???Building People functions that drive great leadership | Mikaila Read, MUI
Part of our weekly People and L&D Hero Interview Series. We chat with some of the top voices in People Ops and talent development to understand what learning looks like today.
Mikaila Read is the Director of People & Culture at MUI. With over seven years of experience spanning progressive HR and Marketing roles, Mikaila spearheads initiatives that scale culture in remote settings, fosters strategic partnerships across the organization, and facilitates complex cross-functional projects. She prides herself in a data-driven approach, using people analytics and behavioral science to uncover unique needs across her employee population and connect people with key resources and programs.
At Impala, Mikaila led remote experience and transformation at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. At MUI, Mikaila has influenced and owned core policies and processes including HRIS systems, time off, promotions, comprehensive internal training, career ladders, talent partnering, and more. When we have an HR question, we’re happy to turn to Mikaila for insights!
In our conversation, we talked about the importance of async and flexible work systems for employee engagement, the feedback loop HR teams can rely on, sparking conversations around management and feedback, and more. Read on to learn about:
Nice to meet you, Mikaila! Thanks for taking the time to chat! To start off, how did you get into People Ops??
I had a really non-traditional entry point to HR, and actually started off working in marketing. I was working as a marketing executive for a HR tech product and part of my job was understanding the reasons how people would benefit from our HR technologies and the challenges that they were facing in their organizations.
I found the HR field really fascinating and eventually one day I said, I'd rather be on the front lines helping people have more fulfilling days at work and bringing great outcomes to businesses and people alike.
So not having the traditional credentials meant that I had to find nuanced or different roles in HR. I was very fortunate to discover a role for a remote experience manager position at a tech scale-up called Impala. They had positioned this opportunity as an "Onboarding Buddy” position. Impala was distributed and they were remote, and it felt like a job that could allow me to travel the world while making people happy and connecting them with their teams.?
Who doesn't want to do that job, right? It was like a dream job. But then COVID hit and my position quickly evolved into a people ops manager role. From there, I just started learning on the job and eventually did very well in that position. I started taking on more of a program manager role.?
Today, I am the Senior People and Culture Partner at MUI and my work at MUI entails a lot of what I used to do and a lot more new things too.
Wow! Sounds like a journey. I’m curious to find out more about what your day-to-day looks like. What are some of the key job responsibilities or big initiatives that are on your plate at the moment?
For the year of 2024 I’m focusing on roadmapping the year ahead and thinking about the most important and highest impact areas for our people and talent verticals.?
Let me explain my process for going about this: I like to organize initiatives and work around the employee life cycle. So that means I'm thinking about ways to optimize at each different stage: the process of attraction, recruitment, onboarding, full working performance, enablement, and then finally exit.?
For this year I've got a high focus on employer branding to help support our hiring objectives, and lots of partnerships with DEI focused recruitment agencies to help us understand better what we could be tracking, how we could be examining these metrics over time for real change, and to just help us really diversify our team more.?
At MUI we are sticking to an asynchronous-first approach and sticking true to remote distributed and async first, which offers an even higher level of flexibility and choice for our employees. Employee engagement is a huge priority so that means looking at the ways that we gather and act upon feedback, how we listen to employees, how we show that we're listening to them and really answering and addressing their needs before they become issues.
Another priority of mine is performance enablement at a manager specific level. We do have a lot of new first time managers at MUI.? They remain one of the most important levers on employee engagement and satisfaction in a business.
So we want to make sure they're equipped with the training that they need to do that really well and to see the benefits from that.
How are you navigating all of those things and thinking about what's to come? What's the most important and why from a business perspective??
My highest priority items come from two places: our finance and our employee engagement data. I’m listening at all levels of the organization and that includes our CEO’s, our co-founders, and our managers.
I do keep an eye on what’s trending, but I also make sure not to exclude feedback from my organization. So really their feedback is the first place that I usually look at for opportunities that could really have a far reaching impact.?
I also pay attention to what can we do within a sustainable and healthy budget or like what kind of revenue generation we need to achieve and what can I do to make sure that happens. Another important factor is people and manager enablement as we know those things are going to help reduce turnover.?
In terms of looking ahead, I’m active in multiple different HR communities. Because I come from that non-traditional HR background and didn’t have an allocated mentor I had to create my own pockets of support or information. I'm a member of many Slack community groups that include members who are very generous with their time, experience, and skills. I also leverage newsletters as they help me keep a pulse on what's really current and what's trending, what people are worried about, what people are excited about.
How are you thinking about manager enablement and performance enablement at the manager level???
We have this concept at MUI, managers of one, that's who we like to employ and attract to the team. We’re looking for people that are able to take ownership of their delivery and their personal development too.
At the same time, we do have this responsibility to provide good management. I don't want us to sit on that responsibility lightly. We have folks with varying degrees of experience and philosophies on what management is all about.?
At MUI we’re detailing our “pillars of management" on what being a good manager looks like and how their responsibilities correspond to the actions they need to take.
I think every organization will have different “management pillars,” and we probably share a lot of general people management and best practices. However, the degree of responsibility and how much people are expected to lean into things like career conversations and onward planning of that variety are going to be different.
At MUI I envision a workplace where managers are really partners in employee career advancement. The plan is to engage managers in outlining our own playbook, our own philosophy, and to make that accessible throughout the organization so everyone can understand it and see how it influences our operations and engagement between employees and managers.?
When you establish a philosophy of people management at MUI, how do you get managers to fully understand that philosophy and implement that in their daily operations??
