Every business dreams of experiencing that exhilarating hockey stick growth where success skyrockets, but what does it truly take to achieve it? Tom Gratian, founder of Gratian Group, shares the secrets to achieving explosive hockey stick growth by focusing on top talent, laser-sharp strategy, and the game-changing power of AI. He provides actionable insights on how to identify and secure A-players, develop effective leadership, and foster a winning culture, all while navigating the unique challenges of rapid growth. Tune in to discover how to unlock your company’s full potential and achieve phenomenal growth.

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Listen to the podcast here

 

Tom Gratian – Preparing For Hockey Stick Growth: Talent And Org Design Strategy

We are going to be diving into the complexities and triumphs of managing rapid organizational growth, and we are thrilled to have Tom Gratian, the Founder of the Gratian Group, join us. He has over 25 years of experience spanning startups to Fortune 100 giants like American Express and TikTok. Tom is an expert in the organizational design and talent management field. We are going to appreciate his skillset here.

His strategic insights have powered companies through pivotal growth phases, ensuring they are not only growing to scale, but they are, and they are successfully doing this, but they remain robust with their teams overall. At the Gratian Group, Tom’s focus is on transforming organizational structures and the processes around them to optimize performance across various sectors where his clients reside.

Tom Gratian’s Journey In Talent, Leadership, And Organizational Transformation

We welcome to have him have him here. Let’s get ready to, have that enlightening discussion for all you founders out there that are wondering, “How do I get this right?” Tom is going to take us through those important first steps. Tom, as we are getting into this discussion here, I would love to hear a little bit of your background on how you got to where you are. Welcome.

Thanks, Sam, and hi everybody out there. My background started in the dot-com days of the late ‘90s and I was a part of rapidly growing startups and I would see a lot of pain during that. I got to witness it twice because of the dot-com bust. I got to be a part of growth, failure growth again, and I always thought, “If I could go back there at some point and fix some of those traumas that we all experienced in those days. What a difference I could make?” I ended up going into business mode focusing on this area and started in large companies like American Express, and I was doing big large organization transformation, change management, multi-thousand person global orgs, and restructuring. A lot of it was during the financial crisis.

Big restructuring, but I was always having my eye on startups and that I would work my way backward, to that size again, and I went to entertainment for a while. I was the Chief Learning Officer at Viacom and headed up learning and talent at NBCUniversal. Eventually made my way to TikTok, which was during rapid growth, and finally got to pull all the things together, whether it was individual training and coaching, team performance talent management, or the broader large-scale org design. I got to do all of that at a stage of hypergrowth, pull it all together, scratch that itch I’d always had at being back in tech startups, and fix some of those things that I’d seen from the first part of my career.

Scaling Up: Lessons From Large Organizations For Startups

In working in a lot of those larger organizations and reflecting on what you’ve learned there and how it applies to startup companies, what’s the crossover there? What did you find when you were starting to help some small organizations develop into rapidly growing firms?

There are some truths that cut across all organizations. They look differently depending upon the size and the maturity. I subscribed to the Jim Collins mantra first, who, then, what attracting top talent and specifically in your most critical roles is the first thing you should focus on. Once you have great talent in those roles, make sure you are managing that talent and developing that talent effectively.

There are certain truths that cut across all organizations. They look differently depending upon the size and the maturity. Share on X

As you zoom out to the broader org, make sure strategy is clear from top to bottom, and especially not neglecting middle and frontline management. Nowadays with how fast things are, there are certain ways that you can supercharge all of that stuff. I’m sure we’ll get into the wave of AI and how you can leverage and use those things, but there’s a certain rapid iterative approach that you can take to address all of that. That’s true at a small company and a large company looks a little different.

These small and rapidly growing organ organizations need to get right is ensuring that they are bringing in the right people. Is that right?

That’s right. It’s more important at a stage of rapid growth because it’s almost like turning on a faucet, and let’s say there’s something wrong with your piping, it’s going to become an issue quickly if the faucet’s on full blast. That’s what rapid-growth organizations have in front of them. They are going to hire a ton, and that group of people is going to be the majority of the organization. It’s less of an impact in a big, large organization that’s hiring small percentages overall relative to the whole, so you need to nail the approach. It’s all about repeatability. If you nail it on the front end, you can get a 4X lift out of the performance. If you wait till they are on the inside, and now you are trying to fix things with remediation and training, maybe you can get a 2X lift. I always subscribe to this funny phrase, “You could train a turkey to climb a tree, but you are better off hiring a squirrel.”

