‘Build your business with intent,’ says Personio’s CPO

Hiring candidates that are the right fit for an organization is always somewhat a guessing game – but of course, HR leaders are now becoming increasingly equipped with tools and technologies that can better assist them with their decision making. 

However, it’s important to remember that each new hire will 

Lenke Taylor, CPO, Personio

make a significant impact on the business as a whole – no matter the level they’re entering at. 

This is because each employee brings a wealth of experience, knowledge, and skills that will not only shape their way of working, but their colleagues and the business at large, too. 

For Lenke Taylor, Chief People Officer at Personio, this is why businesses need to hire and operate with intention. 

Taylor, who has spent several years in the tech industry working for companies such as Google, Twitch, and Buzzfeed, is focused on growing Personio’s products and business, while utilizing past experience to overcome any issues that arise. 

In an exclusive interview, Taylor discussed why it’s important to build a culture of intention, and how she’s gone about achieving this at Personio. 

Building with intention and breaking down silos

For Taylor, there have been two key focuses of her role: How can Personio think about intentional design for scale, to benefit the business and employees alike? And how the company create an intentional culture to become the business it wants to be?

To address this, Taylor says: “One things that’s been really important in our business transformation is looking at how we  ensure it’s built with intention.

It is very easy to get in a panic with the focus of ‘just hiring someone’, but if organizations are not building with intent, they may gain speed in the short term, but you will lose pace in the long term. This will be because they won’t be set up for success.

“By designing an organization with intent, we can create clear paths for the goals that we want people to achieve.”

Taylor also highlights the importance of culture in relation to building a business with intent, explaining that as businesses expand and grow, the culture will become more complex. 

“As leaders, it’s really important that we are making decisions about who we want to be and how we help our employees,” she says.

“We can then scale to become the company that we want to be, not the company that our employees naturally make because of where they worked before.”

Another way of creating an inclusive, intentional culture is by breaking down silos. 

Taylor’s role spans many functions, encompassing different specialists roles, enabling her to identify how working in silos causes missed opportunities in solving higher order problems – for example, to be more effective and efficient in serving customers, employees, and the business. 

In fact, Taylor believes that breaking down silos allows the team to better solve that higher order problem and to be more efficient. 

“One of the things I see here, if I just talked about the people team, is the beauty of having specialist functions. 

“I have people who know talent acquisition, compensation, or organizational development really well, for example. This enables us to solve the problem together, or I can really lean into individuals so we can figure it out as a team.

This drives a much more powerful outcome than being an order taker.

“From this, I think we also see that employees are much more excited about their job, because it’s not just ‘I took the order and delivered the order’, but it helps employees understand how their piece fits in the bigger picture.”

Fostering strong relationships between employees and leaders

Although there are many different forms of leadership style, it’s important for each to have a clear understanding of what they want to achieve, while making a conscious effort to better understand the business and its employees. For Taylor, this is a key starting point.

She explains: “If I think about a real time scenario, I have new leaders coming into my business that are helping us solve really big things. 

“A traditional HR approach might be to focus on hiring someone to fill the role, and then ensuring they’re onboard correctly – so did they get their laptop, and badge, for example? 

I’ve encouraged the team to think about helping that leader be successful beyond that. So, how can we help them think about their own organizational design and leadership team and the types of people that we need?”

To improve upon this, Taylor stresses the importance of thinking about people and team development. 

“What are the things that we’re doing to help that leader assimilate with their team and get them aligned around this shared vision?,” she asks. 

“I’m encouraging the team to think holistically, and to bring that experience together – so I think that is another way to build that relationship with the executive.

Although selecting the right candidates to fill a job role is important, businesses must also focus on retaining and developing current talent. 

As with many HR leaders, Taylor identifies that this is an ongoing challenge, while reiterating the importance of listening to employees. 

“Since I’ve been traveling, I’ve had many opportunities to meet with employees in person to understand their experiences in the company,” she expresses.

“We’re therefore shifting our approach for the next 12 months to really focus on using our Personio Pulse survey tool, so that we can understand more detailed metrics and data.”

To better support this, Taylor and her team are conscious of creating communities within different locations across the globe in which Personio operates. 

This is an area of improvement for Personio, where the business plans to roll out a more structured approach to how it thinks about site culture and leadership over the coming months.

This will ultimately help to drive people’s engagement and connection with their peers.

Sharing her concluding thoughts, Taylor expresses: “I want myself and my team to power the capabilities of our people – or to unlock the power of our people – to use Personio’s tagline. 

This is how we’re going to be successful – through the capabilities of our team members, and how they will work together to reach those goals. 

“I think there’s a lot of things that we can do as a people team to help enable that for their success. 

“I want the team to understand that when we see the business be successful, it’s because we helped them. And I think, if we’re not doing that, it will certainly hinder the ability of the business to be successful. This is my main focus for the future.”