How to Lead Effectively Across Borders And Cultures

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In this HR Leaders podcast episode, Daniel Illes, VP of People at Vinted, talks about his journey from corporate law to leading people and the cultural nuances he's encountered while working across different borders and cultures. He emphasizes the importance of humility and clarity in communication, especially when leading remote teams. The discussion also covers the role of psychological safety in fostering diversity and innovation, and the strategies for effectively leading remote teams.

Episode Highlights:
- Skills and capabilities you need to lead across different borders and cultures

- Key strategies for effectively leading remote teams

- The top qualities and skills to look for when hiring senior executives

Recommended Resources

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Chris Rainey 0:00
Danny, welcome to the show. How are you?
Daniel Illes 0:01
Thank you so much. Happy to be here.
Chris Rainey 0:03
You're the first guest.
Daniel Illes 0:04
Amazing in a studio. No pressure. Fantastic. Looking forward to this.
Chris Rainey 0:09
How things are like good,
Daniel Illes 0:11
very good. It's somewhat stressful week we're going through a budgeting process, which is fun times always fun, but can't complain.
Chris Rainey 0:19
Nice. People can probably hear by your accent that you're not from the UK. Tell everyone a little bit more. Yeah, background and your journey to where we are now. Sure. So
Daniel Illes 0:27
I'm Hungarian. Originally, I moved to London when I was 18. On and off. I've been here since I did spend two years in the US. I worked by OSI started my career as a lawyer. I did that for three years. Yeah. Wow. So I practised corporate law for three years. You're like, nah, this is not for me. That's exactly what happened. And I did a total 180. And I joined left, which at the time was still pretty small. And I worked in a sort of business, generalist business role that average was super fun love that continued this kind of commercial business development, general business journey for a couple of years, ultimately, was part of the founding team at drover, which is a London based startup was a London based startup now acquired by kazoo. And it was really there that I fell in love with people. So within the founding team, I was sort of naturally the one most drawn to the problems that kind of the people discipline deals with. And I sort of started getting involved solving these problems. And I just realised that as much as well as run Yeah. And I just thought, holy cow, I had this epiphany that this is what I wanted to do with my career. And I kind of grew that company, that team and ultimately exited and landed at Vinted. So that's, that's a journey.
Chris Rainey 2:05
Wow, I was gonna ask you, because I saw I've talked a little bit on LinkedIn. Yeah. And I saw the company. And I was like, how did this get this next step to CPOE? Yeah. And so when you kind of sat down with other founders, you realise actually, this is where I feel like I can best serve the business. Absolutely. That's exactly what I'm sure they were like, go for it.
Daniel Illes 2:22
Yeah, that's, that's actually that's precisely what happened. So I kind of fired myself from every other job that I had within the company. So I replaced myself with people much better suited to doing a marketing leadership role. Yeah, sales leadership role, etc. And, and, uh, yeah, I just sort of focused all my attention on Pete. Nice. And that's that's what did
Chris Rainey 2:43
you think HR was got before versus going into it after you know that you must have had a preconception of this is what being an HR leader is now you know, what, you know, now, what did you think it was? Now? What do you realise it is?
Daniel Illes 2:56
Yeah, well, I, you know, if you asked me 10 years ago, if I would be doing this job, I would have said, No, I just was not even on my radar. And I think, and I think that is a bit sad, because Atrus still gets or at least used to, I think, perhaps now it's changing for, which is a great thing. But it used to get a bad rap. Yeah, think people sort of, I give an onboarding presentation to folks who join Vinted every two weeks. And one of the things I referenced is sort of the HR characters from pop culture, like, Toby from HR, or the office, or, like the crazy lady in the office, Christmas party movie, and yeah, and how there's all these stereotypes exist about what HR is, and it's, you know, so much more than that. And I do, I do genuinely think that we do stuff that makes business possible. It's too big for a lot of tech companies, especially people payroll is by far the biggest cost. Yeah, that emits the idea that you don't want to be managing that a part of your that you don't want to be managing that part of your your OP x in a strategic ways is mind blowing to me. So yeah, so I think I've definitely my opinion has changed radically since that time.