 

Char, I’d love to hear about your experience because I know you’ve started up a lot of organizations in your entrepreneurial career. What have you learned in the hiring process? Have you hired many turkeys?

Not only have I hired turkeys as an HR executive, but I even hired turkeys when I was 25 years old as an HR coordinator. As an entrepreneur, yes. When we started up our business, it was difficult. Getting out of the traditional type of HR role and owning and running a multimillion-dollar business of my own was fascinating because, at one point, we had like 6 contractors and 23 employees. Yes. As I leveraged my background in talent management strategy, I was better at hiring people. However, when I was trying to delegate to my leaders, managers, and directors, I learned they had a competency issue, and I needed to help them understand how to spot the turkeys.

At the time, I was happy to work with Sam, and we had a TMA tool. Sam will mention that later, but I was able to have the right competency analysis done to equate my interview processes to the competencies and align my performance management and coaching. Not only that, from a career mobility standpoint, I did emphasize, since we were in a healthcare marketing space, that even though you might be making $80,000 right now, be prepared because if you go out and buy that big house, we may have to close down. That’s exactly what happened due to federal changes. My employees were happy because, at the beginning of the interview and through that process, I explained everything. We could talk a lot about this, but it makes a difference to own your own company. Thank you.

Leadership Gaps: Identifying Founder Blind Spots In Hiring

As Char was saying, hiring right is key. They come in a couple of different categories. You have leadership that you are bringing on or people that you are working closely with strategically, and then you have those that are driving performance in the organization. Have you seen certain gaps that founders have in each of these areas?

Probably one of the biggest gaps is not realizing that if they are going to be leading and having an outsized impact on a bunch of other employees, you may want to assess their ability to lead, not just a functional technical skill. It all comes down to having a very clear scorecard. I’m going to steal another approach from GH Smart, which is a leadership assessment firm that works in large part with all the private equity firms that have to make sure they know what leadership team they are buying. It’s a very simple approach, which is don’t write down a bunch of day-to-day responsibilities. That’s not as important. The roles, responsibilities, tasks, and qualifications aren’t as important as where this role sits within the broader organization and what they are strategically going to have to contribute.

If they are going to be a leader, then you have to capture that in what Char was saying about the competencies. Not only do you have to ask a question in the interview, but you also need to assign it to a particular person to ensure it gets asked. You need to make sure they know how to ask it, take notes, and then score it. If you are looking at all of your potential candidates, imagine they are in a spreadsheet, and each of them is a row. There should be a row on leadership ability, and each of them should have a score so that you can weigh it. If that’s super important to the role itself, you should be looking at the leaders that have the greater leadership scores as your most likely candidates.

I like that, Tom, because that’s why I put in place a rating score system. A lot of my leaders were so brand new, and they thought that the interview questions should be, “What’s your biggest strength, and what’s your biggest weakness? What’s your goal in five years?” Our questions are going to be aligned on a rating sheet with competencies. As an HR professional, you understand this, we need to have the proper documents from a discrimination perspective and equal opportunity. We know the nation is in upheaval about equality. From a legal standpoint, it’s also very vital. Some of my leaders struggled with that, but with the right coaching, we can make it easy for them and use technology and AI.

Char, you mentioned the other benefit, which is counterintuitive to a lot of people. If you have very clear outcomes written in a job description that the person is going to be responsible for, then you back up from those outcomes to a set of competencies. It’s super clear and motivating to the candidate. When they apply, they can see what they are going to be held accountable for. When they get the interview questions, they can see that it makes perfect sense vis-a-vis the competencies and the outcomes they are supposed to drive. From an employer value standpoint, you’ll get a very positive reaction from your candidates. They will say, “These are the clearest job descriptions I’ve ever seen.”

