Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Welcome to The Culture Code podcast. On this podcast, you’ll learn how to grow, shape, and sustain a high-performance culture with the CEO of LEADx, Kevin Kruse. From designing and delivering highly effective leadership development programs, to measuring and improving the employee experience, you will understand what it takes to cultivate a thriving company culture. Through interviews with Chief People Officers, deep dives into key topics, and recordings of our invite-only community sessions, we bring you cutting-edge, data-backed insights from the most desirable companies to work for in the world.
Kruse: Hello, everyone! I'm Kevin Kruse. Welcome back to Culture Code. I'm incredibly excited for our guest today because she is the Chief People Officer at Rivian, Helen Russell. Helen, welcome! And where are you joining from today?
Russell: Hi! Nice to meet you, Kevin. I am joining from Southern California today.
Kruse: What part of Southern California? I was born in Redondo Beach, and I grew up in Orange County.
Russell: Okay, so I am presently in Santa Barbara. So I guess some might call that the central coast, as opposed to Southern. But I still think of it as pretty Southern.
Kruse: Yeah, that's a stunning area. Now, usually, I hail from a location that is almost as picturesque—Philadelphia, Pennsylvania—where I do discover some allure and allure in Philadelphia. However, I'm in San Jose for the subsequent couple of weeks. So, I'm in your state. We're nearly neighbors.
Russell: Yeah. And as you can tell, my accent is very much that of a local. So, I fit right in.
Kruse: People heard Valley girl, you know, in California. So, Rivian. For those who might not be familiar with [your company], how big is your organization and in plain language, what do you do?
Russell: Yeah. So, we are definitely in the EV space. We have 3 products in the market today. We have our commercial product which we currently provide just to Amazon. So, that's what we call our EDV, and that's our Electric Delivery Vehicle. And you may see those out on the road, both here and in Europe, actually, with the Amazon drivers delivering that last mile through the electric truck. And then we also have 2 consumer vehicles. We have what we call our R1T, which is our truck, and our R1S, which is our SUV. And again, if you saw them from the front, you would think they were exactly the same vehicle, and it's only then, when you're looking from the side, that you see you're looking at one as a truck and one as an SUV.
Kruse: And I encourage everybody to visit the Rivian website. I mean, if anyone is not familiar, these are stunning vehicles and truly beautiful. I love the SUV, in particular, and I didn't realize—you just taught me about the Amazon delivery vehicles. I think I probably see one of your vehicles every single day outside my house at this point.
Russell: Yeah. And plus, think about it from an emissions standpoint. I mean, you and I drive to the office park and then drive home. The vehicles that are doing the last mile work, they're on the road 24/7, 365 days a year. So, the impact we can have by having that commercial business is really, really significant.
Kruse: Yeah, that's huge. You've told us a little bit about the vehicles. How big is the organization? Where's your headquarters?
Russell: Yeah. So, we purposely don't have a headquarters. We have a distributed workforce. We have our plant, which is in Normal, Illinois. It was formerly the Mitsubishi plant, and we took that plant over and electrified it. We have our technology—many of our software engineers, autonomy engineers—in Palo Alto, so in Northern California. And then we have a lot of our creatives as well as our product development organization down in Irvine, in Orange County. And then we also have an office in Detroit, Michigan, which is really where a lot of our roots were—the home of the automotive industry—where we knew we could find a real density of talent when the company was first set up. And then we have offices in the UK. We have offices in the Netherlands, in Germany, and recently opened in Serbia, so slowly becoming more of an international company.
Kruse: About how many employees at this point?
Russell: We're about 15,000 employees.
Kruse: Wow! I didn't realize you were that big. You have grown incredibly fast, incredibly fast.
Russell: I often quote the main period of growth. So we came into the year of Covid, the beginning of 2020, with a thousand employees. We ended 2020 with 3,500. We ended 2021 with 10,500, and we got up to 16,000 in the middle of 2022. So we went from one to 16,000 in about 2 years and 8 months. It was a wild ride for sure.
Kruse: How would you describe your company culture in just a few words?
Russell: Yeah, I would describe our culture. I'll use several words so humble.first principled.collaborative. Humanistic. and I would also throw in chaos. I think when you've had that level of growth, we are very iterative, then it is very innovative. And so there's a level of sort of chaos and organized chaos that also underlies all of that.
Kruse: Yeah, its great cultures are distinct. And I will tell you that. I haven't heard anyone talk about their culture as chaotic before. So that's something very distinct.
Russell: Not for everybody. Right there. There's something that I can interview. You can almost put somebody off by talking about some of those elements. And I actually think the best cultures can put people off in as meaningful an awareness as they can attract. Because then you know that you're really attracting the people, they're gonna thrive and survive in this environment.
