders that the role should exist or that culture is important. It's about how they see the value in having a partner who will take the vision they already have and turn it into something super practical and scalable, rather than leaving them to carry it alone. Because the scale of human challenge can be really messy, and sometimes it can be tempting to hire the people role at a more junior level. Sometimes that works really well and the person flourishes and grows with the company, but often it can mean reaching for best-practice answers, which might mean more procedure that you don't actually need, rather than nurturing the principles that sit underneath the culture and that are what really matters. So if you have someone in the exec team who cares about building a scalable people system more than building process, they're going to make sure they're thinking about the things that accelerate pace, that make the place more enjoyable to be, rather than just adding features that add drag accidentally. So the way I'd frame it is: the Chief People Officer role is as financially and commercially orientated as any of those that you might otherwise think are naturally that way.

Yeah. Again, people will have different definitions, but I'll share the way I think about it. Essentially I see it as a set of very deliberate choices that hold up under pressure. So, for example, that high agency and trust are actively designed for, rather than just happening organically or being assumed in the background. It also means talent density doesn't slip. You hear people talking a lot more about talent density now, more than ever in this era we're in, but it's particularly important when you have a role that's hard to fill, or there's a massive amount of urgency, or you've had a team that's been intact, like the early team is still intact. You really do have to think about: do we have the highest concentration of performance we need to achieve what we need to achieve? And in a regulated fintech in particular, a great culture is one that makes people feel safe to talk, to speak up, to tell the truth about risk. Because if any of that goes unseen or flies under the radar, it definitely sends some alarm bells around the health of your culture and whether it's particularly effective. Another way of thinking about it is: if your culture only works in good weather, then it's maybe more vibes than culture. Because what you really want to be able to do, and what I think is a hallmark of a really great culture, in fintech and outside of fintech, is how do you make decisions, how do you run meetings, how do you hire, how do you pay? All of those things help explain the practical reality of how your culture translates into day-to-day experience. And that, for me, is the thing that actually makes a culture great, being able to articulate it in meaningful, tangible ways.

Yeah, that's a really good question. I guess it stems from the founders, as a lot of things in these early-stage fintechs or founder-led businesses do. So the way David and Allen articulate it is that they see themselves as basically unemployable, but have done their best to build a company that they would actually want to work for. And there's a lot of truth in that. For them, that has meant creating a place with radical transparency and trust, built in from the very earliest beginning of Griffin. And as you evolve, you're right in saying that it's difficult to let go of that to other people. I think you're touching on something there, which is "founder mode", something else that's been talked about in our industry. The way we think about it at Griffin is that David and I are co-designers of our culture. So he has created and holds this vision, and then I see my role as staying close enough to him to sort of mind-meld with it. If I get even more poetic for a moment, it's almost like if you have a forest and the sea, and both of those habitats are really strong, really interesting individually, but when the ecosystem joins, that's when all these different ideas flourish and co-create together. That's what the relationship between the CPO and the CEO feels like at its best. It's like the dynamic between you merges two different perspectives in a really powerful way. And I think that relationship is particularly critical in a founder-led company, because regardless of whether you intend it or not, the culture will naturally come downstream from the founder and from those early hires. So I don't see my role as inventing culture independently from David. It's very much about creating and building this shared instinct, so that either of us understands the direction or nudge it needs to take in order to be ready for where we're going next. A lot of people think about culture as something you need to protect, and I can understand that. But if you think that way, you're losing the opportunity to think about the future and how it needs to evolve. Because it will. As each year goes by, it'll start to shape with every new hire you bring in, unless you've been really intentional about who you've hired.

An interesting shorthand way we have, that empowers everyone within Griffin, not just the relationship between David and me, is this concept of the "smell of death." So if you notice something that

Yeah, totally. It's one of those things, again, that's been there from the very early days, that the founders articulated, but it's really memorable, which is why it's powerful. It's basically encouraging people, if they see or know something that feels off, a project that's going to fail, or behaviour that feels sick, to speak up. You're actively encouraged to say something to the person who needs to hear it. And I think that's a really powerful way of keeping the culture the one that you want.

