How to Protect Culture During Rapid Growth
In this episode of the HR Leaders Podcast, we sit down with Andre Heinz, Chief People and Culture Officer at Celonis, to unpack what HR leadership really looks like inside a company scaling at rocket speed.
Andre explains why growth has no mercy in fast scaling organizations, and why HR must constantly think two to three years ahead while still managing the intense operational demands of today. He shares how Celonis went from 800 to over 3,500 employees, and what it takes to build systems, culture, and talent strategies that actually scale with that kind of speed.
Most importantly, he breaks down why HR must act as the guardian of organizational health, protecting the cultural DNA of the company while ensuring talent quality, operational efficiency, and leadership maturity keep pace with the speed of growth.
🎓 In this episode, Andre discusses:
Why HR must act as the guardian of organizational health
What it takes to scale systems without losing startup agility
How to maintain a high talent bar during hypergrowth hiring
Why fast scaling companies must think two to three years ahead
How Celonis scaled from 800 to 3,500 employees without losing its culture
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00:00
Growth has no mercy, right? If something is not working, you haven't addressed it strategically. In a year from now, if you double the company, the problem is twice as big.
00:09
So you've got to have these bifocals of keeping an eye on operations, but also thinking ahead two, three years and thinking about whatever I implement right now, does it also work when the company is two or three times bigger than what it is today? I see our role also as really being the guardian of organizational health.
00:28
And when you grow fast, it's a little bit like kids in puberty, right? The pants are always too short, the shoes are too small and so you can very easily just build things that won't scale.
00:41
And so what we did is very practically, we sat down with each executive on a quarterly basis to do sort of an org health check-in and look at some KPIs and certain aspects and say like, is your function healthy? Are we doing the right things? And to keep the maintenance on because very easily when there's big budgets and fast growth, then people just lose track of efficiency.
01:22
andre welcome to the show my friend how are you doing thank you so much chris i'm doing well thanks for having me today how's the uh new year treating you so far not too bad i started it um going free riding in austria so going free free running or free riding sorry riding skiing oh wow nice is that what they call it
01:43
Yes.
01:45
You go off-piste.
01:46
So, okay, yeah, so explain that to me and listeners that don't know what that means. So you go off the path that you're supposed to stay on. Is that what it is? Yeah, I mean, the background in my case is I love going to the mountains, and I love to go also up summits in the winter, and I'm pretty good at getting up, but I suck at coming down.
02:07
So I said, I have to learn this. I have to learn skiing in deep snow. The quick way down as well.
02:13
yes exactly and this this is what i focused on at the beginning of the year amazing learning how to do free riding so that's what they call it free riding nice nice i was just i was having this debate with someone this morning maybe you can i would love to hear your opinion at what point can you no longer say happy new year mid january mid jan is that what we're saying yeah yeah that's my my gut feel i'm with i'm with you i feel like getting towards the end you're like okay we're just in the year now let's just stop saying yes exactly
02:50
But listen, we've known each other for a while and I'm super excited for this new role that you're in and a new organization. Tell everyone a bit about your current role and a bit about the organization for people that perhaps may not be aware of it. Yeah, so I'm the Chief People and Culture Officer of a company called Celonis.
03:12
Celonis is a quite unique company. We're the global leader in what we call process mining and process intelligence, which if you allow me to use an analogy of the healthcare industry, it's like using an x-ray, not on a human body to see what's really going on, but on a company,
03:34
And with the power of AI, looking into how processes really run, where inefficiencies, and then really unlock potential that way. And now with the emergence of
03:50
of AI, it's actually becoming even more meaningful because enterprise AI does need contextual information. Of course. And this is what we can deliver. Amazing. I mean, how do you even categorize the field you're in?
04:07
It's actually a new tech category that we ended up creating. Our founders started this in 2011 as a student project and it's now actually even a Gartner magic quadrant on process mining. How many employees do you have? Three and a half thousand by now. And we grew very fast. Amazing. And what attracted you to the role?
