Why heads of people and culture have to clean up everybody's mess

A great Head of People & Culture makes THE difference 🦸‍♂️

Surely you know the situation:
Your brother/sister left a mess and your parents make you clean it up.
Even though it’s not yours! 🤬

That’s how heads of people and culture feel when they join a startup - usually around Seed / Series B.

They get full responsibility for things others did in the past. Or didn’t. 🤷‍♂️
And usually these things weren’t even part of their job descriptions.

Here’s the situation:
Your company is professionalizing all its processes. You have to get yourself ready:

💸 For the next round’s due dilligence,
🚀 And for more scaling in much shorter time after the round.

The company has grown to 30-60 people, but the administrational processes stayed the same since you were 10 employees.

Most companies don’t have a COO to fix these processes.
It’s the head of people who has to deal with things like:

🤝 Introducing a working HRIS like Personio or Kenjo,
💩 Outdated HRIS data like old addresses,
❓ Nobody knows exactly who has which computers,
💽 Ex employees still have access to company data…

Even though a head of people & culture should be focussing on building an increadible hiring machine and a great culture a great head of people will also help with all these things.

Some things we’ll look for when hiring our people and culture:
👩‍🍳 Experience with organization intensive jobs outside of HR like gastronomy,
👨‍⚕️ a great level of professional empathy. Like a good nurse,
🛠️ hands on mentality to get hands dirty with implementing change,
🙏 deep identification with company values,
🚀 & an entepreneurial growth mentality: Not to be happy about existing processes but always trying to get better.

We’ll probably fail with finding somebody who checks all the boxes. I know that. 🫠

If your company has a great head of people & culture, cherish them!
Try to make their lives easy and take things off their plate.

They are the ones that eventually hold your company together when founders are already 10 steps ahead.