Cultivating Culture in Hypergrowth: Rivian's Roadmap to Success
In this episode of the HR Leaders Podcast, I’m joined Helen Russell, Chief People Officer at electric vehicle manufacturer Rivian. Despite massive growth from 1,000 to over 16,000 employees in just a few years, Helen has focused on embedding their aspirational culture every step of the way.
As Helen put it: "Culture to me means the expectations of how you're expected to behave here." At Rivian, that stems from founder RJ Scaringe's leadership. As Helen described, he models being "very humble, optimistic, compassionate, idealistic and first principled."
“My role has been baking those cultural elements into "hiring, onboarding, performance managing...every possible opportunity."
When asked how to retain culture despite huge growth, especially remotely, Helen said constant communication from the CEO and embedding cultural elements across all programs was key.
One insight Helen shared was around using anticipation for motivation during inevitable lulls. As she noted, "that level of anticipation was so high because there were these huge milestones all coming..."
The Power of Anticipation
As Helen explained, early on there were so many huge milestones coming that the level of excitement and anticipation was sky-high. However, a challenge emerged when they reached lulls between those major product launches.
Her solution was creating smaller milestones to maintain engagement. As Helen noted, it's about "how do you create those same levels of excitement, anticipation through smaller milestones during a time when you are waiting for those bigger milestones."
I highly recommend listening to the full conversation as Helen shares so many valuable insights around embedding culture, leading through growth, and revving up anticipation.
Episode Highlights
Defining organizational culture through consistent behaviours
Embedding cultural elements intentionally through all processes
Motivating employees amidst lulls by highlighting anticipated milestones
Fuel skills-based organizations with Design Thinking for HR
Traditionally, the role of HR has focused on administrative tasks and policy enforcement — all of it essential, but none of it transformative. But today, that's no longer the case.
🎙️ Automatically generated Podcast Transcript
Helen 0:00
From an onboarding standpoint between myself and our head of l&d, we alternate each week to come to join our new hires in their first hour in the company. And we talk about culture, we have someone from our l&d team, respectively interviewers and ask us, How does it show up? What does culture mean? How do we define it? What does that look like there today so that we're really from the very second year walking the company, making sure that that is a very prominent part of your experience.
Chris Rainey 0:35
And welcome to the show, how are you?
Helen 0:36
Very well, thank you. How are you?
Chris Rainey 0:39
I'm good. I've got you up to up to early. Because I know you're in. What's, what time is it?
Helen 0:45
is 912. So no, this is living in California. This is really late. It's a very early ghetto exercise.
Chris Rainey 0:54
It's not the opposite of the UK. It's literally the complete other way around. We work really late. And start late. Does that. Do you prefer that?
Helen 1:02
I do. Yeah, I'd much prefer it. I feel like the dare seem so much longer. If you're up a lot earlier and go to bed earlier. I
Chris Rainey 1:09
suppose you can like switch off a bit better, right? Because otherwise, I find I'm working late. And it's hard to switch off. If that makes sense. Now, one at a time I go to bed. I'm like I'm still wired with everything that's going on. And it's hard to turn off. Yeah, and
Helen 1:24
especially before I moved here, I'd always worked for California based companies. And so my desk you'd really late, even when the kids were little I'd put the kids to bed and work later to I would have as much overlap from a timezone perspective with with the US. So yeah, so it's a real shift. Now,
Chris Rainey 1:42
what a start a start and give everyone a bit of context. Hold on what's going on. Tell them a little bit more about your background, and your journey to where we are now. Yeah,
Helen 1:50
absolutely. So Chief People Officer a rivian. Today, I just crossed my four year anniversary a week and a half ago. Yes, Cena been a wild ride. Since joining rivian. Prior to that I was three years as chief HR officer with Atlassian, the b2b software space very much team collaboration software. Prior to that I was two years with Sonos. So you know, when when your brand is all about filling every home with music, it's a wonderful brand to be associated with. And that takes me to nine years. And that's how long I've been in the US. And then prior to that I was four years with canta. So that was my first taste of being a global head of HR, based in London and more in the marketing services space. And then prior to that I was with Yahoo. And I lived in both London and Switzerland as part of that role. So yeah, I've been doing this for a long time, I could go back even
Chris Rainey 2:49
like to get going. Yeah.