04:34
I was the CEO of a much larger company called Siemens Healthineers.
04:39
Medtech industry, 60,000 people. We took the business public in 2018. And sort of in my ninth year at that company, I was starting to think, okay, what could come next?
04:52
The natural expectation would have been, okay, he becomes the CHRO of another MDAX or some sizable company.
05:00
And then Solonis came along and first of all, I was like, okay, this company is 600 people big. I'm coming from 60,000. This is factor 100 smaller. Literally. I don't mind smaller, but this is...
05:12
Seriously smaller. I mean, Salon was as big as my HR team at the time. Oh, my God. Wow. What I realized is, you know, at my point in my career, it was not about status. It was about having an impact. Yes. And so I was very attracted by the opportunity to help a business be built from scratch and really grow. So, you know, from listening to the podcast, I always ask this question. Did you choose HR or did it choose you along the way?
05:47
I choose HR.
05:49
I studied economics. I actually wanted to be a graphic designer. And my dad looked at me like, really? Why did you study something that pays the rent first and then you think about it again? And so I studied economics and people tried to talk me into accounting.
06:06
And I tried it out. And after one week, the head of accounting of the company where I interned, said like, oh, maybe you should be going to HR. And so I very quickly caught fire and got really passionate about it. And I always joke with my finance and accounting colleagues because human resources is so much more complex than financial resources because money has no dreams, has no
06:30
It's binary. It's binary, right? Exactly. And people are much more complex and the field is, for my taste, much more complex.
06:38
And so 30 years later, I've worked in many different companies such as Siemens, Nokia, the World Bank, got the opportunity to work in Germany, Russia, China, United States, and I'm still super happy about this space. Yeah. When did you realize this would be your... long-term career and calling?
07:03
In the first weeks of my internship. But why?
07:09
So I always hate when people say, oh, yeah, I'm in HR because I like people. I think that's a little boring and shallow. When you take our profession apart, there's very different components.
07:25
Yes, there's a social complexity component because you're dealing with
07:30
a huge diversity of people. But next to it, there's a huge analytical component as well.
07:36
And then there's a creative component. So that mix really is what made it very attractive for me.
07:42
Yeah, fair enough. So it's quite lucky that early on that you found that, right? Many people go through multiple roles.
07:54
and organizations and before they realize that and I'm one of them I've done so many different jobs before I like even now when I tell my friends what I do they're like wait a minute like you talk to people in HR and like you grew up you grew up break dancing and playing ice hockey and now you do this yes yes you never know you never know right where it's going to go from um how would you describe um obviously when you how long you've been there now sorry
08:24
Over five years. Five years? It's been that long? Yes. Wow. Time's flying. Literally, time has flown by. How would you describe Thelonious' purpose and how did this help shape your approach to the people, culture and talent strategy?
08:44
yeah so like i said we use machine learning and ai to help companies first of all understand how the operations are really running in real time i give you an example of one of our clients is Lufthansa when an airplane comes in and it's delayed
09:08
it creates a lot of friction on the ground, right? Because the fueling may be in the wrong location.
09:14
The ground stuff that's supposed to service the airplane, clean the airplane, bring fresh coffee, all of that is derailing because of, I don't know, a change in weather, right? Or air traffic. And so we help analyze these patterns and help Lufthansa find out how to optimize that so that they
09:35
are able to control all the data points and make sure that ground stuff is in place where it should be.
09:41
All in real time. Yeah, and fly back out on time. And so you can apply this in many areas and it really has a huge impact because when you think about it, the whole world is run on processes.
09:56
Everything ends up being a process, and if we can optimize that, there's so many opportunities.
10:02
For example, we work with the NHS, helping them in patient care. The whole scheduling of the NHS is a big topic to solve material waste and production, CO2 emission in the cement industry. So there's many, many opportunities to do that. But to my question then, how did that inform and shape your people strategy?
10:28
Yeah, so maybe I go a little bit back in time.