Chris Rainey 4:15
That's good to hear that but we have made a lot of progress, like you just said, but the fact that you still have to have that conversation means we're not that there. Yeah, I hear you know, marketing finance, but then after just didn't have to explain this is who we are. Sure, this is what we do. This is the value we bring, but we still unfortunately have to have that conversation and explain that the role of HR, but I do
Daniel Illes 4:36
I do feel it's changed hugely, I mean, not least, since you know, there's been a lot more analytical rigour that's kind of popped up in the space and I am confident that more and more really smart people choose this career path. Well, I
Chris Rainey 4:53
think we it was highlighted, devalued during the pandemic. All of a sudden every business looked towards the HR team was like what a We do. That's exactly right. Right. And and all of a sudden HR was kind of in the spotlight. And some people rose to the occasion. And some didn't. I saw many HR leaders retire during or get that go actually drew and then others completely thrive. And we're like, we were waiting for this moment. This is our moment, right? And got the investment. And they kind of continued, continuing the momentum now, which I'm really excited about. Yeah, absolutely. As well as I feel like there's never a better time, in a better time, completely agree in this space. Given your background, you've worked across multiple countries, regions, cultures, I'd love to dive into some of your learnings. There. I'm sure you learned some certain learn some things the hard way across them. Now, how can leaders develop that sort of cultural intelligence and sensitivity? They need to lead across multiple cultures? Yeah,
Daniel Illes 5:51
absolutely. Look, I'll tell you my story of kind of landing at Vintage and the sort of things that I've experienced there. So. So I'm on gear, and like I said, Eastern European country. I was joining a company HQ in Lithuania. So I thought to myself, You know what? I mean? I'm probably I can probably handle this. I mean, how different can this be culturally, I think a lot of folks from Western Europe might have a hard time understanding the culture. But surely I can handle this. I mean, this is this is not this can be too distant from what I'm used to. And, boy, I was wrong. So I think that's maybe the first lesson, don't assume anything. So you can have two countries right next to each other with actually really quite distant cultures.
Chris Rainey 6:37
And give me an example of something that you like that you fought one thing we like, actually notices.
Daniel Illes 6:41
Yeah, so celebrating success. So I, so when I first sort of landed, one of the things I wanted to put in place within my team, so I wanted to reinvigorate my team a little bit, and sort of get folks really engaged with our culture and our values. And one of the things I tried to put in place within the people team, this is, it's kind of like a values recognition programme where, you know, basically peer can recognise each other for doing really well. And acting in line with one of our values, and then kind of talking about this publicly and celebrating the success stories. And, and there was just a tremendous pushback. And which was shocking to me, because I feel like this kind of programme is such a standard thing to do. And in saying the UK, and I have definitely seen it and most companies I had been involved in in the past. And that was just this like, really? No way we can do this here. This is really not us. What about the other people who are also doing a good job? I think we are a team or not sort of you shouldn't be thought of as individual success stories in your HR team. Yeah, this is just sort of people team. But I mean, I'm pretty sure if you try it across the board, it might get set similar pushback. But yeah, so that was the first thing that kind of made me think, oh, you know what, there's something different, there's something different going on here. So that was the first thing I really noticed. The second thing was, if you if you want to hear the story of that was around decision making, yeah. So I notice that when it came to decisions at Vinted, there was always a bit of a pause, like everyone just sort of, rather than trying to move fast, which was kind of my style. had this urge to ask other people, get folks involved, socialise your ideas, you know, get that stakeholder, I know that they've been thinking about this problem, let's get them in the room as well. You'd end up with big meetings, lots of people belong discussions for my liking. I was just like, how did how do we ever get anything done here, if if this is how we make decisions, we tried to get to consensus on everything. And, and then I sort of started reading up about decision making as a cultural nuance. And turns out that the UK, the US countries where I'm much more, sort of more used to working with and in fact, hungry are more top down decision making countries, meaning you make a decision, you don't really Yes, so So managers will typically consult their teams, but ultimately, they're really expected to take decisive action right. So, in countries which are leaning toward consensus decisions, there is an expectation of for the boss to kind of drive alignment in the room. And I just thought that you know, that cannot that cannot be great. But and I think this is a very important but I've really evolved on this point. So what I've learned is that while making decisions in a can consensus leaning culture takes longer. So the the upfront investment is higher when you get to decision and you start implementing something off the way faster and you gain back. So all of that investment and more, because everyone is totally aligned, no one's kind of cutting side deals, finding loopholes and backdoors to kind of get out of that decision. Everyone is rowing in the same direction. And actually, yeah, you get to same result, if not a better result. So I guess maybe the lesson from that for for listeners is humility. I think a lot of people come into cultural challenges with a lot of maybe ego is not the right word, but feeling like they know better, I know, their way is the right way. And that's, I think, the knee jerk reaction. I think it's just dangerous to do that. Really, there's good reason why these nuances exist. And, and the world runs in different ways. And so have humility and accept that yeah, this way might be just as good and better. It's just different.