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To create a meaningful and impactful management philosophy it really requires engaging managers on defining that philosophy and articulating it. How we express this stuff does deeply matter.
The one area that we can all agree and start from is: what are our values? What is the type of culture that we have been trying to create and evolve as we grow? It's not just about me leading this, right? It's about finding a way to facilitate these important conversations in a values driven manner.?
This is what’s key to an effective management philosophy and how it comes to be and how it takes shape. I think there's also this practicality of just identifying management pillars, right?
We're naturally going to have people that have different managerial approaches, and it’s actually very valuable to have a variety of managerial approaches to accommodate different types of employees. However, we do need to be anchored in some foundational pillars that unite our approach and form this common thread in how conversations get carried out, how decisions get made, and how work gets assigned.?
At MUI there's a lot of excitement around developing our own internal manager playbook upheld by pillars that are rooted in our values.I'm really looking forward to those conversations and we’ll spark those conversations starting with a question set: What's the purpose of a manager? Why do you think you need to exist in this organization? What's your value??
What's the process of creating a manager training and feedback program that's actually lived day to day in the future?
Yes, what a great question! It’s important to define these values and create a proper feedback process, right? We have a fully collaborative 360 degree exercise involving every person at MUI. It’s a combination of synchronous and asynchronous activities that has led to the manager program we have today.
I would follow that exact same approach, and maybe have different guardrails around who's participating to what degree and in what ways. Of course, I think everybody should have some level of input to the program because that is how we know we’re going to get the best out of our people.
We want to empower managers because managers really help to get the most out of our people. Managers are like the single biggest varying factor on a company's engagement levels. They have enormous power day to day, and we want them to be good at what they do.
This approach is all about identifying that central unifying objective that the organization can all get around and agree is important. The aim is to have everyone’s input and we will always start with the question of: why are we doing this exercise? What is the expected or anticipated outcome? And then let the conversation take shape from there.?
I will plan out questions and conversation topics ahead in order to account for all sorts of different outcomes, but it’s also important to let things organically take shape. I could plan and plan, and then someone might ask a really important question in a meeting. It's worth dedicating time and discussion to this point.
It’s so amazing to hear how much MUI time and energy it dedicates to developing a collaborative manager program! What would you say is the hardest part about your job right now?
The hardest part about my job is that there's only one of me and I can see so much opportunity for growth and improvement but naturally I can’t do everything on my own. So I think that's one major barrier. The other thing that keeps me up at night is the challenges of async work.
I'm a huge advocate for remote work and the async model, but I will be the first person to hold my hands up and also say it is not without its challenges. Alignment is difficult, documenting decisions is difficult, figuring out how to get input from a variety of people in a variety of time zones is difficult. Seeing how people are doing and understanding if everything is okay is also difficult.
When you're so focused on execution and so focused on finding the winning strategy and making it happen, this tunnel vision just can lead you to overlooking important things as they arise. I'm also thinking a lot about the human energy crisis.
I think COVID was one domino in a serious lineup of blows to people's holistic health,and frankly, they just haven't recovered from that yet. The idea that it's because people are not resilient enough is, I think, a lie.
Resilience is a very valuable practice, but it's also a very important skill to develop. Putting it all on people's resilience also makes it easy for business leaders to escape the responsibility they have to fix broken systems of work and living. And that's just something that really keeps me up at night is knowing I can't solve this for the world, for my team, and even I can't solve it alone.
What are some of the trends that you're seeing in your role in People Ops and in manager development right now? Are there any that you're excited about or maybe not so excited about?
Let's start with the obvious! Not super excited about this trend of return to office, or at least enforced return to office, where there's only a fake degree of choice involved. I think it's just such a shame. It really is turning backs on different groups that have been historically excluded from the workforce, and still are today.
Let's acknowledge the fact that there are so many statistics out there about people of color saying they experienced fewer microaggressions and are less fearful to work remotely than to come into an office. People who are disabled also do not have access to the same number of opportunities when you shut the door on remote work.The list goes on and on. And these aren't unique people. It's humanity. This is people.?
On the other hand, there have been some really compelling and exciting models created for a hybrid work that does emphasize choice like returning to the office.
As far as things I'm excited about, and particularly with management enablement, is this push towards really becoming a coaching culture where every manager is a coach.
Yes, management is there to deliver results, but it is also to multiply impact and be a multiplier, but it's how you go about that now that's different. Delivering results is not done by micromanagement, aggressive tracking, and publishing of progress reports and updates.
It's now about coaching people to unlock their full potential and really achieve the best of their abilities and to have more opportunities to use your strengths and do what you do best every day at work.
Because we know that, that's what works to get people and business outcomes, right? It's giving people a chance to do what they're good at. Weaknesses really rarely become strengths, but strengths when they are maximized become this unstoppable force and they unlock new leadership capability and potential too.
Thanks for reading Yen's Newsletter.
I’m Yen, co-founder at Kona. My goal is to help every manager be a great leader. You might be managing a team yourself, or supporting better managers at your organization. Hopefully, this newsletter helps you look at the ever-changing landscape of leadership in a new way.
Since late 2019, I’ve interviewed 1500+ remote managers, People Ops leaders, and tech executives to learn how they lead teams and design incredible distributed company cultures. While every company’s different, everyone’s trying to answer the same big question: “How do you enable amazing people to do amazing work, while remote?”
That’s the great thing about big questions, they bring people together. Learning is sharing, and I’ve always looked to share everything we know as soon as we learn it. That's the goal for this newsletter: capture and synthesize all of our remote management learnings in a neat and shareable archive.
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