10:33
When I joined Celonis, we were about 800 people big and we really had to, first of all, lay all the foundations. We had very little people processes in place and I really had to first build that, excuse me, independent...
10:51
of a sort of thinking deeper people strategy.
10:54
But then about one and a half, two years in, we said, OK, now it's time that we really think much deeper about it. And with the strong purpose and mission of this company and a relatively young workforce, right, the average age at the time was 30 years.
11:12
80% of our workforce is Gen Y and Gen Z. So a very
11:17
ambitious and sort of purpose-driven team. And we wanted to think deep about, you know, how do you make this, quote unquote, a generational company with the opportunity to build a new tech category and build a new business? And so what we wanted to do is not just sort of think short term, what is the priority for the next year, but really think what will happen in the next 10 years.
11:48
in the world, how will this impact human needs and which of these human needs can we cater to? So kind of looking over the shoulder of our employees and look ahead what's coming and then respond to that.
12:05
And that ended up being actually not a trivial task. No, of course. Because first of all, we had to find people who could explain to us what will happen in the next 10 years.
12:15
And so we did a lot of research and there's obviously a lot of people out there who pretend that they know, but a lot of it is not very data-driven. Yeah, exactly.
12:27
But we did find some professors who are looking at socio-economic data of the past to predict the future right because there's certain patterns in society that repeat yeah exactly like they look at things like unemployment rate wealth distribution alcoholism all kinds of things um to to predict what's coming um if if you're interested to read really nerdy papers you can google peter turchin He's a professor at the University of Chicago, and he does that kind of stuff. And we sat down with him and sort of created this vision of the future and then looked at what will come from there. And some of it is a little bit gloomy, right? There's a continuous imbalance of wealth. Sure.
13:20
access to education becoming harder, erosion of trust in institutions and a big need for collaboration. Yeah. It's really interesting because I have a similar approach to investing. So if you look at ever read any or watch any videos of like Ray Dalio, he would talk about the trends from the past for like, you know, hundreds of years. And you can see the same
13:47
patterns repeating okay there's maybe a different context right to it but it is we sort of repeat i wish i could remember the word that he uses for it um as well and i've used that strategy to help me personally zoom out rather than focus on yes you know the here and the now in terms of how i invest and more take a more of a and a longer term view based on historic data Whereas before, you know, I'm like, oh my God, the stock's up today and tomorrow it's down.
14:20
You know, or like, and also understanding that I can only, there's only so much that's within my control to like, just focus on what I can like control the controllables. Like, let me just, and then if everything counts, just, you know, and understand that, especially with AI, right? Like the skills that you're going to need in the next few years, you don't even know about yet. Yeah.
14:43
They don't exist right now where we are. We thought that the next big job would be prompt engineer. That's already gone.
14:53
The AI is already smart enough that you don't need a prompt engineer to be able to do that. That's how fast that we're moving.
15:01
So you go through that process with the team, right?
15:04
How do you now turn that into action? Talk me through some practical things and steps that you took
15:14
Yeah. So first of all, what emerged out of this research was that there's four basic human needs that we found. I mean, they're not totally surprising, but were worth looking at. One is around security and stability, obviously in a highly dynamic world. Then health and well-being becoming more and more important.
15:37
the evergreen of a greater purpose and belonging sense, and then also the evergreen of individual growth and development as a need.
15:47
And so what we did is we first of all cross-referenced that with our company and who we are. And what we realized, for example, is that security and stability is not something that we can or want to cater to. We cannot because we're a highly dynamic, fast growing business and people who are increasingly attracted to, for example, public sector roles because they think they get this type of stability there.
16:14
We said those are not the people we should attract. And also you should be very transparent with them about that. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And so what we found is the other three are very much down the alley.
16:28
So the topic of purpose very easily fits to what I described earlier. Salon is being a very powerful solution to really address some big complex problems.
16:42
That being very deep ingrained in the culture of the company anyway, right? A lot of young people saying like, I'm here because I believe in this mission.