Helen 2:52
reiterate, how did
Chris Rainey 2:55
you did you choose HR? Did it choose you somehow along the way, it
Helen 2:59
chose me for sure. I did choose recruiting, I love recruiting. And it was from doing the role of recruiting that I fell into HR for I was at Siebel searching for our head of HR for Europe had shortlisted three candidates for that role, my boss came over to meet with the three to determine which person she was going to give the role to, we went out for dinner that night. And she said, I actually want you to do it. And I was like, whoa, I'm an HR person. And she said, No, no, but I actually think you'll bring something different. And the the thing that I had on my side at that time was that I'd established a really good relationship with the leaders in the European business. And so I didn't have to start building those relationships, I already had those in place we had trust. And so then it was just a case of starting to learn the craft. And as you know, when you practice HR in Europe, the craft is far more technical, because you have to be really comfortable in all of the jurisdictions in which you operate. And so I attached myself to a law firm that we were working alongside to make sure that I could really go deep on the employment law site, because I wanted to beat technical competencies and measure of success for me. So I wanted to make sure that I was really credible, especially around all aspects of employment law. And so that's when suddenly I find myself in the in the world of HR. And I've been doing it ever since. If
Chris Rainey 4:27
you look back now kind of it makes a lot of sense, right? Because you also knew the business. Not only do you have the relationships, but you truly understood how the, you know, how do we make money. And that's something now we start talking about. More so So picking up a lot of the CPAs I speak to now don't have any background in HR. Interestingly enough, you know, L'Oreal I just got back from hosting an event now. Stephanie, their new chief HR officer was in their r&d sort of team for 10 years plus law and Schuster, Chief Legal Officer for Lego came from a sales and operations background. But they could pick up all of those things that you're sort of describing. But they understand the business downtown people. And they surround themselves with a great team of knowledge experts like you know, deep, deeper knowledge needed to different areas. So it's kind of changed quite a lot, isn't it? Over the
Helen 5:22
years, and I do think whatever discipline you're practising, nobody is going to have the full suite of going in every area. And so whether you're leading operations, or leading sales, or leading HR, you know, where your capabilities lie, and then you know, how to plug the gaps to bring in skills and capabilities that help round out, you know, maybe where you fall short. And so yeah, it's just a case of making sure you have the, the best possible
Speaker 2 5:51
team I know, something you're super passionate about, which we'll get into now is embedding culture. But before we get into that, I wanted to understand how do you define it? Because otherwise, every person I speak to, is a different response to those questions. I mean, I'd love to hear from your perspective, what does culture mean to you? How do you define that? Culture,
Helen 6:11
to me means the expectations of how you're expected to behave here. So whether that's the culture of your family, I mean, I don't know about you, but I remember as a kid going and having played it, so, you know, Hangouts with with friends, and realising that what was normal in their family might be different to what was normal in mind, like the practices and behaviours, or what is expected from a community or a culture or a country, you know, having relocated several times, it's clear that there are norms and cultures that are associated with a country that are different to others. And so for me, it's exactly the same in a company. So you come in, and you very quickly assess what's expected here. And how am I expected to behave and show up here. And that, for me, is culture
Chris Rainey 7:04
as a great analogy, by the way, because I remember as a kid, first time I walk into my, the homes of my black friends, very different culturally, versus my Indian friends, most of my white friends, and you like, Oh, wow. And you just very quickly get to understand that this is a cultural ring. And this is how things work. And it's very different in my house.