Chris Rainey 11:08
I had the same thing with me. And Shane, because when we first started the company, we're just making quick decisions, because we're just starting the business. We want to move quickly, a perfect example, which matches what you said, when we went to the first lockdown. We lost, you know, 80 90% of our revenue because of events. And we were trying to figure out how to pivot as a business. And rather than making a decision, we actually brought the whole team in and said, these are some of the ideas we have. But we basically agreed it before we went with me and me and Shane agreed that whatever the group consensus will go with, and, like to your point, I didn't have to explain it to them why it's valuable, what it means for them, they're immediately engaged, they're immediately bought in because they're part of the process. Yeah. And within a few weeks, we have completely pivoted the business, a digital, everyone knew the role that they play the why. And it was just like, lightning totally, where's of me and Shane would have came in that room and said, This is what we're doing. This is direction we're going in and didn't really clearly communicate what that means. Each of them, we would have spent weeks, maybe months trying to push that process. Yeah, makes sense? I do. I do think it does depend on what level of decision we're talking about. Sure. So not every day, I'm not doing it every day. For every single decision, I wasn't made a while. But those are big important. We're talking about companies who are going through mergers, for example, or digital transformation or implementing a new programme or piece of software. Those are the moments where you need to involve as many people upfront as possible. And you save on the back end in terms of the implementation, like you said, completely. Which take, which is really the hard part.
Daniel Illes 12:48
Yeah, completely. And and I'll say that No, company, no team, I think gets this perfectly right now, everyone sort of not. That's one. And toward one end of the spectrum. And I think as a leader, it's about challenging yourself to say, Okay, are we are we doing this? Right? Are we? Yeah, yeah. Sort of, how can we? How can we have an even better balance between speed and alignment?
Chris Rainey 13:13
Have you have you got to adapt your communication and leadership style? Yeah, well, two different populations and cultures that used to serve and where your employees live?
Daniel Illes 13:24
Yeah, I mean, for sure. I think in particular, when it comes to, well, communication wise, just tremendous clarity. Again, cultures can exist in the sort of low context sphere and the high context weird, you know, some cultures require you to say exactly what your, what you mean, other cultures work by implication to some extent, and so, you know, if you want to do this, well, across cultures, I think you're best off not leaving anything up to interpretation, because you might lose some of the colleagues and the kind of. And then the other thing is, in particular, in my case, it was stakeholder management. So because of this, because of kind of consensus, leading decision culture, so much of the job is, is storytelling is getting by on the Y for for for Wired, you're trying to introduce a change. It's getting folks bringing folks along that journey with you. And so I've invested a tonne of time into kind of getting that piece of the puzzle, right? Yeah. But you know, perhaps I emphasise less than
Chris Rainey 14:40
us. I'm sure. I know. We're gonna go talk about this a bit more later. But I know this must also be something you take into consideration in your hiring process, then. Yeah, so those are some of the skills that those those leaders need to possess to work in this organisation to be a good fit. 100 storytelling is a perfect example.
Daniel Illes 15:00
100%? And I really think that Yep, so we really double down on that, as we search for leaders. And to be honest, anyone but particularly leaders, I would say that's only become even more prevalent and important since COVID. Yeah, because I think if you're naturally not the strongest relationship builder, or stakeholder manager, in person, you kind of figure it out, you know, people have just more empathy for each other in my experience, in person, and you kind of work it out, you shake hands, you sort of get it done. When you when you kind of don't have that, in personnel element, I think it's just harder to build trust. And the work that you need to do to get buy in to get folks on board is just so much harder. And I think, yeah, you really need leaders that are up for that challenge,
Chris Rainey 15:55
before we jump into the sort of leading remote, because every Sunday, I want to talk about how do you leverage the diversity across those multiple cultures in terms of how that comes into play in terms of innovation, in the business, diversity of thoughts and perspectives? That's something that you've focused on harnessing across the different cultures?
Daniel Illes 16:15
For sure. I mean, I don't know if we kind of emphasise cultural differences as a way to harness it. I think we just generally, as a culture, really, really fight for psychological safety. So it's a really key tenet, I would say of
Chris Rainey 16:35
that people can bring their ideas perspective, absolutely. They understand or want, as you kind of mentioned it earlier, right? In fact, the fact you're involving them in the conversations, you're already going to get that diversity of four perspectives. And that's going to fit right down into the product.
Daniel Illes 16:47
Yeah, we'd be paid genuinely tremendous attention to and honestly, on a systematic basis to making sure that people always feel like they can say what they mean. Yeah, so we have, you know, listening systems like pecan. And, you know, we really train managers to read every single comment, respond with grace, take the feedback, offer to have a conversation, we really want to have an environment where people feel like they can chime in Nice. And so you know, diversity plus psychological safety, hopefully equals innovation. Yes, that's the thinking. Love it.
Chris Rainey 17:27
So moving on to sort of management routines, we all this is, all of us have been adapted to this new way of leading and managing. And I feel like what it meant to be a manager or a leader is changed significantly. Now, what are some of the key strategies that you and your team have implemented to lead remote teams effectively?
