Maintaining Company Culture While Scaling for Success: A Conversation with Eileen Naughton, Zscaler’s Newest Board Member

A few weeks ago, I shared insights on how my guiding principles and life experiences help assist employees at Zscaler with delivering on our promises. It proved to be a valuable and enlightening exercise, so I posed similar questions to the newest member of our Board of Directors, Eileen Naughton, who was most recently the Chief People Officer at Google. Here are insightful highlights from our discussion.

Eileen, how did your early life experiences contribute to your interest in Zscaler?

I am a first-generation American. My parents emigrated from Ireland in the 1950s and arrived in New York, a port of entry and opportunity for millions of Americans. As the middle child in a family of six children, I was a diligent student and was always attracted to serious topics -- economics, geopolitics, cultural anthropology.?At university, I envisioned a career as a journalist, investigating and writing about issues of global significance.??

As it turns out, I’ve worked in information-intensive businesses throughout my career, at the intersection of content creation, access and distribution, with companies dedicated to disseminating trustworthy information and making it as broadly available as possible. I see many parallels to Zscaler, where your goal is providing the security necessary to ensure the information people consume, and the applications they access, can be trusted, and accessed at scale.

Although you envisioned creating content, you ended up on the corporate side of Google. Can you talk about that journey and its relevance?

After starting out as a journalist, I went to the Wharton School and later joined what is now Warner Media. Eventually, as President of the TIME Magazine Group, I had the opportunity to digitize about 20 million photographic images from the Time-Life picture collection. We needed a technology partner, and one of the companies we approached was Google, which back in 2004 was first and foremost a Search company.

True to its mission, Google chose to digitize the entire archive on its own, without any commercial reseller agreement, and make it universally accessible and useful to the world. I was intrigued by Google and its transformative search advertising model.?I knew that digital disruptions to traditional advertising models were here to stay. This led to me joining Google in 2006 as a leader on its large advertiser sales team, helping market the concept of search advertising to global corporate advertisers. It was a tough sell back then.

After nearly 15 years of sustained growth -- for Google and for me, professionally -- I left Google this past spring, and entered a new phase of my career, focused on advisory and Board work.??Reflecting upon this transition and thinking back on my career, I realize that my most meaningful professional experiences -- and what I enjoyed most -- involved working with mission-driven growth companies that seek to improve access to and delivery of information. Zscaler is such a company. It is offering disruptive technology, just as Google was in its early Search days. You are ensuring information security in an era of working from anywhere and, simultaneously, at a time when a shocking number of corporate cyber-attacks are demonstrating the massive vulnerabilities of the old castle-and-moat network security model.

So I was immediately attracted to the possibility of joining Zscaler’s Board, and hope my experience and expertise will prove useful as you grow, and will help you maintain Zscaler’s culture of honesty, integrity, hard work and life-long learning.??

What are some of the lessons you’ve learned that will help us serve our customers better?

First, it’s vital to establish trust, especially when introducing a disruptive technology.?You need to educate customers, listen to their feedback, and be transparent about your product roadmap. Your after-sales support must be fast and reliable. And you need to take the friction out of doing business. This reminds me of an example from the early days of display advertising at Google where we challenged the internal status quo and reduced lengthy media contracts from manual paper documents -- often faxed back and forth -- to a streamlined digital contract that presented terms and conditions clearly, with a simple click-to-accept option.?We removed a painful friction for our customers and sales teams, and it unlocked growth.

Second, focus on culture.?It matters for employees, and it’s felt by your customers too.????Zscaler already has a strong, healthy culture focused on customer success, teamwork, candor, passion and innovation. As Zscaler’s workforce grows, scaling and maintaining the best of your culture -- through a shared sense of mission and values, and through cultural rituals that build community-- will matter more than ever before.?Culture is set by the words and actions of leaders, by the behaviors you expect and the behaviors you accept.?Cultural norms then become understood and appropriated by individuals and teams.?So, it’s absolutely essential that leaders communicate, communicate, communicate.?Never miss an opportunity to remind employees of your mission, or to reinforce your values.

An intentional focus on culture is especially critical given the colossal shift in the way humans now work, due to the Covid pandemic. It’s been fascinating to see how quickly the world adjusted to remote work, and to see that productivity and economic activity did not grind to a halt. We can all speculate about the post-pandemic future of work, and tomes have been written on this topic. One thing I am sure of is that the change in employee expectations about where and when they work will have long-lasting effects.?The other thing I’m sure of is that the role of the manager is forever changed.?

The future of work most certainly will include hybrid working, where some team members are in the office and others are remote. So, a large part of successfully scaling teams and culture in this new normal will fall to managers. They’ll need to integrate new team members remotely, orient them to company norms and help them be productive as quickly as possible.?They’ll need to be super diligent about setting team expectations, checking in, coaching and providing feedback.??They’ll need to lead with empathy and recognize when stress levels are reaching a boiling point -- for the individual, and at the team level.?It means managers will need to adopt a different mindset, whether they’re a CEO, a divisional head, or the leader of a small group of individuals. I believe it is every manager’s responsibility to reiterate the company’s mission, goals, and purpose; to live the company values in words and actions; to communicate clearly and often; be there for every team member and, above all, to show empathy.

You’ve touched on the ongoing impact of the pandemic and remote work. What’s the most important thought you’d like to leave us with?

We’re only human.?So be human and show up authentically.?Yes, I do believe that in work (and in life), we should prioritize well, plan ahead, deliver on expectations, show up on time, respect each other, look back on a day (or a career) and ask, “did I have impact?” and feel good about one’s effort. But to strive for absolute perfection is a recipe for disappointment.?

It’s important to be authentic and show vulnerability -- whether it’s your voice cracking during a presentation, or showing emotion when something really affects you, or having a child wander into a Zoom meeting. Those moments reveal your authentic self, which humans respond to positively.

In-person connections are more difficult to have now, when so many of us are working remotely. This means we have to be mindful, and much more intentional, about creating virtual human connections. Having heartfelt discussions, building team esprit de corps, and keeping the cultural bond is doable, as we’ve learned over these past 18 months. It may be different, but it can be—and needs to be—equally powerful as we move forward.

Taking her lead, I’d like to give my heartfelt thanks to Eileen for contributing her sage insights and, of course, for joining our Board to help guide us during these exceptional times. Clearly, she’s a valuable asset for assisting our company, and our team members, with reaching our collective potential as we strive to serve you, our customers.

If you’d like to know more, I invite you to learn about Zscaler and how we’re helping companies globally adopt zero trust to solve their security challenges.

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