I’m going to quickly say that you’ve got CompTeam here. Look at these wonderful professionals. CompTeam helps you get your job descriptions right and also uses technology to do so because we had such antiquated job descriptions in healthcare systems that in 1 small healthcare system, we had over 4,000 job descriptions that were not compliant with the ADA, not compliant with disability accommodation, and outdated antiquated. That’s why I’m promoting Sam, Howard, and Sumit here and the team, because that’s good. With your partnership, which is why I’m involved. Talent management strategy in alignment with compensation, architecture, competency planning, and everything you’re saying is magical for what can happen for a company so the HR is feeling overwhelmed. I was a broad generalist and I’m not an expert in comp job descriptions or every single aspect of the world, it takes a village. I’d love to hear what my colleagues, Howard and Sumit.

Candidate Assessment: Overlooked Qualities In Startup Hiring

What do organizations, especially young organizations, and startups, miss when they are assessing candidates for a role? They may see people who seem to be a great fit, but what, in your experience, do they tend to overlook or not assess thoroughly?

This process. One of the other things you should think about as we are managing a system for repeatability, not individuals and people within the system. If you set up an infrastructure it doesn’t have to be complicated. Let’s say you can’t afford a talent management or talent acquisition applicant tracking system. That’s fine but you do need to know from a process standpoint, that we are going to all align on this scorecard in a meeting. It’s going to then make up a series of rows in a spreadsheet, and every candidate we evaluate is going to get a score with some notes so that we can see them side by side. A process and a system that builds repeatability, and everybody’s on the same page so you know, “I’m the guy who asks the leadership question of every one of these candidates, and I fill in that row.”

 

System and process for repeatability but also a lot of times people forget and we already covered the leadership piece that’s number two. People also forget culture. Culture is supposed to be an enabler of your strategy. If you have a particular winning aspiration to beat a competitor, and you are going to capture a certain market of customers, product category, or geography, usually there’s a certain culture you need that fits with the organizational competency required to achieve that strategy. That should be detailed, and written out in some part of your company manifestos, and it should take shape in that same process.

Culture is supposed to be an enabler of your strategy. Share on X

Let’s say, for example, you are trying to cultivate an extremely creative and innovative culture. There are certain aspects of willingness to fail, learn from failure, and fast and rapid iteration that people need to have not just behaviors, but mindsets and beliefs to make them a propelling force within your culture. That should be a question. Someone should own that. Whoever’s the culture carrier for that creativity and innovation should own that in the interview, and every candidate should get a score on that. People often forget culture.

That’s great. Good advice.

Sumit is big on culture, so do you have anything to add to that, Sumit? What are your thoughts?

Bias In Hiring: Building An Inclusive Selection Process

I love the bit about using competencies and the actual scoring of people during the interview but I have a question that relates to culture as well. How do you prevent bias from entering into the process in the first place? For example, if I’m only shortlisting people whose names sound like mine, or who look like me, or talk like me, or are from the same city as me, and then they are getting interviewed they are doing well and it’s becoming like a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s saying people who sound like Sumit are brilliant at what they do, and they should be hired. How do we prevent that aspect from entering the selection process?

In the process and the system, there are many stage-gating mechanisms that you can put in place to reduce it. The first is in the way you even write the job description. There are all sorts of companies out there, many of which are pretty free, where you can submit your job description and see if it even smells of bias. Many of them may be gender-biased, especially in tech startups. If they are written mostly by men, they can sound a little aggressively male and maybe a bit off-putting to a female candidate. You can vet your job descriptions for bias but then you mentioned once the candidates come in how do you prevent that? There are all sorts of ways to do that.

You can extract names and use unique identifiers for your candidates so that when you are looking at and comparing across the candidates, you are not talking about the names or even a background you associate with a certain name while looking at those scores. If you are talking about competencies and culture, a lot of people use the phrase, “culture fit.” That in itself can be biased if what we are saying is we want to mold everybody to be the same as us. One of the best practices is to refer to it more as a culture ad.

Let’s say, for example, you are trying to capture with your strategy a certain market in a specific type of customer segment. You want to make sure you have people who represent that customer segment so that you can win them. Somebody who uniquely understands that customer segment would be a culture add. You can build into the process the positive side of this, where you are looking specifically for a particular underrepresented person in your process and recruiting.

Talent Management: Strategies For Rapidly Growing Startups

That’s some good insight there. I liked how you were talking about the different elements of ensuring that you are reducing bias and making sure that people are adding to the culture and not just a part of it. That is part of the thought of continual improvement and driving the organization in the right direction. Let’s shift gears here. As a founder of a rapidly developing organization, you have your team together. You have a variety of people contributing in different ways. How should leadership think about their talent overall?