Daniel Illes 17:43
Look, I think leading teams remotely is actually kind of the same as leading teams in person just amping up some of the behaviours that make you successful in one versus the other. So much, I think like, how you manage stakeholders, and how much time and care and effort you invest into building, bringing folks on the journey with you as a good example of is the same behaviour but you just do it and more care, or emphasis, I think, similar thing when it comes to just being aware that remote work for your team is hard, it can have an adverse impact on their mental health, it can be lonely. And so just onboarding me to extra care, really checking in because I know that passing Can you give us an example of how you do I just think it's time it's time of day, it's checking in with folks. It's It's, uh, it's actively, you know, messaging them on Slack, when you have nothing else to say other than how are you? And how's your day going? And who have you met so far? What are your first impressions? What's that when
Chris Rainey 18:50
they're not visible in front of you? Absolutely. You designed any like systems or prompts or nudges, to give notes? Because the minute we as managers or leaders are already busy as it is, right? Because they're not in our field of view? We don't see them in an office. It's quite hard to be like, Yeah, I've checked in with Ivan today to see how he is. I think that's one of the challenges. Yeah,
Daniel Illes 19:07
I don't I don't have a silver bullet kind of solution there. I'm sure that someone tackier, let me figure that out. But I just think it's just about, like, for me personally, it's just about reminding yourself that you've got to pay attention to this, folks need that kind of check in, I think, another piece here. And this depends on the size of the sort of function that you lead or team that you lead. I do think that leaders should be visible. And so if you are, if you're in person, it's easy to be visible because you're there. And you know, people see you, your host meetings, etc. In a remote leadership role, I think you've got to be a whole lot more intentional about how you achieve that visibility. So I think in part it's how you set up your comms infrastructure
Chris Rainey 19:56
that how would you that you mean, like, virtual town halls?
Daniel Illes 19:58
Yeah, exactly. So I think you've got to have that you've got to have these these virtual hands or town halls where you are you have an opportunity to, to, to be visible and to to to talk to your team. You know, I've experimented with other ways as well, because I'm not sure that's enough to be honest, I think what I've what I've been doing as well is is things like long form content, you know, if I have an off site with the executive team, for example, people might be wondering how that one my team, so I do a write up on that, and I'll show like, Slack, or, you know, we're doing, we just, you know, we wrap a budget thing, and people are wondering sort of how that process went, how I feel about it. I think they're interested in stop podcast. Yeah. And so people have sort of given me the feedback of doing, you know, instead of these write ups, like, why don't you do video messages, and I should do that, but I think I'm scared of doing that. So I'm kind of
Chris Rainey 20:53
laughing because you're gonna get more engagement, if you would like, it's easy to consume. Yeah, no, no, you're doing a great job now. So otherwise scared of doing it actually will save you time as well. Having to write down my experience having to write it out versus saying it and just having a conversation. Totally, totally. And you're not kind of editing too much and having to do it. And then people can either listen, if it's audio, they can just listen, or they can watch and consume it. I think I
Daniel Illes 21:17
think I'm, I think I got they're not there yet, but I'm getting there. So yeah, so that's another, I would say, key thing, and then maybe the Yeah, this last thing is as you hire your team, again, just really pay attention to even more than you did before, to are they values aligned? Are they going to be good at bait building relationships? Because in a distributed remote context, all of that is just so much how do
Chris Rainey 21:44
you assess for that?
Daniel Illes 21:48
Well, I think you look for empathy to begin with. So that's something I do and and how do I look for empathy? I think one way I do that is just listen to how they tell their story or a story of something that they know a lot about, and I may not, yeah, because I find that when people have a lot of empathy for the person they're talking to, they're going to be careful about using abbreviations. They're going to be careful about the words they use using sort of turns of phrase that I may not know, because they've thought about the fact that I don't know that if they don't, then they're kind of focused on their story and not kind of the listener.
Chris Rainey 22:34
lack of empathy. That's,
Daniel Illes 22:36
I mean, that's just one way. But I think over time you get you can feel
Chris Rainey 22:40
it sometimes in the conversations, right? I even if you're even if you haven't got a specific question, like you said, during conversations, you can pick it up. Yeah. As the example that you just said, What about your own team? Like you're leading a remote? People team? Walk walk us through? Like, what is your day look like? How often are you checking in with each of your team members? How do you communicate? Because I'm sure many of the your peers are listening right now leading similar remote HR teams, they could probably, yeah, to hear how you do it.
