Jess Larsen grew up in New Zealand. Her career has spanned hedge funds, publicly listed manufacturing companies, Berlin-based start-up incubators and now TrueLayer, the UK’s leading open banking platform. Jess is the VP of People at TrueLayer. Jess is accountable for delivery of TrueLayer’s people experience. This covers everything from attraction and selection of new talent to enabling their potential and careers through their journey in the business.
In most organisations People leaders will go through a period of needing to earn trust and build credibility before they can be truly effective in the organisation. But there are some companies where, for one reason or another, they just don’t see the People team as partners. They don’t want to have their People leader in the room when decisions are being made. They haven’t yet recognised the value that a People team can bring to their organisation.
That isn’t a company I’ll want to stay in for long and it’s a type of company that I’ll work hard to weed out during the job application process.
Before I join a company I want to understand their attitude to their People agenda. I do this through a ton of research. I’ll read everything I can online then I’ll check through my network. I listen carefully to the language they use, particularly around culture and values - and how they describe what happened to prior people who held the role. I’ll ask questions like ‘can you tell me more about that story?’, ‘why do you think that went wrong?’, ‘what role did you play?’. I’ll listen for accountability and ownership. I’ll have very frank conversations during the interviews. I want to understand what they want their People function to do and what their version of good looks like. And it's okay if it doesn't align with what I think it looks like, it’s just probably not the right opportunity for me.
The foundation for any People leader to become a strategic partner to the leadership team is to understand the business that you work in. One of the first steps I make when I join a company is to ensure that I’m able to speak the language of the business.
“People leaders are ineffective if they don’t understand the landscape that people in the business are working in.”
When I join a company to help get up to speed I’ll try and pay a lot of attention to the work of the sales team. It’s my first port of call to understand how we present the business to clients. The sales team communicates the value of the product and the value of the company so understanding the way they do that gives you a huge amount of context when you join an organisation.
My next priority is to spend time with the teams who form the heart of the business. With a business that sells technology, product is often the heart of the business. In manufacturing, it’s going on to the shop floor and meeting the machinists and learning how we actually build the product.
“Within each different team you often have different types of people doing very different work and they think differently and they speak differently, they have different value systems and different priorities.”
Without understanding this context of values, language, constraints and priorities I can’t influence well or be as effective.
When I’m learning about a new business I want to understand where there are gaps between how we’re perceived in the market, how we describe ourselves and what we believe internally. This gives me the context on how as a People function we can support those teams, it gives me the context for conversations with leadership where I need to explain the importance of these initiatives and it enables me to participate fully in strategic conversations.
Some key questions I like to ask are:
Understanding the business you’re in is the first step but in order to try to influence what's happening in the business and deliver your team’s objectives you have to go out into the business and earn trust. My personal style is to lead through relationships with senior stakeholders but also throughout the business. So I'll try to go out for lunch or spend time together with people when I start working with them. I want to understand:
During this conversation I’ll also be sharing about my own life and career. The goal is to get to a point where we’re both comfortable and a basis of trust as quickly as possible. I want to understand their work preferences and share my own. Some people like a structured update, some people like to have information in advance, some people don't like a lot of information at once.
The more that we’re able to work inside of our preferences, the easier things go and the happier we are.
I'd say that an absolute priority is to get a sense of the leadership team’s expectations and views on the People function. You’ve hopefully got a sense of this while interviewing but you can dig deeper on joining. There are unfortunately a lot of companies where the People and HR functions are ineffective and as a result team members who have previously worked in those environments won't necessarily see the People function as high value. You always have a journey of testing what do they know, what are their assumptions, how do I help them see what we can do. There's always a piece of helping them and through that building a relationship with them where they see you as a key stakeholder to work with.
After this conversation, we’ve ideally declared intentions and have a great starting point for working together, but the relationship is going to play out based on what happens next… People will judge whether they trust and value you based on whether you do what you’ve said you’ll do and whether you deliver effective results. So I’m looking to deliver value on any piece of work we do together. I’ll try to set clear expectations and follow through on those. I’ll look for easy wins where I can support them, deliver those easy wins and then build from there. They begin to think, oh actually that's quite valuable, oh actually Jess can you come and join in this?
“I almost always find I can build good relationships with people by doing good work and supporting them in their role. You give them a reason to want to include you, there are no more closed doors because over time people get the value that you’re adding.”
So long as you're delivering more than people are expecting, you don't need to worry about closed doors because they'll come and find you. And then you get to the point of ‘we really need you in this meeting’, or ‘we need you in this discussion’, or ‘we need to talk to you first before we kick off the work’ because they know that you and the People team can deliver value they can't deliver themselves.
There’s been a conversation for a long time in networking at HR executive levels; of people saying, ’how do we get a seat in the boardroom?’. My experience is that if you deliver the work, people will come knocking for you.
Start with getting to know your business, listen, learn and network with the team.
Engage with those leaders, find out how you can help the business achieve their objectives through your team’s work.
Communicate that the People team’s initiatives will translate into improvements for the core functions into financial improvement and into sales improvements.
Get buy-in with data, logic and take the time to make persuasive arguments.
Finally hold yourself accountable and deliver the work or the metrics.
If you’ve selected a company which is open to the value that a People team can provide and you follow through on these steps then you’ll have a seat in the room when decisions are being made and you’ll be a valued team within the business.