Well, I feel like so many decisions and discussions involve culture, whether or not you're saying "this is a conversation about culture." If you're deciding how you're going to give feedback to someone, if you're deciding which roles you're going to hire or not, those are org-design decisions. So many day-to-day decisions, whether directly people-related or not, involve culture indirectly. So it just becomes part of the fabric, the intangible thing that flows through everything, really. Interestingly though, we are looking at our own values at the moment, which has happened through recognition that the company has evolved in a slightly different way, and perhaps the way we've codified our culture at the moment doesn't fully capture it. So it's a really interesting conversation, because we're more directly talking about, is this behaviour the one that we feel covers what we're trying to articulate, or is it something else? And we've involved the whole team in that conversation, so everyone has a chance to say and shape, "actually, no, I think you're wrong there." And that's a great thing about Griffin's culture, that people will be really open about their views, which I think is a really healthy sign.

It's interesting, in the sense that we might talk about what keeps people at organisations. One of the ways you can do that is by making sure the people you get to work alongside are incredible, like in the top five or ten per cent of the people they've ever worked with. That's one of the best things you can do to make sure you keep the best people with you. Because if you've got someone who's a real high performer, they're going to get ultra-frustrated with someone who isn't pulling their weight, who doesn't care enough, who's okay with "good enough." All of those things start to add friction in the system. In terms of how you measure it, we do have a way of looking at performance at Griffin, and we try to make sure we don't overly engineer it, because we're still relatively small and you can add layers and layers of this stuff. So we try to think about the most lightweight but effective way of understanding it. One of the ways we do it is we have ExCo sessions where we'll talk about this at least twice a year, and we'll each bring people who we think are more or less meeting our definition of what incredible, transformative performance looks like. But we have a couple of simple rules that are designed to mitigate bias. For example, you can't mention someone in your own team, and if someone doesn't agree, it's a veto, it's not a collective decision. The reason I think that's a helpful way of doing it is, first of all, the ExCo team is talking about performance and agreeing on a shared view of what that looks like at Griffin. It's not just "my view is different to our Chief Revenue Officer's," or whoever else. And it means we can challenge one another in a very safe, open way. That's been the way we've done it so far, so that we consistently identify this group of people. But I'd say that, although a lot of companies like to say they see a nice neat bell curve of performance, for the stage we're at, we have an extraordinarily high level of talent density. The team is incredible. So part of our challenge is: how do we keep making sure those people are stretched? Because if someone is an A-player having transformative performance, they technically shouldn't still be in two quarters' time, we should be pushing them to do more, to learn, to grow, to develop. So it's a really interesting one. There's definitely room for us to evolve our approach there, but the main thing is recognising what it looks like and having a consistent definition of it.

I think for sure there is. I think there's a huge opportunity, and something we're really spending a bit of time on at the moment is how we build a programme that's meaningful, that does start to think about how we nurture talent from the earlier stages to build the future leaders in our team. We do have a pretty experienced team, but the balance for us is the capacity we can dedicate to the entry-level type of roles versus hiring someone in who can have an immediate impact. But I don't think just saying "we only need experienced hires" is good enough. I feel like we owe it to the next generation to always know that there's more we can learn from them than we can necessarily impart on them. I feel really passionate about that. It's something we want to build, particularly in the engineering space, where we do have room for people to progress through different levels and actually demonstrate capability growing over time. So it's a challenge, though. I do see, more and more, that you keep reading about the fact that these roles are just disappearing. And I think that'll change once people realise how valuable these roles are, and where they started from as well.