Daniel Illes 23:09
Yeah, sure. Sure. So. So I usually. So I do, I have a leadership team meeting with my direct team, plus a handful of folks, which is really the leadership of the function once a week, and we actually be take our time. So we it's scheduled for two hours, we don't always fill up the two hours. But we do want to give each other just time of day. Once we were on that, roughly, I want to say seven, seven of the core. People take the course sort of senior leaders of the team. So that's one sort of important block of the week. What it
Chris Rainey 23:51
hasn't had it what does it look like though? Yeah, how do you do? How do you map out that meeting? To make sure, yeah, so you guys structure agendas,
Daniel Illes 23:57
which I guess brings me back to the point about sort of how to lead remotely. So we do have a very kind of pretty clear structures were meeting which is, to some extent, based on Patrick Lynch, Tony's the advantage and sort of their line of thinking around how to do meetings, right, we've kind of adapted it to our needs a little bit. But, and sort of in a nutshell, we do a lightning round, which is like, three sort of things top of mind for you this week. You start with that can be work or personal. And it's just to kind of have an idea about what sort of what your week is looking like, and some people might may have follow up questions and we, if it requires discussion, we stick it in the agenda. We build the agenda in advance. So people are
Chris Rainey 24:46
you already know you're not spending 25 minutes talking about why are we here?
Daniel Illes 24:49
Exactly. So we bought the agenda in advance, which
Chris Rainey 24:53
is that you bought it in advance one the week before throughout the week, throughout the week.
Daniel Illes 24:58
So it's supposed to be I'm complete, sort of, I mean, we can still add things to during the lightning round. But it's supposed to have a pretty good skeleton there by the by the, by the beginning of the day. And there it's, it's like, okay, well is you're supposed to denote if it's going to be a brainstorming topic is this, a decision we need to make is this whatever your process is exactly, so you categorise it, you kind of give it a time limit, like what you're looking for, like what you think we're gonna have to how much time you think we're gonna need to discuss it. And if it's something that requires a decision, or it's something a little more complex, you have to have a pre read, typically, one or two days before, you've got to have sort of share that otherwise, you're just not going to, we're not going to be able to engage with the content in a way that's going to be helpful for how to do that slack. Like, oh, yes, I mean, Google suite, and then just remind folks to read it on Slack, etc. We take really kind of, we take, like, offline, people add notes, to avoid to avoid the meeting becoming a bunch of updates. Everybody puts their written update into the doc. Yeah. And then pre meeting, everyone reads the updates, whatever questions you have on those updates, you can stick in the doc and add them to the agenda. This is only a Google Doc, on a Google Doc. And then and then be taking notes during the meeting. We agree. Actions that needs to happen. As a result, we look at actions from last week, have they happened? Oh, that's kind of it.
Chris Rainey 26:36
I love it. I really want to jump to detail because I've actually asked my question before, I'm sure everyone has had their own process and an actions how are they stored in a in a consistent or just in calendar?
Daniel Illes 26:46
No, it's actually just the less like Daniel to do X as distributed. So it's just for us within the for the seven of us. We've been to Canada and by no, not so. No. So it's in the Google Doc. Okay, so you just list out the actions of the Google Doc. And then, yeah, basically, if you have to involve other people, it's your job to kind of go out and just slaughter people and then be check in the next week, like, did these things actually happen? If not, we moved them to actions this week again,
Chris Rainey 27:19
last week. Yeah. And And what about the kind of wider HR team?
Daniel Illes 27:23
Yeah, so we actually share a one pager of the outcome of the leadership meeting with the whole team, okay, they sort of want to keep them in the loop on what gets discussed in these meetings. And then we have an all hands with them. Every month, it used to be every two weeks, it was a bit overkill. So we move it to once a month, which is usually a kind of hobby doing against our objective step type of thing. And a couple of deep dives, that folks are doing interesting initiatives want to talk about how those are going. So we do that. I said, these are two corner stores of the of the comms infrastructure. We also every manager has one on ones with their directs. Of course, a lot of the teams have their team meetings, as well, which is on a weekly basis. And I also attend the senior leadership kind of Yeah, meeting once a week.
Chris Rainey 28:16
Very efficient, about managing performance as well as speak to my friends, peers, colleagues, and even me entirely personally. How what, how have you how have you? How have you been getting on in terms of managing performance?
Daniel Illes 28:30
In a remote setting? Yeah. Look, again, I don't think it's any different. I think it's just about Yeah, it's just about being present as a leader. And I think, you know, perhaps in the past, you could use attendance as a proxy, or just sort of be
Chris Rainey 28:54
disseminated even if just because the rain doesn't mean to do any work.