Kruse: Yeah, 100%. It's about strong cultures that will both attract, but also repel those who don't align. What are some of the ways you foster or sustain this culture? Any unique rituals or traditions related to your culture?
Russell: Yeah. And that probably was the number one question I was asked by Rj. during my interview process, as to how do you make sure we do this? How do we maintain the essence of who we are as we grow? And so I think the first thing you do is ensure that you are incredibly intentional with your hiring choices. I know that sounds really obvious, but every hire that you make needs to enhance the culture, needs to be someone where the team improves because they're on it. So they are a "we" player, not a "Me" player. The other thing is, from an onboarding standpoint, make sure that you are weaving every aspect of your culture from day one. I go to the new hire onboarding orientation every Monday, and I talk about culture. We also have Rj., our CEO, who meets with the new hires every month, and we call that session "Zoom Out with Rj." He doesn't talk about products, strategy, or objectives. He talks about culture. And so we are weaving this through everything. We have quarterly conversations that we call "Recharge," and we call them "recharge" because you're supposed to feel recharged after having them, not miserable or depressed. In those recharge conversations, Kevin focuses much on the "how," the elements of how you're living our culture, and where there may be areas where you can make modifications, as they focus on the "what." And then the other thing is, from an all-hands perspective, we have bi-weekly all-hands that Rj. attends, and there isn't an all-hands that has happened to this day, and I have been here for 4 years, where elements of our culture are not woven through that bi-weekly all-hands. So it is through everything that we do.
Kruse: You see me scribbling, scribbling so many notes. I'm often asked how often companies should conduct all-hands meetings, how frequently companies should conduct employee voice surveys and similar things. And I always say, there's not one right answer, but it's based on the speed of the growth of the organization. So, you could have a large, established organization with 50,000 employees. That really doesn't change that much, and you probably don't need to run that many surveys. On the other hand, when you're experiencing hypergrowth and you realize how many new people are joining the organization this month, this quarter, and the previous year, you need to increase your pace of communication to keep up. But it's not easy to do, right? Like those all-hands meetings every 2 weeks. That's a lot of work.
Russell: Well, it's a lot. And the other thing I would add to that is, I would say I violently agree. In founder-led cultures or founder-led companies, the culture is profoundly defined by the founder. So, making sure that the founder is accessible and familiar to all employees is crucial. When you have such a distributed workforce and people connecting through mediums like Zoom, having the founder's face on that small screen brings his personality and the cultural aspects that are important to him a lot closer and more immediate, irrespective of where you reside in the organization.
Kruse: That's a good point. Now, I'm a really passionate person. Anyone who knows me knows I'm really passionate about leadership development, especially frontline leader development. 70% of engagement is correlated to the manager, and front-line managers touch more employees than any other leadership group. What are some of the ways you develop your front-line managers?
Russell: Yeah, I think so. I'll answer that in a few ways, Kevin. I think I could sit here and give you a box-standard answer of what everybody else is doing in the manager training space, which is interesting but sort of uninteresting.
But there's a few other things that I want to speak about. First of all, the assumption that most organizational hierarchies are built in a way that the way you grow and develop your career is through a management path, not through an individual contributor path. And so it's really important. And we did this from the outset. We built our management hierarchy and our job architecture in a way that you can grow just as successfully as an individual contributor as you can as a people manager. So that then prevents you from putting that fantastic individual contributor who's gonna be a pretty horrible manager or who genuinely doesn't even want to be a manager. It allows you to grow and develop them without putting them in an area and a position that is outside of their comfort zone and is not giving off their best to review. So that's the first fundamental thing.
The second thing is that from a people management role, this is hard. This job gets harder every single day, and thinking about the complexity that we're throwing. I mean, we've talked about the complexity of being an HR leader over the course of the last several years, with everything from Covid and George Floyd, and financial crises, and all of the things and remote work that have been put on our lap. People managers are also dealing with those same complexities every single day.
And so one of our biggest focus areas is to say, when we ask our people, we manage to do something. How do we ask them? And how do we design that in the simplest, most simplistic way? So how do you try to take the pain out of the process? So, for example, you heard me talk about our quarterly recharge conversation. When you zoom out and talk about what is the essence of performance management? It's to make sure that at the end of any performance period, let's call it quarterly, you have a really good sense of how you're doing, what you need me to focus on, and is there anything that you need me to modify? That's it.