16:49
Secondly, growth, also fairly easy for us. When you're a fast growing business, you can obviously offer a lot of growth opportunities, but also going deep and not just making it about career progression, but really also personal growth and learning. So we went very deep on investing in a learning portfolio.
17:09
And then the third topic, care and belonging, also was one thing that we felt really comfortable with. And so we invested heavily in the whole variety of well-being offerings. But we also did some maybe unique and sort of more generational things like we offered a equity grant.
17:30
for the babies of our employees.
17:34
So if you have a baby or if you adopted a kid, you get an equity grant from Celonis for this child as a seed funding. So when this kid is, I don't know, 20 and is looking for higher education, that there's a basic funding already in place to make that happen. amazing so creating belonging and sort of stickiness to say like hey if we get this business right and if we really exploit this market opportunity incredible my kid can go to a great school one day does it have to be used for school just out of curiosity is it specifically linked to that
18:13
that's the idea um initially we tried to give the grant actually to the baby yeah and we um there was some complications here with our with tax and and yeah yeah okay how is that supposed to work and so we said okay let's keep it simple we give we give the equity ground to the parents uh but with the intention of course say look you're getting this and keep it but as yeah okay great yeah that's a trust-based yeah immediately my brain was like that sounds very complicated it sounds great in practice as an idea but i was thinking about tax and along the way but that's incredible and again that's really gonna like you said people feel like they truly belong and feel really connected to the business um you know and it's not
19:03
it's not like a work-life balance is a work-life blend and they feel part of something bigger than just a company name. Right. Um, as well, especially when it comes to your kids, like it doesn't get much more, you know, if I feel like the organization I'm working for is here for me and my child, like, you know, um, what, what on the wellbeing point, what, what like so many companies I speak to, they're doing so many different wellbeing activities. They've got all these different apps. They've got all sorts of going on. What would you say is the one war being initiative that had the biggest impact that you did?
19:41
So it's coming a little bit with the demographics, a fairly young workforce.
19:49
The initial thing that people most asked for and were most interested in was really physical well-being. So having access to gyms, having access to yoga classes, all these things. So we invested first in that. But very soon thereafter, what also emerged is mental well-being.
20:08
And so really offering through partners of ours coaching opportunities that go beyond just the job, but sort of more like life coaching. How do I tackle certain things in my life? And that turned out right after physical well-being, which was more sort of a, hey, I'm young, I want to do sports, I want to be fit.
20:30
It soon emerged as the second biggest topic. Nice. Are these separate platforms? Can you tell me who they are? Or are they one platform?
20:39
They're separate platforms. Can you share?
20:42
Can you share? We're in the middle of changing platforms. Oh. We're afraid from doing that. Okay. Are you in the middle of changing both the physical and mental? Just the mental. Well, can you share the physical one? Would that be okay? So the physical one is, for the majority of countries, it's Gym Hub.
21:05
And I think they rebranded themselves recently. No, you mean Well Hub?
21:10
Yes, Well Hub. Thank you. There used to be Gym Pass. Exactly. Thank you, Gym Pass. That's all right. Well Hub, thank you. I got that wrong so far.
21:18
Now, I only ask you these questions because I think for our audience, and this is part of our podcast, we just try to share what other companies are using. It's not a sale for them. It's really just, there's a lot of noise. I'm sure every day your inbox is full of providers and
21:36
So it's always good for them. And Gympass, you know, we work with Gympass. They do incredible.
21:44
WellHub, sorry now. Now you've got me saying it. WellHub.
21:51
And I've also done a pretty good job. I'm not sure how much you've looked into it, to expanding into the mental health space. because obviously that was a big gap um uh as well so and and you're right though it it always will depend on the demographic in terms of what you need at your different stages of your life and career right when it comes for example financial financial uh uh well-being is something that is sort of the third pillar right next to physical mental well-being financial well-being is another topic but
22:28
It is only slowly emerging because a lot of young people don't think about their, you know, pension funds yet and so on. They say, hey, have some Salonis. I wish I knew that younger.