Helen 7:25
And vice versa. I always had strict his dad. So that's why when I used to go to other houses, I was like, wow, they get away with it. Yeah. So that was a culture right there. You know.
Chris Rainey 7:37
So when you think about that, how do you then define what culture you want to be at Rivia? And what does that process look like?
Helen 7:44
I think there's something different about defining a culture when you are coming into a founder led organisation. And I've worked for several founders now and founder led organisations. And I think, when the founder is still in place, and still leading the company, the Chateau that that founder casts is a huge definer of how that culture then shows up. And so if I look at our founder, and I look at the culture of rivian, you know, they're synonymous, right? So he's very humble. He's very optimistic. He's very compassionate. He's very idealistic, and he's very first principled. And all of those things are massive elements of our culture, and they're really defined by him. In the same way, if he was a very different type of human being, then we would have a very different culture, what you're trying to do is to make sure that those elements of the culture are embedded through everything that you do. It's incumbent on us then to make sure that when we're hiring when we're onboarding, when we're performance, managing when we are thinking what our performance and reward elements are, those aspects of the culture are woven through every possible opportunity and moment that matters.
Chris Rainey 9:01
Give me a specific example of how you've done that. You mentioned the cut you some examples, but drill down a little bit more for us looks like so obviously
Helen 9:08
hiring is the is the obvious one, because you're trying to make sure that anybody that's coming in, is going to make the culture better. And so the thing that underlies a lot of the attributes of ideas, this notion of humility, putting weed before me. And so what that means is when you're interviewing and assessing, you're really looking for that team player, you're really looking for someone where the team is going to be better because they have joined it not hero type cultures where it's all about individuals, you know, like diving and catching the ball. That's not what we're looking for. From an onboarding standpoint between myself and our head of l&d. We alternate each week to come to join our new hires in their first hour in the company. And we talk about culture. And we have someone from our l&d team respectively in to viewers and ask us, How does it show up? What does culture mean? How do we define it? What does that look like there today so that we're really from the very second year walking the company, making sure that that is a very prominent part of your experience when it comes to the quarterly what we call recharge conversations. So this is where we sit down with individuals. And we say, right, how am I doing, and we call it recharge one, because there's obviously a real resonance with the brand. And what, also, because you want to feel recharged when you've had it not totally depressed. And so when I, you know, when we're sitting down and having those conversations, we guide those conversations to be as much about not only what have I done, but how have I done it. So the cultural aspects are part of the questions in the guide that we give all of our managers to say, as you're assessing Chris, is Chris doing what he's doing in service to our values, as opposed to doing what he's doing and breaking lots of glass along the way. So that's also deeply embedded. We just been through our calibration session, determining promotions, all of the documentation, when I'm submitting a promotion, or anybody submitting a promotion, we're asking as much about the how, as we are the what. So again, this is just woven through everything. And you can have someone who's doing incredible work. But if they're also doing it, you know, detrimentally towards the values into the culture, then that's not going to be the thing that's going to get you promoted. If anything, it's going to be the thing that gets you an alternative role with another company.
Chris Rainey 11:44
I love that. And I love the fact that you've made it great for the simple for the managers, by giving them those questions, those resource guides, they've already got enough to deal with, right? Coming into support and the guidance that they need to be having, and that in itself creates a culture, because they're always leading the conversations looking through that lens. And then, you know, as they progress, employees progress throughout the business is so embedded in their leadership, I'm just guessing, if someone gets embedded in a way that they lead, that that also reflects and trickles down the organisation.
Helen 12:19
Vocabulary creasing very much part of our vocabulary are the words of our values, you know, we have come together, stay open, ask why zoom out and over deliver. And you know, very regularly, you're sitting in a meeting, and someone just says, we just need to zoom out for a second spective or you'll have someone say, I think we need to stay open, we're not being open as much as we could, which is really trying to drive this first principles approach. And so that really is about forget what you know, forget what you've done before. Let's just stay open, that could be a better way. And I think that's the other thing when you have founders, because they don't bring, you know, 20 years, 30 years of doing this in other companies, everything they do is first principles. What's the right thing here? Right?