Daniel Illes 28:57
Exactly. I think it actually just, it actually has a forcing mechanism for leaders to just be a lot more have to. Yeah, honest about how their people are doing. So. Yeah, that's, that, to me, is the key thing. So
Chris Rainey 29:14
I always like cuz I've seen like, companies take it to the extreme, like, you know, my wife's company was picked on them. But I feel like it's crazy, where like, they measure the time people are logged in. Yeah, they measure, you have to kind of in that system, how I was called now, you have to share what you're doing every day. So this is what I'm doing. And then it kind of gives it kind of like if my I think it has the opposite effect that I want. Definitely less engaged. Now. I've been in situations where my we need to make my daughter who's for lunch and Tasha, like, I need to make sure I'm logged in. Like that's crazy. Like, it's crazy, like, you know, so I'll bet two times out. If you have to press a number keys, it turns out is that the most and it actually gives managers an excuse Not to be as engaged as they should be, not have those conversations that they should be and they become less and more and more disengaged. So it's actually the opposite effect of it. Whereas your what you're talking about actually encourages more conversations more accumulation. We talk through what we're doing. We don't need to have a KPI of how much you've done today.
Daniel Illes 30:21
Yes, I think you'd like us to be very much sort of outcome focused, and output focused as well. I do like to have. So I don't believe in not having performance management systems. I do think that those are helpful in particular, as a mechanism to make sure that those feedback and development conversations do take place both ways. Yeah. So So for example, we have these like quarterly impact discussions, we call them where? Yeah, basically, we're effectively making the manager sit down with their direct report, to have a session about how things are
Chris Rainey 31:04
going. But you know, hopefully, those are kind of more formal, but they should be having those conversations every day anyway. Yeah, absolutely. And it's kind of more like, Okay, now we're actually going to put it in a formal setting, actually,
Daniel Illes 31:15
it's, it happens in the in the in the sort, of course of their one on ones. Yeah, it's just, it's almost like just a reminder, like, in case you're not talking about us all the time. Yeah, here's a nudge that you should definitely talk about, at least once a quarter,
Chris Rainey 31:30
us, we're gonna map it back to activities like their own personal growth, leadership and investment in terms of training or well, and it also goes back to your talent strategy, where you see future talent development, that's not necessarily going to happen during those conversations. Yeah, exactly that way, exactly. What about, I love talking to you about the kind of hiring, especially if you've worked for multiple startups where you've had to attract senior leaders, we've experienced perhaps when you necessarily don't have the big brand name in the beginning, right? Because you're a startup just starting out? What are some of the strategies that you've employed to attract senior leaders? Or great talent to a business when you're not really a brand? a household name yet?
Daniel Illes 32:11
Yeah, yeah. I mean, look, I think you just have to, to me, it just goes back, you've got to tell the story. You just you have to if you've got nothing to show in the past, you've got to tell a really compelling story of the future. Right. So you, I think you have to have a very, very clear story of your mission. What is it that you're trying to achieve? How do you plan to get there? What is the contribution that this person is going to make? To unlock that? Right? I think I would say that, you're gonna have a hard time doing this. If you don't authentically Believe in your mission. So I think every startup likes to have a mission, but they stay
Chris Rainey 33:00
right down as part of their business plan. We have to write this.
Daniel Illes 33:03
But But I do think that if you if you are genuine about what, you know, if you're genuine about sort of that mission, that truly is, what's driving the team toward execution, that I think you're already in a better spot. So that's kind of how I would I would start. Yeah, I mean, I would invest a tonne of time into getting the brief, right. So the number of times, I think these hires fail, because you don't think through what you're looking for. It's just crazy to me.
Chris Rainey 33:43
What do you mean by that? Yeah. So
Daniel Illes 33:45
say you're hiring a, a CEO, right. I think you've got to be super clear on what the remit of the of this role is going to be. I think you'll be surprised that sometimes in startups, you ask three of the panellists and they will have a slightly different idea.
Chris Rainey 34:07
Also to being a CEO in a startup is very different to being a CEO in a larger, exactly. organisation, very different,
Daniel Illes 34:13
very, very different. So I think you really have to be clear on like, what are the skills you need? Or the skills you may think you need? But actually, you probably don't, because the you know, the team already carries that. And that's Remember, you're building a team here are not just a collection of individuals, for example, right? So if you're, you know, if I say CPU, a product leader, the chief product officer, you might think, well, they have to have really strong product vision, and maybe they do, but if your founder team are incredibly strong on vision, but actually lack the kind of discipline to organise the team toward that in terms of execution, so probably don't need to look for that vision spike, and you're unlikely to find that vision. Jin spike, did the like the execution kind of action orientation organised analytical spike in the same person that has the vision spike. So you may want to actually very clearly spell out at the beginning of your hiring journey like, you know, typically a CPM may be mean, other companies may look for a visionary Superbowl actually, in our case, we don't do that we want a operationalized kind of thing. So yeah, have those conversations aligned with folks on the team? That's, that's really key.