22:38
I say to my wife all the time, why do we not get taught this in school? And if I would have known We would probably be retired by now because I would have been investing from the day that I started in the company, I would have been investing into my pension if I understood the benefit of compound interest, the benefit of the tax relief from investing in the UK and ISAs and JISAs like it kind of like hurts. So it's great that organizations are now helping guide that. Yeah.
23:09
Yeah. What about some of the other areas you mentioned is around upskilling and reskilling and that must be really fascinating in your space because it's so fast moving and you're looking for highly technical skills that probably are in demand beyond belief in the space. But also as your solution evolves, you're having to bring in new talent, new skills. Talk me through how you approach that both from an internal upskilling capability perspective, but also bringing in skills externally.
23:49
So what's maybe unique when you're in a fast-scaling business is that the skill profile dramatically changes over time.
23:59
So I'll give you an example. When I joined, we had a young lady in my team who was in charge of learning, everything from technical learning to leadership learning.
24:09
And she was sort of the generalist. She was very proud that she can pull that off. And then we said, look, we have to start professionalizing this and go more deep. And we want you to be only in charge of one part of learning and sort of make it from wide to deep.
24:24
And she initially felt like we were limiting her. and we said but you don't understand like if you go deep how deep you can go yeah yeah and that happened across the company because when you're a startup then everybody does everything everything sort of projects and you love to get involved with all kinds of things and over time you have to um really build out the expertise in the specific field and make sure people understand the advantage of going deep rather than feeling uh limited right by a more narrow deep scope um so so that's the first thing that we have to coach people through that
24:59
And there are some people who say, you know what, I always want to be in the startup environment, so I move on. And that's OK.
25:05
And then secondly, when you grow fast, a lot of the skill building really comes from hiring.
25:10
You just keep adding more people. We had periods where we doubled the company every year.
25:16
And so you easily do that. But we also realized everybody who was on board already was increasingly eager to get more learning.
25:26
Generally speaking, the way we organized it is we have very technical learning on our own platform that's taken care of outside of HR, because I would not dare to know how to manage that.
25:38
So that's one sort of technical academy. And then we have a business learning academy, which I own. And the way we structured that, because to your point, it's so dynamic.
25:49
and this is sort of school book approach, but it works, is to put in place a learning council. On a regular basis, we sit down with business leaders and experts to say like, okay, what is the priority? How do we make that happen? And what we found is initially we tried to do a lot of online learning.
26:11
and the adoption rates weren't that great.
26:14
No surprise. We still offer that, right? So we still have the big LinkedIn learning libraries and those kinds of things.
26:22
But given that our workforce is fairly young, they actually didn't want this
26:29
sort of democratized way of learning. You can access anything you decide yourself what you want to learn. But they said to us, look, actually, we're busy. We don't have a lot of experience. You tell us what you think is most relevant.
26:44
And so we we become much, much more
26:47
focused and much more intentional to tell people, look, this is what we think is important for your role. And so please take these trainings. And then what we also did, what was really a success, is we introduced learning days by function, where we said people, we all come together in a certain location. And for two days, all we do is learn.
27:07
Oh, so collaborative.
27:09
Really collaborative, bring people together, bring in speakers, make it very engaging, rather than say, you know, in your spare time, go online and find a training yourself. That didn't really work, to be honest.
27:22
It's still there.
27:26
I've shared with you what we're building with Atlas, right?
27:29
Yes. Right. So we're on the same page here. Learning shouldn't be something that you go to. It needs to show up in the flow of work. It needs to meet you where you're at. No one's going, hey, on my lunch break, I can't wait to look through 2000 LinkedIn learning courses to try and find something that's not tailored to me, that lacks the context of my role, my organization and my challenge.
27:57
Along the way.
27:59
So we're on the same page. I think it's the. Knowledge versus doing gap.
28:07
Is becoming wider. Everyone. We have democratized access to content. And knowledge. Which is incredible.