If your question is about your overarching approach to strategy and leadership of the company, you’ve solved the first “who,” and now you are at the “now what.” The reason Jim Collins says that is because once you get the right people on the bus, it’s helpful to have them decide the direction of the bus. If you are talking about mission, vision, values, and purpose relative to strategy and goals and roles, most people will say to focus most of your attention on this massively transformative purpose the long-term big vision.

I would say that has to be articulated, but it’s a mistake to focus most of your attention on the more fluffy things without ensuring that you nail it all the way down to ground level, especially in a rapidly growing company. It’s the connection between that mission, vision, values, and your overarching company strategy with clear goals and roles on a short-term basis at the frontline and middle management levels.

 

That’s one of the biggest mistakes I often see. Now we have these great senior leaders. Let’s say we pluck them out of some of the top big companies because they are where we are going, and we are hoping to grow into these places that we are plucking them from. They may have a bit of a big company mentality, and they stop at mission, vision, values, and overarching company strategy. They may not roll up their sleeves and come down to their middle managers to say, “This is how I want this to translate down here in your function, in your team. I want to make sure you guys tell this to your frontline managers.” We need to have it documented in goals that are reviewed quarterly to see whether we are on track or off track.

That’s usually where strategy and leadership fall in a rapidly growing company. It used to be a bunch of people we could gather in a room. Now it’s multiple offices, multiple levels, and maybe different geographies, with everyone working from home. How do we know that the frontline managers are instructing their teams the way we architected it up here in our ivory tower? It’s all about the cascade, and it has to happen on an iterative, recursive basis very frequently.

Good communication is critical. Even in smaller organizations, where you might take that for granted.

I would say it’s probably more important. We mentioned earlier, and Char said this, that you are going to be plucking earlier career leaders in a rapidly growing company. Often the people most attracted to an entrepreneurial environment were mid-level managers at a top-shelf tech company, but they are getting antsy. They are like, “I don’t want to wait years for my chance to take on a bigger role.” They will come to a smaller, rapidly growing place to earn a bigger role.

That’s great from a creativity and innovation standpoint, but it’s potentially a risk from a leadership standpoint. A lot of them have never had to set goals and roles for teams or hold larger teams accountable. They may have had 1 or 2-person teams, but now they are managing a bigger team. It’s more important to ensure a tie-off of goals and roles at the lowest levels of management in a rapidly growing company.

Strategic Vs. Supportive Roles: Defining Roles In A Startup

I’m also thinking about the different types of roles. There are some roles that contribute in different ways. You mentioned that in our pre-show, as far as certain roles being more strategic and some more supportive. Can you tell us a little bit about that and how founders should be framing that?

The first thing is to focus on your top-most critical 5% of roles so that you can dedicate a serious amount of attention to them. Whether it’s ensuring that, if you don’t have an A-player in that role, you are managing them out or going and getting that A-player which is going to take a certain amount of money, attraction, and a compensation package you need to have all the people involved in that decision-making process, whether it’s the CEO, CFO, Chief People Officer, or head of comp and then all of the table saying, “We’ve all agreed.” Let’s say, in an 80-person company, there are 4 roles in this top 5%. If I’ve got a set of 10 ships, I’m dedicating 4 to that top one, 3 to the next, 2 to the next, and 1 to the last one, and we are going to put that much time, attention, energy, and money toward it.

Can you first even identify who’s contributing the most to revenue, specifically EBITDA? From a pretty binary, quantitative standpoint, can you say, “This is the person who is the head of sales who’s generating the large majority of our revenue,” or “This is a value-protecting person, like the legal person, who ensures that none of those deals gets us sued?” There are usually a few key people you can point to who are driving the large majority of your EBITDA. That’s where you want all your attention not just on getting them into the role, but now that they are here, what are you going to do to make sure they are successful? This includes onboarding, networking them, coaching and development, and giving them the resources they need to be successful very early on so they get up to speed fast.