Yeah, that's a super interesting one. I don't really see that there has to be a tension between happiness and performance. I think companies often treat them as a trade-off, and then they end up with neither. Because what they're really asking is how to balance elite performance with consistently long hours. Those aren't the same thing, and treating them as such will actually probably make their culture quite fragile. We know it's not too much of a reach to say that burned-out people don't consistently create elite performance, it tends to come in peaks, and then there'll be a big dip. What people really need in that situation, and what I think we do really well, is autonomy. Because a lot of this "long hours" or intensity element is about control. When people talk about work-life balance, what they really want is some semblance of control. If someone's working long hours by choice, because they're deep in the flow, because they love what they're doing and they've got an interesting problem to solve and they're just locked in, "I'm going to solve this now, we're going to work through this weekend", that's because that's what they want to do. It's more about when people feel like they're being forced to do it, or there's an expectation, or surveillance or monitoring, that it starts to feel like they're just a part of a machine. And I don't think anybody really wants to feel that way. So one of the ways we do that here is we give people complete agency over the hours they work. There's no nine-to-five. If you feel like you've done your job, done enough that you wanted to do, you're able to just do what you want and you don't have to explain yourself. So I don't necessarily think, the emergence of the 996 stuff as well is really interesting, because it's almost like an emergence of this very intense form of hustle culture, which has always been there. Obviously, working in a startup, the expectation that comes with that is intensity of some form. I've worked in startups for 20 years, so I get it. I know it's not for the faint of heart. And one thing I do respect about 996 is the honesty of it. If they're saying "this is how we want to work," that's up to them if they want to work that way. But I do think it measures the wrong thing, because it's basically shorthand, like inputs are what matter. Hours, and the number of days, are ways of indicating that we're going to have a better output. So it's kind of dressing up hours and hustle culture as a virtue, rather than saying "this is what we're going to do to win, and this is what we're going to do to trust you." Because I think it's much more interesting, from a leadership point of view, to articulate what the moonshot is. What's the dream? And how do we get there, what's the quickest, fastest, best, most effective way? Give people that, and you're talking to their heart as well as their mind. You've got to find that thing that makes them feel like the work they're doing is work they're in the flow with, that they genuinely care about. And it can't be imposed on people. So I'd rather give the big vision and help people feel like they've got the agency to find the smartest way, rather than prescribing that hardcore mode is the only way to get there, because I'm not sure that's the case.

Yeah, it's an interesting one. It'd be interesting to see the different opinions emerge on it, it tends to create quite a strong reaction. So yeah, I just think it's about giving people agency over the hours they work. If they want to work longer, that's fine, but I don't think it needs to be the way to achieve success.

Yeah, exactly. Like I said, working in a startup comes with intensity. As long as you know that from the beginning, then you know what you're signing up to. It's just sometimes, if people have an expectation of something different, it feels jarring. But I don't think the level of intensity needs to be to the extreme. Like I said, for some of the companies where they advertise roles, they'll let a candidate see a different comp package if they want to go for hardcore mode. I like the honesty of that, to be honest. But I don't think not doing that means you're not working hard. It's just one way of defining what hard work looks like. And hard work doesn't always equal results. Hours are not the denominator of valuable output.

Well, the lucky thing with Griffin is that we've been remote-first from the very inception, back in 2017. So what we haven't had to do is engineer in-person things into a remote culture, it's always been designed to work that way. And one of the things for remote culture, but actually, in all cultures, to be honest, even if you're in an office, I still think this would be super valuable, offsites are like oxygen for remote cultures, I would say. That's something at Griffin we spend quite a lot of time thinking about and doing, to make sure we're giving the culture the oxygen it needs from some in-person time. Finding the right balance of that is really important.

Yeah, that's a good question. It's so right, so many of our formative experiences are characterised by observation. When we feel as though we don't necessarily have permission to talk, we're watching how other people do things. So a lot of my personal leadership philosophy has been shaped around recognising experiences that didn't feel logical or didn't feel right, and then recognising in yourself, "if I'm ever in this position, I am never doing it that way." Whether it's things like micromanagement, or someone taking credit for your work, or just making you feel insignificant on a human level. And even outside of work, if you ever struggled to fit in, whether at school or university or wherever else, it might mean that as an individual, it becomes your personal mission to make sure nobody in your company ever feels unwelcome. So all of these experiences, whether on a human level or in a workplace, shape who you are. And then when you have the privilege, because it is a privilege, of leading people, you need to remember those lessons that were forged early on. And also not to think of yourself as a finished article, because as we've grown up we've had all sorts of life experiences that also shape who we are. Maybe we've experienced really horrible things ourselves, or really positive things ourselves, that make us have a different perspective, whether it's becoming a parent, or the loss of a parent, or all sorts of messy human things that happen to all of us. We're all shaped by all the experiences we have. And I think that makes us become super intentional about how we show up for our team, what kind of leader we are for them. And then you mentioned pitfalls as well. I think the main pitfalls I try to avoid, based on my experiences, are doing things the way they've always been done. Often that means things bigger companies do that are sort of locked in as lore, that you should follow, for example, nine-box grids for succession planning, or performative performance systems. They're often quite seductive, because it feels like "okay, it's a process, we can follow a process." But what they unintentionally do is remove the layer of human judgment. So you're replacing your judgment with a process, when actually what you want to preserve is as much space for people to exercise their good judgment as possible. There's always a temptation to layer things or add things, but part of the trick is keeping things as lightweight as they possibly can be. That's probably the pitfall I'd point to from a culture point of view.