Chris Rainey 13:08
Yeah, no, I love that. And I think you made a really good point. Now, it's really important that we help create a common language to have the conversation because otherwise, there's a lot of times where people will mean the same thing, but it using different language. And you can sort of misinterpret that. And it causes so many issues, miscommunication are probably the some of most issues in organisations as well. But you have that common language, to be able to have that conversation. Everyone knows exactly what you mean. And you're on the same page. And to your point, especially within HR. You can't have a fixed mindset, it's moving so fast. You know, you need to be agile, you need to constantly be pivot in if you're not, you're not going to survive long in HR. Things are always changing. Feeds are always evolving. There's no such thing as any more of this is just how we do things. That's not That's not good enough. And I think it's
Helen 13:55
harder now, Chris than ever before. You know, we were talking as part of our leadership summit a couple of weeks ago, we were talking to our leaders that now is probably the hardest ever time to manage. I agree, because of the diversity of the workforce. But this this moment, we have five different generations within the workforce, five different generations with massively different expectations of what the company's role is to them. That means as a manager, you have to be incredibly ambidextrous in making sure that you know what may have worked for you 10 years ago, practices as a manager isn't necessarily going to translate in the same way today. And so trying to make the role of the manager as easy as possible, just given the complex landscape in which they're operating is incumbent on certainly us in our profession, to be constantly seeking for simplicity.
Chris Rainey 14:51
How do you assess for that? What kind of questions because it's interesting and I'm interviewing at the moment for a couple of roles and I'm finding certain people I'm meeting to have a lot of exposure Koreans are coming in with a very much a fixed mindset. I have done it for this many years. I know how to do it, but it's just opposite of what you're describing. You need someone that, okay, we value your experience, we understand that, but this is the way we work. And this is it. Sometimes I find it really hard.
Helen 15:15
It's really hard because you can't always catch it when you're interviewing. Yeah. Sure, and often is a line of questioning, that's about learning. Because if you are open, and you don't believe that you have to just keep bringing the playbook from before to the each company that you move, you're really trying to understand that appetite for learning, and to make sure that there's not this dogmatic mindset that's going to prevent that from being the case. So you're looking for a line of questioning that's around, when did you fail? What are the sorts of examples of where you, you came in with one perspective, and you came out with another examples of where your team or a meeting have moved you from your existing position to a different position. So really looking for behavioural based interview questions that are looking for examples of where someone's perspective has been changed? Again, you could have someone who's incredibly good at answering. And then in the day to day practice, you're not seeing those things exhibited. But you're trying to really weed that out if you can, one
Chris Rainey 16:27
of you are thinking about what she was talking because I think when we first spoke you you were growing so quickly, and you can probably give our listeners an idea of that on that point. And how do you retain the culture, as you scale so fast? It's challenging,
Helen 16:39
that's for sure. And again, to put it into perspective, when I joined four years ago, we were just coming up between sort of 700 to 1000, people coming up to the end of 2019. In 2020, we went from 1000, to three and a half 1000, in 21, from three and a half 1000 to 10 and a half 1000 And halfway through 22 to 16 and a half 1000. So we went from 1000 to 16 and a half 1000 In about two years and eight, nine months. The challenge during that time, which all was during COVID, by the way, because only in some of our environments where you physically able to observe the culture, because when I went you asked me the question that beginning like how do you define culture? Well, it's like what's expected here, and the examples you and I cited with things that we could see, right, suddenly, were in this remote environment, other than the plant where people were physically proximate. And some of our other design and building and testing a lot of Unmaker type roles were very much in the office because they had to be massive percentage of people were sitting at home. So we weren't able to visibly see