28:13
You can ask any question. And have answers to anything you want. But actually the doing part.
28:21
And being able to prove. That people have that capability. And those skills. There's a big gap.
28:30
So I love the fact that you broke down the technical training internally because that's not something you can get from LinkedIn Learning or anything else. How does that work? Do you basically leverage the incredible leaders and talent you have internally and sort of record content and then kind of build stuff out that way? What does that look like if you don't mind me asking? So we actually have enablement teams. They're very closely integrated into the specific functions.
29:02
And they create the learning content as the solution is developing.
29:09
And they stay very close to being with customers, being with the colleagues who actually apply the learning. Because to your point, it's developing so fast that you constantly have to feed new features, new aspects. into the organization. And then where's that stored?
29:36
This is stored in a central knowledge space.
29:41
That's an area where we still need to get better, right? Because you generate so much data and we're currently looking at how do we make that more accessible and more curated. Yeah. Now the reason I ask that is like, I don't know about you, but I've got Slack, I've got Teams, I've got, you know, email, I've got like, there's a million places.
30:07
We've got obviously our internal intranets and organizations. So trying to create a, we've got five, six different agents.
30:16
Every one of our vendors wants us to use their agent. So it's like, where do you store and access this content so that it shows up when they need it, right? Is it them getting a notification inside of Teams linking them back to the content, for example? Yeah. So we use Confluence quite a bit.
30:37
Our engineering team is using Slack quite a lot, so we're kind of right now piloting Slack AI, where you can start accessing sort of to your point in the flow of work. You can ask questions and it's not like, okay, I need to go to this repository with 10,000 files and find it myself, but let the AI find it.
30:58
So that's what we're experimenting with right now. Looking ahead this year, what are the areas that you're most excited about?
31:09
I'm super excited about a continuous growth of our business in certain regions.
31:17
So India is a really high priority for us and not sort of only in the classic sense of tech companies go to India because of the talent. Yes, that's an important aspect. But second to that, when you look at the users of Salonis,
31:34
like the biggest group of Celonis end users sit in India and they want us to be with them. So we're right now expanding our India presence quite a bit.
31:45
Then AI is super exciting for us. Obviously it's what we offer to customers, but also internally it really peeling the onion and going from general AI enablement and utilization drive to going much deeper into how will that change skill requirements? How will that change the tasks that need to be done by humans versus by AI? And how will that change the workforce and the way we operate altogether?
32:16
That's an area that I find super exciting. We're starting to go deeper and deeper into that.
32:22
And then just continuing to nurture the culture of the company.
32:27
It's not a trivial task when you grow and evolve so quickly to kind of keep your soul.
32:37
Yeah. What advice would you give to...
32:41
Perhaps yourself, when you first came into this role, going from a very large organization like Siemens, where literally, as you said yourself, your HR team was as big as the entire business that you're going into. Looking back, what do you know now that you wish you knew going in?
33:01
Yeah, I can tell you, I mean, I was very naive.
33:04
coming into Salonis. One of the founders said to me, Andre, where you are today is sitting on the backseat of a German cab on a German highway, everything smooth.
33:16
And you're looking out the window and enjoying the landscape. And when you come to Salonis, you're going to be on a rocket ship and it's going to be very bumpy and fast and loud. And I thought that was quite an arrogant statement because I was like, wow, you know, I run a 60,000 people business. This doesn't feel like a German cab drive, right? So, but three months into the company, I realized what he was talking about. I'm like, I was humbled and I realized, okay, this is much bigger.
33:42
Because what happens is if you're in a large company, the complexity comes from size.
33:47
When you're in a scale up, the complexity comes from the speed of change. Yes. And so what are key learnings?
33:56
The first one is you really have to think ahead of the scaling curve. I always use this analogy of you need to wear bifocals.