Well, people coming from these larger organisations, particularly in a function like people, can bring with them hugely valuable insight about a better way of doing things, or a more rigorous way of doing things. So I'm not saying everything out of the box that large companies do is going to be overly bureaucratic. It's just being mindful that lift-and-shift doesn't always work. You really do have to spend the time in the early days thinking about what this company needs and wants, and adjusting it to exactly the situation you find yourself in. The people coming in from larger organisations have really invaluable skills and expertise, but it's finding the right balance between what we need, what we must do, versus what we could do. And I think it's sometimes the "could do" stuff, more so when we're talking from the position of people, that is optional. You don't need to add layers and layers of things for them to work well.

Often, when you get to exec roles, you don't have the leader that you might be to your team, you have to be very autonomous and very self-aware. So in some ways you have to be your own worst critic. And I think that probably naturally happens, because you've got to this position because you love what you do, you care about it deeply, and you want to do it really well. All of those ingredients mean you set a really high bar for yourself, because you know that the bar you set for yourself is the bar you set for your team. For example, if I have someone who's not performing in my team, that reflects on me, or it should reflect on me, because I'm the leader of that team. So you've got to always think about the team's performance as your performance. That's the way I think about it: if my team aren't performing at the highest possible bar, then how can I say I am? Because I feel like your role is to help them thrive and perform at their best. Luckily, my team are all brilliant, so I don't necessarily have this as a reality of my day-to-day, but it's a really helpful reminder, and I think every leader should think that way, because it shines a really clear light on how you should think about your own performance.

Yeah, I think it's super interesting, because of my age and the way my career has almost followed the same path as the evolution of the profession. Early in my career, HR was still "HR personnel." It was very much locked away in a room, and it just kind of made you feel like some kind of secretive cave troll, where you were pretty universally despised by the rest of the organisation. No one really knew what you were there for, and the reality was something like a hybrid teacher-slash-police-officer. I remember just thinking, "why does anyone do this job? It's a little bit soul-destroying." And I was seriously doubting my choice of career, because I'd gone into it with an interest in psychology and design, feeling like, "okay, I can see how these two things mesh together, how it can make organisations successful." And then I realised that maybe I just needed to find somewhere a bit more progressive. So I ended up getting an interview for a fintech startup. I met the founder. I could see we had the same kind of ideas around a people function that had started to emerge out of Silicon Valley at the time and was landing in the UK, a very different way of building a people function. The remit was very much "start from scratch, build it as it should be." And I found that really exciting. I told myself at the time, "if I don't get this job, then I'm just going to do something else entirely, this isn't for me." But luckily I got it, and I got to rewrite what that function was, working together with the founder. And then I realised that was kind of my jam, designing things, designing systems, not producing policies or rules. Because I think all of those early experiences in the fintech world shaped my belief that principles always beat rules. It taught me that working in a founder-led company, where someone really cares about what you're there to do, is just so refreshing. Being able to build a culture around their very early, initial vision and turn it into something scalable is such a fun, exciting thing to get to do. And I've got to see it move from those early stages into becoming an architect of how a company succeeds and wins. It's been so interesting to see, in 20 years, such an early profession compared to some of the others.

Yeah, I think COVID broke the spell, didn't it, really? I remember at the time, so many companies were not sure how they would preserve, as they saw it, their culture when they were no longer going to be together in one place. Because it was almost like the office was a stage set. So if that was the definition of what made work good, then what's left? What about the actual job? Because that was really what mattered all along. If the job wasn't interesting or exciting or challenging or fun, it didn't matter how many free snacks there were or how good the coffee was. And I think everybody kind of came to that realisation, that offices have their place, and beautiful spaces have their place, and I do think they can influence how people think and feel while they're in them, but I don't think it's necessarily the way to build a great culture anymore, whereas it was seen as the way to build a great culture then. And I know what you mean about drinking culture, that was definitely a feature early on. I think it's almost with the swing we see from different generations towards slowing the pace down, even doing hobbies that are a bit more gentle and more artisanal, where they don't necessarily feel the need to have that drinking culture to blow off steam. It's more about how they recover. And I think that's a really interesting shift that has started to happen over time.