culture, we were having to just try and test it through any zoom interactions we were having. And I think it's Simon Sinek was saying about the challenge with COVID is that, you know, a lot of the culture and relationships are built at the interactions that happen between the meetings, you took away the opportunity for that through COVID. So extra challenge that you're doing it in a remote first environment. And so we had to make sure that all of the things whether it was the onboarding or the recharge, or the total reward, or the bi weekly, all hands was an was a major driver for us. And so during that time through a combination of RJ, every second Friday morning, in fact, during the wild times of COVID, it was every Friday morning. And then when we started to get a little steadier in our growth it became every second Friday morning, I would sit down and just do a very intimate talk update to the whole company. Every single, all hands, every single all hands, he would talk about culture. And he would talk about what's important, and what's prevalent, and what we need to work on and what we need to tweak. And so that was massively infused throughout the company. And then again, it put a lot of pressure on us that all of those programmes and practices and everything that was symbolic, was also reinforcing the culture. So that whether you were a service centre person sitting out on the East Coast, getting ready to service vehicles, or whether you were sitting in the plant, or whether you were designing the future vehicle, or whether you're a software engineer figuring out how to, you know unlock the potential of the technology in the vehicle that they're understanding and how they would play back and define the culture. If they were asked the question would be entirely consistent. And that's what we were really trying to drive towards, such that the cultural aspects almost became verbs that we use, you know, my example of let's zoom out or let's stay open, they just became part of our language that everybody is using all of the time. It's
Chris Rainey 19:59
interesting cuz you mentioned that because now we kind of realise that that is the glue, isn't it? Especially when you have a hybrid workforce, the culture is the glue that holds it all together. Because I thought and you have to be intentional about how that shows up in every part of the employee lifecycle along the way, like because it means every single part and like, you have to be super intentional, because as you said, in the office, it just happened by the watercooler conversations between meeting conversations. But that doesn't work the same way remotely, if you if you're not intentionally, making sure that's embedded into this every system processes, conversations, all hands, it just doesn't happen. Even
Helen 20:41
like your your reward programmes, you know, we decided early on. And again, I remember a really early line of questioning with RJ when I joined, which was, how do you think about pay? And how do you think about performance? And how do you think about, you know, reward. And that led us to have a bonus programme that is about collective success. So going back to that we versus me, oftentimes you have these highly collaborative cultures, and then you look at the, the setup of the rewards doesn't match, or even individualistic, right? I am going to try all of you in order to get the best bonus possible. Why is the penny not dropped on that? You know, because it's, it's us against the competition. It's not as against each other. And so, yeah, the reward systems really have to also reflect your culture. Yeah,
Chris Rainey 21:31
I think another version of that, that I spoke about recently on one of our events was, if you want your leaders to become talent, exporters, then not just talent importers, they also have to be incentivized the right way. Right? So if you're saying, hey, we want to grow leaders that develop talent that can leave and work in other parts of the organisation, then you have to incentivize them that way. So when it comes to looking at the leadership review, at the end of the year, say, Oh, well, Chris has been developing great talent, and as an analyst has moved throughout the organisation and, and to different parts of the business, and you have to reward that, if you're not rewarding, they're like, Well, I don't want Chris to go anyway, just I don't wanna let you saying, Oh, my team is a great performer, it
Helen 22:10
has to be that you're rewarding people to put the company as priority number one, and then the function and the team and the individual follow their, you know, it's like assaulting at the enterprise level, like real enterprise collaborators, enterprise thinkers, system thinkers, everything has to support
Chris Rainey 22:29
that. What are some of the leadership challenges when you're scaling so quickly?