That doesn't need to be anything more than a conversation. Now what was interesting was it was our managers who came to us and said, Can you give us a system for us to document some of these things? And we were like, we were trying to make this light and easy! And we got, I've never had people come to me and say, Can you give us more to do? And so I think they may be regretting that now, and we're probably going to revert back to more of the conversation. But how do you make their work as light as possible? And how do you assume that they know what they're doing? And one of our guiding principles is indexed to the highest common denominator. Don't design a performance management process assuming that everybody is going to fail. Design a performance management process that assumes that all have a fundamental belief that everybody can learn and grow. And that's how we've really come into that role.
Kruse: I love this. That phrase "Index to the highest common denominator." In fact, my last leadership book was called "Great Leaders Have No Rules." It should have been called "Great Leaders Make No Rules." Just this idea that organizations often make rules because one knucklehead out of a hundred did something wrong. So now we have a rule, a policy, a system, and they never work. And they bring both the downside along with the upside.
But anyway, this idea of keeping it simple, these conversations that include expectations - you know, "What do you want me to do?" - and feedback. I can't tell you how even today I had interviews with Chief People Officers who talk about, "We're trying to drive a culture of feedback" or "We're really trying to get people to give more feedback." The idea that you're saying, "Look, we're gonna do these recharge meetings where it's baked in. This is the cadence, and you're gonna get it." It would be pretty rare then, as long as these conversations are happening, for people to say, "I don't get feedback from my manager." Well, you're getting it at least every quarter, right?
Russell: Exactly. And we're not gonna lose that. What we do instead is we do our service quarterly and say, "Did it happen?" We're gonna trust you with it. But we are just gonna verify - trust and verify.
The other thing I will say is that I feel like we have spent 20 years figuring out how to make your manager better and more equipped at giving feedback. We've never focused on how to make your employee more equipped at receiving it. And I think in a world where we were all incredible at asking and receiving feedback, the notion of giving feedback would be very, very different. You think about those conversations that you dread and those that you don't mind. The difference between a feedback conversation that you dread and one you don't mind is how you anticipate your message will be received. It's not your ability to do it; it's how that message will be received. And so I think there's an unlock there somewhere. I don't have the answer, but we're trying to figure it out - how do we get that unlock there?
Kruse: Well, I'm glad you're working on that answer. I mean this, I have a physical response to what you just said because it was one of my greatest weaknesses when I was in my twenties as a manager – young and dumb, maybe even early thirties. So personality-wise on the Big Five factor, I'm very high in agreeableness. So, hey, it's great. I get along with everybody. I know I keep the peace, all this kind of stuff, but it means I avoid conflict. So for years, I would withhold feedback. You know, when you're highly agreeable, you withhold feedback. "Oh, I don't wanna hurt Helen's feelings. I don't wanna cause a fight with Helen. Oh, it's gonna be, you know." And all this time, I wasn't protecting your feelings. I was protecting my feelings. And that's right, that's right. And then, later, I realized that, you know, my team members didn't. They don't need another friend. They need someone who's gonna make them better in their role so that they can move on to a bigger role. They need a coach. They are disengaged if I don't give them feedback. And all of a sudden, I'm like, "Oh, my gosh, I'm such a jerk. I've been withholding feedback and stunting people, and they're like, 'How come Kevin doesn't tell me anything? Like, it is, doesn't even care?'" And it's like a light bulb went off. Now, it doesn't mean I love giving feedback, right? But now that I understand it in the right context, and I've grown myself where I'm less triggered when I get feedback myself, and then it comes together. So there's a lot there too.
Russell: And again, knowing that more people than not struggle in a world where I came to you and said, "Kevin, if there was one thing I could have modified in the meeting you just had today, what would it have been?" My God! Is that an easier message now delivered to me than having that build up? And you talk to me at the end of the year, never gonna refer back to that meeting again, whereas if I was inviting it all the time and using words like "modify it" so that it doesn't feel bruising, then it makes that conversation so much easier.
Kruse: My gosh! We could go on for a long time, but let me elevate the feedback conversation to feedback like employee voice stuff. How do you solicit feedback from employees about the culture and their engagement (e.g., engagement or other surveys, town halls, ?)
Russell: Absolutely, and a bit like your comment earlier, Kevin. The frequency of our surveys has run concurrently with the pace of growth. So if you wind the clock back 2 years ago, it was quarterly surveys. Last year, we did 3; this year, we'll do 2, and we feel like we've got to the right cadence for where we are today with biannual surveys. They go in January, and we've just closed the back half survey that just completed at the end of July, and we're running the data right now. We then take those surveys and then we dive into focus groups and dive deeper for a clickdown, more of information. And obviously, we serve that data up to any manager with more than 5 respondents. So, obviously, we're protecting the confidentiality of whomever has completed the survey. And then we also do pulse surveys. Whether it's a pulse survey post a learning session, a pro survey. We do pulse surveys after all hands to make sure that even our communications are hitting the mark. So we are constantly hunting for information on everything that we're doing and looking for trends and correlations in what that information is telling us. And again, an interesting thing coming out of our last survey was when we looked at well-being, we looked at belonging, and we looked at what was our third item. Well-being and belonging were the two biggest correlators. But what we found was that if you are answering positively to, "I feel like Rivian cares about my wellbeing," and you were answering positively to, "I feel like this is a place where I belong," you had a 35% lift in your level of engagement. So we also know the areas where we can go deep because it's going to have a significant impact on engagement.