34:04
Because if you're in this environment, it's super intense and you're bombarded with very operational demand. And because your team is small, you can't delegate it anywhere. So it's always you, right? I know how you feel. Trust me. And so you can totally get sucked into just daily operations. And at the same time, growth has no mercy, right? If something is not working, you haven't addressed it strategically. In a year from now, if you double the company, the problem is twice as big.
34:33
And so you got to have these bifocals of keeping an eye on operations, but also thinking ahead two, three years and thinking about whatever I implement right now, does it also work when the company is two or three times bigger than what it is today? So that's one finding.
34:50
The second one is you need to really watch out on keeping a high bar on talent. Because when you hire so many people in a short period of time,
35:03
the chance that you lower your bar
35:06
because you just want to create the volume is very high.
35:11
And that is a really dangerous thing. And so we learned very quickly and painfully that it's important not to just hire people that are top notch from a talent point of view, but also people who have the mindset to be in a company like this. They can handle speed and ambiguity. So that was really important.
35:36
Another topic I would say, you need to keep a close eye on organizational efficiency.
35:44
So this goes beyond the talent agenda, but I see our role also as really being the guardian of organizational health.
35:54
And when you grow fast, it's a little bit like kids in puberty, right? The pants are always too short, the shoes are too small. And so you can very easily just build things that won't scale. And so what we did is very practically, we sat down with each executive on a quarterly basis to do sort of an org health check-in and look at some KPIs and certain aspects and say like,
36:19
Is your function healthy? Are we doing the right things?
36:23
And so to keep the maintenance on, because very easily when there's big budgets and fast growth, then people just lose track of efficiency. It's so funny you just said that, because this morning when I was getting my daughter ready for school, she's outgrown her school shirt. So her sleeves are very high.
36:46
So your analogy of like, you know, your systems and everything has to scale equally, right? Because otherwise they'll become disproportionate, if that makes sense.
36:58
So your analogy was spot on. And my daughter was like, mommy, she's growing so fast. She's seven and she's constantly growing out of her clothes. And that's kind of what it must feel like in a startup, in the scale up, sorry. Just growing so fast, you're always having to keep an eye on that. Yeah, and you have this dilemma of agility and scalability, right? Because on the one hand, you say, okay, we'll still act like a startup and every decision is unique. At the same time,
37:32
And you don't want to become big corporate, but at the same time, if you want to scale, you've got to put some guardrails and some policies and structures in place. And people don't like that because they say, but we're this agile company. And you say, yeah, that's great, but we can't reinvent the wheel every day. So that goes also a little bit along being in puberty. off you're not the baby anymore but you also don't want to be an adult yeah so how do you figure out you know what rules to play by what what um for leaders may be listening that are thinking through taking an opportunity like this on a personal level what are some of the questions they should be asking themselves so i think what's really important is first of all, to find out what is really driving you.
38:30
Back to my intro statement, are you driven by status or are you driven by impact? Because ultimately you got to be in builder mindset and you got to be prepared to be part of a journey.
38:46
I keep reminding myself and my team always to say like, if we run into challenges to say, hey guys, this is part of the journey.
38:53
You know, we wouldn't be here if we wouldn't have signed up to this journey.
38:57
And not everything is linear in the scale up, but you have these ups and downs and steps forwards and backwards. And your organization is maturing, your leadership team is maturing, and you need to be prepared for the rocket ride in a way.
39:15
And, you know, get the joy out of that. Yeah, I think that's kind of one of a lot of my friends and family don't understand that. And they're like, like, you know, me and Shane kind of, we love the, we talk about seeking discomfort.
39:37
That's something that we talk about a lot.
39:40
And in fact, actually, when I don't feel comfortable is when I feel most worried. Because I feel like that's where we're not pushing the boundaries. And I do have similar conversations with the team is that when we are in these moments and we're in these sprints, we recognize that we're in these sprints.
39:59
And obviously at that point, we need to make sure we take care of everyone and recognize, hey, we're in a sprint right now. This is a tough time. But also understanding that that's what it takes.
40:12
And if you are going to come and work here at HR Leaders, every day is not going to be the same.