Helen 22:34
Yeah, there's a really obvious biggest one, and that is the types of leaders that survive and thrive in this type of environment. So when you're when you're small, and you're looking out as to where you're headed, the destination is obviously to be a significantly bigger company, the types of leaders that you believe you need, obviously, types of leaders that have done jobs in significantly bigger companies. And so we spent a lot of time looking for leaders that had worked at scale, went out and brought in some leaders that had worked at scale, and realised that if they'd only worked at scale, but hadn't worked scaling, so building and trying to, you know, do all of the things at the same time, they were really struggling to survive and thrive in this environment. And so our biggest learning has been the types of leaders that work in this environment, a leaders that have operated at scale, but also done the building. And so the analogy I always use during interviews is, you know, there are examples of people that moved into a home where the home really didn't need a lot of work, they maybe just needed to decorate the bedroom or redo the kitchen that's working at scale. There are other people that bought a plot of land, and went and got an architect and decided I want to build something from scratch. And so my questions are around when do you do examples of both of those things? Because those things are required to be successful here. Because you have to build the architecture. And if you've only worked in that house that was already built, that's already been done for you. And you've never had to really do the context switching required in an environment like
Chris Rainey 24:17
this. How did you find that I'm gonna, I'm going to turn that on you because I find I speak to many CHR OHS that go from working at the IBM's, the Walmarts, etc. to them being CHR OHS in a SeaBIOS in startups, and really struggle for the exact reasons. There's someone who came to mind that called me like three weeks into the day was so excited. They went from 100,000 Plus employee, company, etc, to a start up and they called me a couple of weeks says I can't do this. All of the day to day heavy lifting all of you doing everything that you're saying you're building the whole house, the foundations, the water, everything, all of it. How did you find that when you went from large organisations that you described the beginning to all of a sudden now you're in a startup environment,
Helen 24:58
I would say The thing that I had to my advantage was that the bigger companies that I've worked in, I'd worked in through very fast scale times. So whether it was Siebel, whether it was the amount of change that we dealt with at Yahoo, the steady estate company was definitely cantar. Because we had about 35,000 employees during my tenure there as as head of HR, then when I left Qatar to join saunas, my HR team at Kanto was bigger than sawn off to the company, it required you then to be very much into the the day to day I'm very much into the details, I didn't really find that too challenging, because I felt like I'd never really worked in an environment where things had been really steady and slow and predictable. I've always been in some kind of build environment. So that transition didn't ever feel that challenging. And so by the time I came to rivian, which has definitely been, you know, the scaling opportunity of my career just in terms of the piercer and speed at which we scaled, I had to draw upon all of those experiences in order to do what I needed to do here and build my first team, you know, my direct reports who had also done the same. And again, I'm just really fortunate to have a team that in any given day, we can play at 30,000 feet or two feet off the floor. And that context switching one, it's really exhausting. And two, it's not for everybody, it really isn't for everybody else, you know, you're trying to weed out almost I was interviewing somebody yesterday, and I spent 10 minutes almost trying to put them off. And if they were still interested, then we can pivot to selling because it just isn't for everybody. And you know, you almost want it to be a repellent as much as you do for it to be an attraction.
Chris Rainey 26:52
That's such a really good point, because it's not for everyone is it? I tried to sell it to my friends who want to be entrepreneurs, I'm like, You don't understand? Oh, it sounds glamorous. It sounds great. But when you are dealing with everything, because I was marking operation production, people recruiting you name it is there. And it's not for everyone to do that. And yeah, I've realised that I've made some, you know, some mistakes in hiring early in, in where I've hired people that have really come in, you know, super high level strategic, but aren't willing to get down and they're like, oh, okay, now I'm here, Chris, and you're paying me use of my money? Where's all my team? And I'm like, no, no, I need you to do that. We're a staff. We're a start up, we don't have the resources, like in your previous team to have 10 people working for you to do all those. Okay? I'm like, Oh, why did I not see this new interview process? And that's
Helen 27:43
a military thing to write. Because there's a there's sometimes a not necessarily always a capability issue. Sometimes there's just a mindset, like, I don't want to be doing all like this is a well, not a skill thing, right? Go down and do some of the details. But I'm at this late stage of my career now where I don't want to do that. So you know, you're also trying to define, is this a skill? Well,
Chris Rainey 28:07
you've mentioned first principle, thinking quite a few times, and I'm aware that maybe not everyone may not understand what we're referring to that. Could you elaborate on that a little bit more?
