The People Everywhere Show

Women too often get stuck in middle management. It’s a broken rung in the corporate ladder. For every 100 men who are promoted from entry level positions to management, only 87 women make that transition. In this episode we explore this topic and, more importantly, what can be done to address it with Kim Havens and Noa Ries, Co-founders of Kahilla.

Kahilla is a digital leadership and development platform for underrepresented communities in the corporate world. They’ve started with focusing on helping women build community and the skills needed to succeed professionally. Kahilla is building a support system through a cross-industry community for individuals to be open, vulnerable, and candid with peers.

Noa and Kim are an absolute delight to speak with. They bring a joyous energy to every conversation I’ve had with them, as you’ll hear in this recording.

In this episode, we talk about building intentional, cohesive, and cozy—yes, *cozy*—companies with Brie Wolfson, founder of Constellate. We geek out on:

• Why Operating Principles are more useful than company values (and how to develop them)
• The role Culture Carriers play in scaling your company (and how to recognize and nurture them)
• How to build a Culture of Writing that helps your company feel cozy.

Brie is the founder of Constellate and creator of The Kool-Aid Factory, a series of web zines about building great organizations. She has worked at organizations like Stripe, Figma, and Google, and consulted with dozens of startups on how to scale culture.

• Anything You Want, by Derek Sivers
• How to Operate, Keith Rabois
• The Peanut Butter Memo, by Brad Garlinghouse
• Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott

• Setting the Table by Danny Meyer
• Radical Acceptance by Tara Brach
• Atlas of the Heart and Dare to Lead by Brene Brown
• Like a Rolling Stone by Jann Werner

Andrew Blain, founder of of remote:af, talks with us about how the Remote Agile Framework can help leaders foster greater connection, motivation, and autonomy on the teams they lead. We also get into complexity theory, practical techniques to empower teams to make decisions, the potential that remote has to transform work and life, and so much more. 

Andrew is a founder of remote:af (aka remote agile framework) and Elabor8, Australia's leading lean/agile consultancy. He is an experienced technology leader with expertise in strategy, organizational design, complex facilitation and adaptive leadership.

• Cynefin: Wikipedia, video
• An Everyone Culture
• The Principles of Product Development Flow
• Beyond Budgeting

How does a 1200-person office-based company transform into a leading remote-first company? Jason Morwick is Head of Remote-First at Cactus. In this episode, he takes us deep into how Cactus went all-in on remote-first and became one of Quartz's 20 Best Companies for Remote Workers. 

This episode is packed with useful info for supporting a remote-first, globally distributed team. We talk about crafting policies, working with budgets, experimenting with tools, organizing retreats, and so much more. Jason also shares wisdom on leading change and how to help team members feel like they're driving the transformation. 

Jason Morwick is Head of Remote-First at Cactus and the author of Remote Leadership (2021), among other books. He started working remotely in 2006 and, prior to Cactus, consulted with companies to help them make the transition to remote work back when "remote work" was called "teleworking."

• Quartz's 20 Best Companies for Remote Workers (2022)
• Remote Leadership and Jason's author page
• Deep Work

Sarah Young is the founder and CEO of Zing Collaborative, a leadership development company that helps high-impact, high-integrity organizations, teams, and individuals elevate their leadership capacity. She is also the author of Expansive Impact: An Invitation to Lead in Everyday Moments, which came out earlier this year. In Expansive Impact, Sarah offers a framework to elevate your impact as a leader while remaining grounded in the truest version of yourself.

• Expansive Impact
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

• The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership
• Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers
• Byron Katie's The Work

We sat down to talk about all of this and more with Amy Robinson. Amy has decades of experience leading HR in startups at every stage of growth, from very early through IPO. Today, she helps leaders scale as an executive coach and founder of Pivotal Moments.

Amy has tremendous insight into not just how People organizations get built, but how companies evolve, how leaders and teams level up, and how to stay grounded through it all.

Kona recently published their 2022 Remote Manager Report featuring insights from 350 managers across some of the top remote companies in tech.

In this episode, we speak with one of the masterminds behind this report, Kona co-founder Yen Tan. Yen co-founded Kona just before the pandemic. Kona has since grown to be a staple wellbeing platform for remote teams. Kona plugs into Slack and allows team members to report out a quick green/yellow/red 🚦 check-in that gets teams connecting at a deeper level, building trust, and psychological safety.

Yen shares how discovery interviews with remote managers helped shape their product and discussed the insights gleaned over literally thousands of conversations. We dug in particularly deep on the topic of psychological safety, how to measure it, and how to build it within your culture.

(Note: Yen changed their name after we first published this episode. We've updated the show notes and transcript, but you'll hear us use Yen's former name in the audio.)

Nikki has published more than 60 academic articles focusing on understanding the way personality and cognitive ability predict decision-making and job performance. She is an industrial and organizational psychologist, teaches at American University, is a research fellow at the U.S. Army Research Institute for Behavioral and Social Sciences, and is the CEO of Blackhawke Behavior Science, where they bring a research-backed approach to helping startups and venture capitalists make better people decisions, build more effective cultures, and the close the gender gap in venture capital funding.

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