The office is still a visual representation of your brand, so there's still a place for it, in my opinion, which is obviously very spicy; not very many people agree with me, given the droves of organisations forcing people back into the office. People want control over where they work. So I think mandated office culture is dead, yes, in my opinion. I don't think it gets the best from people, and I don't think it's necessary. It feels very performative given what we've now learned over the last five to seven years.

We love an offsite at Griffin. It's one of the highlights of the year when we run them. A few things we've learned along the way, we've actually created this... well, Annie, our brilliant Experience Partner, has created this super useful playbook that's essentially all the lessons we've learned across all of them, which is such a good resource, and we're happy to share it if anybody wants it. But off the top of my head, I'd say there are probably three things that are really important. The first is thinking about the small things as well as the big things. From the beginning, how do you want people to feel? The small touches that feel unnecessary but make it go from being ordinary to something extraordinary. Keeping the novelty factor high, and not just killing all the stuff that feels unnecessary, is really important, because it's all the small things that make the difference. The second is not over-engineering the agenda. It's tempting, especially if you haven't been together in person for a while, to cram it, "let's do all these things", but actually no one's going to take anything away from it. So much connection happens in the gaps in between the scheduled agenda. So finding the right balance between what's scheduled and natural connection is super important, letting that happen and not forcing it. And the third is immersion. Almost creating a temporary world for people to step into, where they can shed the worries they came with and just be present in the moment. So it doesn't feel like they've stepped into some generic corporate offsite. It's "this is our offsite, this is our space." That's really important. All of those ingredients together would stand you in good stead if you're thinking about running one yourself.

Yeah, we've had both. For the time being, we're running them mostly in the UK. Our last ones were in London and Bristol, and the next main one might be in Edinburgh. I feel like if I say that enough it's going to happen, because I'll say "I'm in Edinburgh," and that would be nice. I know the city well. But yeah, we try to go somewhere that isn't too much of a logistical lift to get the team together, because although we do have people based remotely outside the UK, everyone is mostly within the UK. So somewhere that's not a total lift to get everyone to, but that's got a high novelty factor and is interesting. With Bristol, and with places we try to go, we spend a bit of time thinking about what that city brings, what would tell us we're in this city rather than anywhere else. So for Bristol, for example, we spent a bit of time learning about the history of graffiti art and Banksy, and all of those different things linked to Griffin in ways people wouldn't expect. So it's all of those things that give us the idea of where we'd choose to host it. But yeah, we have big dreams for our offsites. As we grow, we hope to make them better every single time.

Well, they probably want all sorts of different things. So a good place to start, if you're someone listening to this, is to ask people what they want. But my interpretation is that people often want a combination of three things, and it's quite simple: they'd like mastery, autonomy and purpose. And obviously that comes from Dan Pink's very famous book, but I think it does hold true. Most of the time, in my experience, people want to feel that they're trusted to do amazing work and just get on with it. And also, on a more human level, to know that if something in your life outside of work goes sideways, as it does, as we know, because life happens, the people around you will care about being there for you. Not just because a policy says you get X many days off, or you're supported, but because they really care about you as a person. I think that's what people want to feel: that the people they work alongside see them as more than just a number or an employee. I also hate that word. And if we think about fintech for a moment, when we talk about the purpose element and the mastery element, people want to come and do super interesting work, even if it is intense, like we talked about earlier. I think the people who thrive in our industry are those who are very intrinsically motivated: they're not here because they want the next job title, they're here because they want to build something that matters. There's something in that as well. And I think equity plays a big part of that, for sure, as we sort of touched on earlier. If you're going to work this hard, or put in this much effort or time or output, or create these amazing things, you want to know that later down the line it will be recognised in some way. So being able to have a meaningful equity slice is always important, for sure.

I think one thing I'd say is that culture happens whether you consciously try to do anything with it or not. So it's just thinking about how you evolve it intentionally. There are some practical tools and resources you can reach out to or find as well. Open Org is a great one, it has a totally open-sourced playbook from all sorts of companies who share their different resources. We're happy to share things, and the CPO community is also very open and welcoming. So if you have a challenge, it's always comforting to know that someone has already gone through this problem and solved it, and will be willing to share their story. I always find that people are very happy to share their stories and help other people learn from their experiences. So if you're in a position where you don't have a Chief People Officer, I think you'll always find a very welcoming ear to listen to what's on your mind and help steer you if you need help.