Vision And Culture: Essential Elements For Startup Success

A lot of this involves ensuring your leaders are selecting the right person, identifying the criticality of roles, and developing those roles. It’s also about ensuring they are thinking about culture and how it impacts their organization. We spoke a little about vision, but when we think about bringing on this important talent in smaller, rapidly growing organizations, sometimes the vision can be a journey, a bit of a path. Do you see this in the leaders you are coaching? Do you see that it’s difficult for them to articulate the vision and keep it front and center for their people?

Sometimes at a company with a more technical product that has found product-market fit very quickly, they may think a little less in terms of bigger, broader, grander visions. They might need help thinking on that level. However, I find that it’s the reverse in most cases. Usually, an entrepreneurial founder has a bigger, broader vision. It’s the operationalization of that vision where things fall, whether it is getting from mission, vision, and values to strategy, or from strategy to organizational competencies. We need to be awesome at this, this, and this. For building premium products, we have to be great at product development and branding so we can charge the price, or if we are driving a low-cost product, we have to be awesome operationally.

An entrepreneurial founder usually has a bigger, broader vision. It's the operationalization of that vision where things fall. Share on X

Getting that clear and turning it into a way to attract, grow, and keep talent, align people, and manage performance is where things usually fall. Helping them with vision is maybe 10% to 20% of the issue but if that is an issue, there are a lot of cool, creative ways to co-construct it in the “now what” phase after you have the first two solved.

Here comes Char with a comment. I’m cut from the same cloth as you are, Tom, and some as well probably more so but I would say that I’m also a talent strategy and skills consultant. In my corporate life of HR, talent management strategy, organizational effectiveness, and change management very much like my competency, speaking personally, was lacking in true business strategy skills.

I’m not being self-important here, but I would say I’m working with Rich Horwath, who’s a former guest speaker of ours who teaches strategy skills. As all that stuff you just said,  even our executives struggle with everything you said. They don’t have a full talent management strategy that is reviewed on an almost weekly basis. It can’t be looked at just once a year. Don’t you agree? Often, as consultants or HR people, we go into the boardroom because I had to do this. In 0.8-point font on 8 pieces of paper, since my VP was like, “Tell me more. What’s your strategy?” As the strategist for talent management?”

I lacked credibility with the executive team because it was stuff like, “We are going to do a leadership conference. We are going to do exit interviews. We are going to follow up on the comments from our employee surveys.” All tactical activities. It wasn’t until I left corporate in 2016 and finally started working with Sam to improve my competency on the strategy side that I realized I needed credibility. I needed to have an understanding of true business, and that’s where we people people, no offense to our profession, we often lack.

I agree, and that’s why you’ve got the finance guys being best friends with the people guys. What do you think about that?

HR as a field and less so comp. Comp is the inverse of this tends to attract people who are people-oriented. They may be a little less data-oriented, so without proper training and business acumen, sometimes there can be a bit of a shortcoming there. I agree.

Howard and I are the guys on the other side of the HR equation. Nobody likes to do their numbers, but that’s why we have people like you, Tom, Char, and Sumit that are the people people. Howard and I can focus on the numbers for sure.

AI And Systems: Transforming Organizations For Growth

That brings us to the next thing. There’s a combination where people and numbers come together, or information as a whole, in our systems. Tom, you are very passionate about systems and how they can transform an organization, especially in the age of artificial intelligence. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Shameless plug, but this is the secret sauce for Gratian Group. We have about eight different AI products that supercharge all of the above. Everything we’ve been discussing whether it’s how to hire effectively, develop an individual leader, or assess a team or an organization for its performance AI products can do amazing things these days, provided there is proper human intervention and oversight for issues like bias and data privacy.

For example, one of the things we do from a leadership standpoint is use AI to help with a 360 process. You can perform varying levels of complicated procedures with this, but at a bare minimum, a 360 involves interviewing a group of leaders surrounding an individual leader you are coaching and providing them with insights about their strengths, development areas, and coaching tips.

AI is extremely good at consolidating the interview transcripts of the ten people you interviewed and condensing them into a two-page report that an executive can digest. That usually takes hours of an executive coach’s team or the head of people’s team, and so that process can be tremendously shortened. You can even conduct the interviews themselves through AI bots if you want to interview more people than you typically have the resources to interview.