Chris Rainey 35:34
What are the key skills and attributes you feel like the leaders need in this?
Daniel Illes 35:40
I mean, for me, and this really is just for every, every leader, and really everyone but like, exponentially more important in leadership, and especially in senior leadership is self awareness. The number one thing I would highlight, and it's not and self awareness about what you're good at, what you're not good at, and what you do about the stuff that you're not good at. And I think there's many acceptable ways of dealing with that right social opinion
Chris Rainey 36:10
on that, because like, you hear one side of people say you should double down on what you're good at, forget about what you're not good at. And then others, I've heard other people say, actually, you should focus on your weaknesses and, you know, go on to become strengths.
Daniel Illes 36:24
Well, I think there's a lot of ways of getting it. Right. Definitely. I mean, if you want to have a career that you enjoy, I probably would not encourage anyone to double down on their weaknesses, because
Chris Rainey 36:36
I mean, double down, I mean, just improve a little bit like,
Daniel Illes 36:39
but at the same time, I also completely, and this is why I feel a little bit sometimes. Like, I'm not sure how I feel about personality testing, because because people pigeon holes, you Asian holes, you're pigeon holed themselves into boxes, and they're like, Yeah, and it almost used as an excuse that sorry, I'm not good at execution. I'm not good at, you know, numbers. And I'm just like, that's yourself. That and also it doesn't, you know, if you're in a job, you've got to have the skills to do that job. And just because you're not naturally good at that thing, you should probably get to a level where you can at least deliver some of it if you have the luxury of finding a some other way of compensating for that weakness. Great. I mean, I think as a senior leader you want you want to hear in an interview, as they tell you. I'm for example, really disorganised I
Chris Rainey 37:27
need to I, by the way, Shane will tell you that immediately. And that's what it is. And he's not. He's amazingly organised. Exactly. So you
Daniel Illes 37:35
guys are a great partnership. And that's what I'm talking about. So I think you find ways to
Chris Rainey 37:40
we were intentional about that, though. We sat down. After the first year, we just didn't feel like for like we're making as much progress as we want. And when we sat down and kind of spoke about what gives us energy, what takes it away. And what asked you as a weakness is we realised there was so many things that I were doing, that he loved, and I hated. And and vice versa. And we're like, and then soon as we land into our strengths and things that give us energy, brilliant game changer.
Daniel Illes 38:04
There you go. Absolutely. Chris,
Chris Rainey 38:06
I hate doing sales. I'm like, I loved it. It was just we so definitely recommend it. You sit down at that conversation. Do that.
Daniel Illes 38:16
That's amazing. And I'm familiar with you. I think it's a Yeah, so you can choose to kind of get better at that thing. If that's your that's what you want to do. Or that's your strategy. Or you can choose to compensate for it by hiring a team that does that part better than you or having a partner or, you know, and this doesn't work in life, etc. It's
Chris Rainey 38:37
a good answer that I get a lot actually from a lot of the CHR OHS because when I interviewing, who was interviewing, oh, I was interviewing Lauren Schuster's as Chief People Officer for Lego. And I asked him around some questions around people are like some quite technical questions. And he was like, This is why I have Melissa. Yes, I don't need to be. I don't need to be an expert on people and legs. I love that. And he was like, No, Melissa was there actually. And then I questioned. And it was really like one of those moments of Yeah, that's why he hires an incredible team around him because he doesn't have to be you shouldn't be the expert in everything. That's something I learned the hard way for a long time trying to have all the answers as a leader as a CEO. I was like, no, no, that's the whole point of having a great team. So that's
Daniel Illes 39:22
I would say that's the number one thing that I really look for, and self
Chris Rainey 39:28
aware. Well, one of the great ways to become self aware is having a culture of psychological safety. So people give you feedback. Yeah. As well, like the amount of times that CHR O has come to our events face to face. I realised this is the first time they're really getting feedback, because they maybe don't have a team or the type of environment where they're getting it. But when there's whenever there's when there's 50 or 100. Obviously actors in the room, they will give you feedback during the roundtables and they'll be like Chris, this was great. I've got so much feedback today looks great on my projects, and I was like next kind of sit down is a clear signal that you probably need to have a conversation with your team who are not giving you that feedback. And I learned the hard way, my coach did a free 60 with my team. And all the feedback I got, I was like, Really, all of these things we all we all have to as managers, when we get our feedback, we're like, really? And that just sent a clear signal that okay, perhaps I don't have as much.