Kruse: I love it. You've already, Helen, talked about so many cool programs. Related to culture, are there any special initiatives or results you’re most proud of?
Russell: I don't know whether it's like a program, but what I would say, and I was talking to Ben, someone who leads our learning team, about this a couple of days ago. We were talking about previous lives where we had our core values printed on our badge, or printed on a mouse mat, or on a, you know, poster on the back of the toilet door. They were the environments where it wasn't part of the ether, and so you had to promote it using these very tactile ways of exhibiting. We have none of that. That's because our values are our vocabulary. We use our values as verbs. "Zoom out" is one of our values, and that's obviously all about perspective. "Ask why" and "stay open" are also values, and I can't tell you how many meetings you're in when somebody will caveat what they're about to say by saying, "I just need you to stay open while I talk through this" or "Can we just zoom out and make sure that we solve for this at the Rivian level? We're not solving for this at the functional level." So this is vocabulary that's just in our way of working, and I would say that is unique. I haven't experienced that in my career before I came to Rivian.
Kruse: I love those values as verbs. I mean, when people are expressing your organizational values in the everyday flow of work, you know you're doing it right. YWhat book would you recommend that your colleagues read? (or podcast, video, etc.)
Russell: That is such a hard question. But, given our earlier conversation and the fact that this directly links, I would send "Radical Candor" by Kim Scott.
Kruse: Fantastic! One of my top books for leadership development and soft skills. So good, right?
Russell: And culture. Because I think that talks to where your culture resides, not just the type of person that you are and how you give feedback.
Kruse: You told me, you know, she developed Apple's first manager training program, and radical candor feedback was the main course. I said, "You know, how much was that? One fifth? Was that 1 hour out of 4? How much was it?" And she said, "Kevin, that was like 80%. If I had it my way, it would have been 100%. You get that right, everything else takes care of itself."
Russell: Everything else works, absolutely right. The only other thing that I would recommend, and it's an old Ted Talk from 2006, is by Sir Ken Robinson. It's called "Schools Kill Creativity." It talks about how creativity is all about original ideas that add value and the richness of human capacity. I think in a company that's very first-principle like ours, his podcast discusses how our education system stifles the way that we think. I would say that our corporate cultures can stifle the way that we work. So how do we think about fostering creativity, bringing your skills, and leaving your experiences at the door, so that you can bring this real, first-principle way of thinking to work every day?
Kruse: Well, you lead into this next question. Maybe it's a similar answer given where Rivian is today and what you're facing in the year ahead. What skill or behavior do you wish your employees did more of?
Russell: They would be better at two things. They would obviously be better at receiving feedback. And the second thing is they would really develop their level of humility. Because to be humble allows you to be open, to be collaborative, to be curious, to zoom out. To do all of the things that we need you to do requires you to leave your ego at the door. And you know, I'm gonna quote Mitch Brown. He is one of our directors, and we did a deep dive into his family life yesterday. We like to do these spotlights on our employees, and he used a quote in there. His favorite line is, "I never learned anything while I was talking." I just love it because it's just like, how do you just leave your ego at the door and just be in listening mode and keep questioning, inquiry versus advocacy? And that's something that I wish everybody was so much better at.
Kruse: Rivian has a lot of exciting things going on right now. WWhat excites you the most about your company right now?
Russell: Yeah, I think the exciting thing is the things that we can't talk about. Of course, the products that are coming down the line. If you think of the products that we have on the road right now, and I mean our consumer products, they are absolutely stunning and beautiful. But they're also not affordable for all. What's coming down the pipe certainly allows us to broaden the ability for others to come into the brand and experience our product. So, you walk into our design studio right now, and your chin is on the floor looking at some of the things that are coming down the pipe. That's what I'm definitely most excited about right now.
Kruse: Is it still a secret as to when the rest of us are going to get a glimpse of that future?
Russell: Yes, maybe sometime early next year-ish?
Kruse: Helen, congratulations on all the success, and thanks for the impact the company is making. You've got, as they say, a tiger by the tail. Shaping the culture must be an incredible challenge, but it's such important work. Thank you for that work, and thanks for coming on a Friday afternoon to share your wisdom.
Russell: Thank you so much, Kevin. I really enjoyed it.