40:18
Things are going to change very fast. You know, we went from being a podcast to a digital media business to scaling one of the fastest AI learning enterprise solutions.
40:31
Which is, I'm laughing because like, if you asked me that 10 years ago, I would have been like, yeah, if you said that to me eight years ago, I'd have been like, what do you mean we're an AI business? It sounds ridiculous, actually. But I'm actually very lucky that I'm proud that about 80, 90% of my employees have been with us since day one. Wow. And, um, and to your point, they're now deep domain experts, marketing, production, you know, exactly. Like when they came in, they were doing a bit of everything and somewhat to some extent they are a little, because obviously we're still a small business, but as we grow their depth, um,
41:11
And they love it because they're getting them more responsibility, more ownership. They're leading the strategy, et cetera, along the way. But it's different. It's like, how do we maintain the scrappiness entrepreneurial side? We're also creating systems and processes that scale at the same time as well. And I would not change that for anything.
41:39
yeah and if you uh back to your question you know what questions to ask yourself before you sign up for something like this the other two things that are helping you to you know enjoy the journey is uh you gotta be feeling very comfortable with the purpose of the business like can you really buy into that is this something that you're passionate about yeah
42:02
And the other aspect, because it can be so extensive, you got to really enjoy the people that you work with. 100%. Yeah. Because it's hard enough, right? And so look very carefully at who is the team you're working with. Of course, that changes over time.
42:23
trust and friendship help a lot i agree you know it's it's like especially during the hard times and all the uncertainty and chaos having those people around you is what pulls you through and then if you combine that with what you just said a very strong purpose because no matter what happening around you you can still go back to your purpose which is your foundation yes so if you can ignore all the noise and everything that's happening this is our why
42:51
and start with why and our purpose and you and you get to do that with people that you genuinely have fun with and you that is why i love doing what i do um so when people say you're working on the weekends you're doing these crazy things you're traveling here you it's crazy chris and you're doing all these things i'm like yes but but that's that's that's exactly what i want to do which sounds crazy to a lot of people
43:19
Obviously, as well. But listen, I know I've got to let you go at some point, but I've really enjoyed the conversation. And I can't believe it's been five years. Like, honestly, that has absolutely flown by. Because I remember when I saw you started the role. And here we are. Wow. Wow. And what, like quadrupled the employee turnover?
43:42
We went from 800 to 300,000. Yeah, crazy man. Absolutely crazy. Last question for you, I promise and I'll let you go. What advice would you give to those HR leaders, those CHROs of tomorrow that are going to be sitting in your seat one day?
44:00
So if you're in a scaling business, first of all, you've got to watch out for culture.
44:11
It's really, really important that you protect the cultural DNA of the company.
44:16
And that's not trivial. I recently had a young man walk into my office. I didn't know him. And he said, like, I just came back to Solonis. I've been here for a long time. I left for three years. I'm coming back now. And he said, Andrej, congratulations on keeping the soul of the company.
44:34
because he said he worked for other startups and they all sort of lost a little bit of that spirit. I said, somehow you guys figured out how to do that. So I think that's really important.
44:44
And if I look at sort of the technical side of what's ahead of us,
44:49
I think this is the most exciting time to be in HR ever. And maybe we've said this before, but the level of change, the depth and the substance of organizational development that will come our way because of AI,
45:05
is unheard of and we're going to be right in the middle of it. It's the biggest opportunity probably of all of our careers beyond anything we've seen before. And really embracing that and going deep into that and helping businesses become more competitive, becoming, reinventing who they are is a very unique opportunity. And I look forward to that with the whole HR community to make that happen.
45:33
Amazing. Well, listen, I appreciate you and congratulations on the journey so far. It is a journey. There is no destination. It will continue.
45:43
And I wish you all the best until we next speak. Thanks so much.
45:46
Great speaking with you, Chris. Thanks for the conversation.
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Andre Heinz, Chief People and Culture Officer at Celonis,