Daniel Illes 40:22
It's so funny because I feel like we, we, you know, it, it's so difficult to you're you always feel like you're creating the circumstances for people to be able to speak up. But actually, what I find is that you really have to actively proactively ask
Chris Rainey 40:47
Yeah, it's not just gonna happen if
Daniel Illes 40:49
no matter how, like that act of asking is actually the only act. That is a
Chris Rainey 40:55
good and it's a signal that you want to receive it right. Yeah. Anyone listening right now? When was the last time that you asked for feedback? It's good question to ask ourselves. Absolutely. Most of us including me was quite a while
Daniel Illes 41:07
ago. Yeah. And I don't do it enough. Now that I think about it. So yeah, good
Chris Rainey 41:12
lesson. Right now, what is the boy let's go on to our quickfire round. Sure. So ask you some questions. We've only got five seconds cool. hobbies and passions outside of the office.
Daniel Illes 41:23
Jim mudlark king wants to go down to the dumps for sure. Look for historical finds that people have chucked into the river.
Chris Rainey 41:32
No way because obviously you when the Thames when the tide comes out, you've got all the all the mud in the Thames. There's
Daniel Illes 41:39
a whole community of people doing this. golden coins you find Roman stuff. It's amazing.
Chris Rainey 41:46
Yeah, the things that around in the Thames I can only imagine. Yeah, as well. So it's called mod locking. But
Daniel Illes 41:50
lurking Yeah, okay. I've
Chris Rainey 41:51
seen people doing it. Obviously, I've literally never knew what it was. All right, there we go. If you could cut your fingers and change one thing about HR, what would you change?
Daniel Illes 42:03
I would give it a an even better. br turnaround. I would want a bad day so called HR, all the smartest people in the world to come work in HR. Yeah. Oh, I see. Yeah. So I would I would just want to, like, accelerate that journey of, of it being a really attractive place for smart people
Chris Rainey 42:25
love that. How would your friends and family describe what you do for a living?
Daniel Illes 42:30
Well, my mum would say I work for some sort of online secondhand shop. And she actually worked in HR in the past, she'd say, she knows. She knows Oh, that's very rare. That's normally that's not the answer. There we get.
Chris Rainey 42:50
What legacy Do you want to leave behind?
Daniel Illes 42:55
Hopefully, making work. Better, just, I would love for people to leave vented feeling like they had freaking good time. They learned a tonne. It was a curious thing shot for them, and then they're going to go and do better. Even better things with their lives. It's kind of
Chris Rainey 43:18
Yeah, I think we all hoped for that. If he wasn't doing the job, even now, what would you think you'd be doing?
Daniel Illes 43:24
I think I might be
Chris Rainey 43:28
looking for gold on the beach.
Daniel Illes 43:31
I'm obsessed with history. So
Chris Rainey 43:33
I might Oh, okay. That's a good like history professor at interest in what's your favourite era in history?
Daniel Illes 43:41
Second Century Rome.
Chris Rainey 43:43
Oh, was fascinating. Yeah, we don't have a show about that. But yeah, that was a fascinating time. Who says a person has the biggest impact on your career?
Daniel Illes 43:53
Probably my current boss, Thomas, who took a chance on me and is an incredibly inspiring leader that I really look up to. So I mean,
Chris Rainey 44:01
what would you say is the main things you've learned from him?
Daniel Illes 44:05
Humility, no matter how successful you are, stay humble. And listen. psychological safety, which I think is very much related to the first point, so yeah, double down on building that in your team. Those will be the key.
Chris Rainey 44:21
Those two things combined are very powerful, as well. Last question, what advice would you give to HR leaders, CEOs of tomorrow that are going to be sitting in your seat one day? I'm allowed to wait to take a deep breath. They're like, Oh, God.
Daniel Illes 44:39
Okay. Well, I would say it really depends on your context. So I think will be almost reckless to give advice, but I would say like, if you have a lot of hiring ahead of you, so you're at some stage and you're now going to raise some funding, and now you're going to hire a bunch of people. Like really make sure you get that piece, right. Because if you've focused on everything else, and you kind of Let hiring fall by the wayside and and you make poor hiring like poor quality decisions and the hiring process and you build a team that not just for your not just for the people, but for the whole company that aren't right. I think you could really derail your company. So get hiring that get the hiring piece of the puzzle right first before you figure out what to do with everything else.
Chris Rainey 45:24
Yeah, because unless you have the right people and skills, the rest doesn't matter. It's not going to exactly what is supposed to go on a show. I appreciate. Thanks for having me. And I said to you before, I should have said to show like all of so many of our employees love your love your love Vinted they're on their buy in selling, you clearly got a good connection. You clearly got a great connection with your audience as well because we're here all here in our home. With you, we wish you and the team would have success and so much.
Daniel Illes 45:54
That's great to hear. Thank you. Thanks for having me.