You can also do this for teams. You can assess the performance of teams and whether they trust each other or not through similar mechanisms. Consolidate that down very quickly. For an organization, you can do things at a scale that you wouldn’t ordinarily be able to do. Usually, if you are trying to assess what’s wrong with employee engagement or how your organization isn’t performing from a design standpoint, you need a shortlist of maybe twenty or so people that you and your team can go out and interview, then crunch all of that information.

Now, with AI, you can interview at scale a much larger percentage of the organization. It’s counterintuitively more representative of the issues. Not only that, but the AI can also help you create solutions from the back of it. If you want to do something very inclusive and co-construct the solutions to any of these problems, you can come back in iterative cycles of design where the people who were interviewed contribute to the solutions you identified.

Let’s say you are going to restructure. Having a smaller group of people in the tent contribute to the redesign through interactions with AI is possible. Let’s say they want to fix a talent process, like your performance management process. They can help you co-construct this with the use of AI. It’s a much quicker, faster way to accomplish tasks that we used to rely on sheer arms and legs to do manually in the past.

I’m sure that many of our readers are saying, “I’m wondering if these types of solutions that involve AI are the right fit for our organization.” Artificial intelligence, whether it’s involved in the recruiting process or other parts, may fit better in some organizations than others. There could also be more of a cultural fit in certain cases. If they have some questions and want to get a hold of you, Tom, what’s the best way for them to reach out?

Super simple [email protected].

Key Takeaways For Startup Founders

As we’re wrapping up our conversation here when we think about everything you’ve spoken about regarding helping founders achieve that hockey stick growth, what key elements do you want to emphasize in summary? How would you bring that all together?

Focus on your top five most critical roles that quantitatively contribute to EBITDA or support its generation. Ensure you have A players in those roles. If you don’t, focus most of the CEO’s chief people officer head of comp’s, or CFO’s time on managing out and then getting the right person in. Once they’re in, ensure they get up to speed super fast.

If you’re looking at what to do once they’re in, focus on performance first. Motivating, engaging, and retaining employees comes from winning. Figuring out super-clear strategies not just mission, vision, and values, but also short-term OKRs is what helps frontline and middle managers generate performance out of their teams. This motivates everyone, and you can use AI for a lot of this and make it happen in a fraction of a time.

If you’re looking at what to do once the right people are in, focus on performance first. Motivating, engaging, and retaining employees comes from winning. Share on X

Could you let all our readers know how the Gratian Group can help them? What are the areas you love to specialize in to help companies grow?

We focus on three main areas individual performance, whether that be executive coaching or leadership development programming team performance, where we look at a C-suite and help them iron out issues of performance as well as trust, and then at the organizational level, we can look at the large-scale structure of your organization to see if it’s well-positioned to perform according to your strategy. If it’s not, we help you co-construct, as a leadership team, the solutions to that. We use AI for all of it.

On the cutting edge there. Perfect. Thanks, Tom, for your time. It’s been a pleasure talking to you.

Thanks so much, Sam. Thanks, Char. Thanks, Howard. Thanks, Sumit.

Thank you, Tom.

It’s nice meeting you. Thank you so much. I will connect with you on LinkedIn.

Sounds great.

Take care, everyone, and we’ll see you next episode.

 

Important Links

• Tom Gratian on LinkedIn
• Rich Horwath Episode
• Tom Gratian Email Address

 

About Tom Gratian

Tom Gratian is a seasoned expert in organizational effectiveness, with over 25 years of experience spanning consulting, business operations, and people management in startups and Fortune 100 companies, including American Express, NBCUniversal, and TikTok. As the Organization Effectiveness Practice Lead at Kamyn Search, Tom specializes in delivering tailored assessment and coaching services to elevate the performance of healthcare organizations and diverse industries.

Tom also serves on the Advisory Board for SemperVirens Venture Capital, contributing his expertise to guide investments in workplace, healthcare, and financial technology companies with strategies focused on employer markets.

With deep specialties in scaling high-growth organizations, organization design, change management, executive coaching, and leadership development, Tom has a proven track record of driving success across the startup, growth, and turnaround phases of business. His innovative approach incorporates methodologies like design thinking and agile/scrum, ensuring impactful and sustainable outcomes for his clients.

Tom’s dedication to transforming organizations and empowering leadership teams continues to make him a sought-after advisor and leader in his field.