Helen 28:17
Yeah, one of our heads of brand described it, I think, in the most simplistic way, which is, forget what you know, forget what you know, which is really hard. Forget what, you know, really hard idea of first principles. And it's a very engineering term where you really are coming and starting from a blank sheet. And you're saying, right, first of all, what's the problem we're trying to solve? What's the problem? We're trying to solve a line on what that problem is, and forgetting what you know, and what you've done before determining what's the right way to solve it here. And, you know, when I did the Welcome to the new hires this week, I was talking about first principles and talking about, you know, this is a pretty torrid time in the world right now, we have all of the things that are going on in the world, we have geopolitical issues, we have wars, we have socio economic issues, all that have an impact on first of all, how we feel coming to work every day. But also, secondly, decisions that may have worked 612 18 months ago may not be valid today. And so you're constantly taking all of that context into consideration and saying, I've never done it on this day with this context. And so I don't have the answer. And I think if you can just keep reminding yourself that you will have far more of a first principle approach than just assuming you can bring what you've done before and it's going to work today.
Chris Rainey 29:41
How has that impacted the way you personally lead and look at building an HR HR function?
Helen 29:49
It's harder the longer you do this, because you assume that you've seen every possible permutation of what what's going to happen. I've seen that before. So first of all, it's almost To swear word rivian. When someone says, Well, when I was at Sony,
Chris Rainey 30:05
I can imagine no, no, no, no. It's like the door shut,
Helen 30:09
the blinds come down, somebody comes in behind you. So it's not a saying that you ever hear so my team around it by saying things like, well in a previous life, you know, because we try and like look for other terms. Yeah, so that's something that's not in our vocabulary, that's for sure. So one thing is you just don't have that in your vocabulary. I think the other thing for me is treat your curiosity equal to your knowledge. And I think oftentimes, you want to be doing a lot more monologue than dialogue. And so it's been very conscious of saying, What am I not thinking about? What am I not considered. And they're just sentences that I try and add on to when I maybe have had a point of view on something, or being conscious of holding back on my point of view, to make sure that I solicit the points of view and perspectives of others before I divulge, perhaps what my point of view is, because I don't want them to be inhibited by knowing what my perspective might be. So that's also something where I triangle last rather than go first, love
Chris Rainey 31:14
it? Is that changed how you hire for your own team? How you traditionally hire people for your team?
Helen 31:20
Yeah, I think it makes you a lot more open to different experiences and different skills. Because if you're thinking more than I'm hiring you for your skills, versus I'm hiring you for your experiences, then you will look a lot broader into adjacent type functions and teams and industries in order to solicit the right people for your team.
Chris Rainey 31:44
One of the things you spoke about for is is the power of anticipation. Yeah.
Helen 31:50
I owe this completely to Scott Gryphon, who's on my team. So Scott is one of our senior business partners, business partners and incredible talent, Scott did a sort of a semi white paper, but also pulled some other papers together that talks about the power of anticipation. And he did that at a time when if you think about when I joined the company, and Scott joined about six months after I did, and we were at that time, Chris, we had no products on the road. So all of these products were in development and hadn't yet been manufactured. So we were anticipating the launch of the r1 T, the launch of the Amazon vehicle. And then the launch of the r1 s we will also anticipating going public and all of the buildup that goes with getting your company ready to to IPO. And so every morning, you woke up with this laundry list of things that you were excited about because you were anticipating the challenge was when you have that level of anticipation, it was so high because there were these huge milestones that were all coming, that when you start to hit off those major milestones. And especially in a business like ours, where the time to develop a product is extended because you have a very complex product that you're developing. The challenge becomes how do you maintain that same level of excitement and anticipation when the next product isn't going to be ready until 2025? Now we'll launch and show the world it in 2024. But that's a couple of years timeframe between our last products hitting the market and our next products hitting the market. And so you're trying to think about how do you create those same levels of excitement, anticipation through smaller milestones during a time where you waiting for those bigger milestones to hit? Yeah. And it was just such an insightful white paper around how to think about that, and how excited we'd all been, because of all of this thing, that the stuff that we were looking ahead to a bit like when you're packing and getting excited for a holiday, that's true anticipation of going can often be more fun or a night out than the actual experience itself. And so it's just taking that same mental model a model and applying it into how to keep people inspired in an organisational setting. Yeah,
Chris Rainey 34:18
I know we can apply that to all parts of our life. For sure. For sure. Not just professionally, but also personally, as I was
Helen 34:27
getting ready for a night out can often be so much more often than the night. Yeah,
Chris Rainey 34:31
when I see my wife and our friends. My house getting ready. Yeah, they haven't a wall over time. I might go out. It's like 11pm We're still here. Still flying in the house. No, no, I agree. And listen, I love the journey you've been on and I know we've also made it sound like it's been really easy, but I'm sure it's been tough. You know, what's been sort of the biggest challenges that you face personally in this journey?
Helen 34:56
I think probably just the the sheer time commitment and investment to certainly at rivian, to get ready to what we needed, you know, all of the milestones that we had to. And I always describe it as, especially when you're in the early days and you're building, you have to be very, very conscious and intentional of the day is where you work in the business, because you haven't got all of those people to delegate to. So you're getting pulled in to more tactical work that you otherwise wouldn't be involved in. So you're in the business, but then at night, you have to work on it. Because at night, you then have to take the time to say, right, in order for me not to have to do that, again, what are the capabilities and leaders that I need in my team, that I can start to delegate that work and a portion out where that work should reside? The people that fail in this environment get so consumed by working in it, that they don't carve out the space and time to work on it. And I think when the days are so full, that has to be at night, and I say at night, you know, evenings and weekends, but I think that the tough thing was doing the work while doing the build and the time investment required to do that. What
Chris Rainey 36:14
did you What do you wish you would have known going into this?
Helen 36:17
I wish I'd have known the so it's so obvious. It's so obvious, but taking your time to make sure that every hire that you make is a hell yes. A hell yes. Because if it's a yes, a good and it's not a great, phenomenal, hell yes. It's a no. And I would say that that would be the advice I would give myself and the advice I would get. Give everybody else who's hiring and building a team.
Chris Rainey 36:52
And where can people connect with you? If they wanna reach out say hi, probably the best
Helen 36:56
way is LinkedIn is the best way to to get hold of me. So yeah, very open to anybody wants to reach out amazing.
Chris Rainey 37:02
Well, firstly, thank you for coming on the show. appreciate you sharing your journey and experience everyone listening or listening. So below, I'm gonna go connect there as well. And I'm extremely excited to get my hands on a rivian Whenever you're here in Europe as well, like since I first saw it came up on my YouTube suggested videos. A long, long time ago. I was like, Wow, what an incredible organisation and then, of course the work you did with Amazon to obviously build. I see to delivery trucks everywhere all over the UK people aren't even aware of that they will be now after they hear after they hear this.
Helen 37:37
And Chris there's also some footage where Freddie Flintoff drove an hour when t on top here so you can track that down and find it which for me is a Brit Top Gear is of course, you know, I have anything to do with with vehicles. So that was very exciting when that happened.
Chris Rainey 37:54
That's a big moment. Anyone in the UK which is Top Gear knows right actually globally suits global To be honest, is global. Listen, I wish you all the best until next week, and all the best. Until then. Thanks so much. Thanks so much grace.
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Richard Letzelter, CHRO at Acino.