Building a unicorn company is the dream of every entrepreneur.

Inside Culture Unwrapped, the authors share the secrets of what Unicorn companies do differently, more specifically, how they attract great people, inspire them to do their best work and build passionate teams who drive the business forward. 
 
Culture Up reveals what lies behind the success of their people. The authors have not just studied Unicorns, they were key players inside them. They were right there inside high growth startups as part of the early teams at Tesla, Lilium and other brand giants. 

#CultureUp @Zooloo’s Book Tours @zooloo2008 #ZooloosBookTours #blogtour #extract

Let them show you how to:

• Become and inspirational leader
• Attract, recruit and retain the best talent
• Discover the secrets of company culture and how to nurture and develop it
• Crack the code of always overlooked internal communications
• Maintain a happy, motivated, effective and loyal team
• Create an EQ-driven, human-centric successful company

Here is a short extract from the book:

1.1 Getting Up and Running

Strategy as a Foundation

Arnnon Geshuri, the CHRO of Teladoc Health/Ex Tesla & Google, mentioned that founders or founding teams often struggle with recruitment if they haven’t hired before.

‘If you don’t focus on the culture, you may hire people who might even somehow get things done, but they don’t really fit into your company overall. You will find that eventually you will need to part ways with these people, which is a shame and a difficult thing to do because they ARE pushing for it and putting a lot of effort into their jobs. It is just not what your company culture needs. Founders often struggle with difficult team decisions like this, in the early days.

Recruiting correctly, starts with the founding team.

It is important to know yourself. What are you good at? Where do you need to supplement? Which skills are you really good at? What is your background? Be honest with yourself, be true to yourself. This will help you make a strong selection for your founding team and key hires for your company.

Most founders spend time interviewing every single person until the company has about 50-100 people. If people are one of your most important, successful drivers to business, why don’t you and your founding team get involved with final interviews for the first 300-600 hires or even your first thousand? Elon Musk does just that. And we know of others as well, so there are no excuses except maybe poor time management and lack of prioritization. It could be simply a thirty-minute call, or getting your interview team together and reviewing their feedback.

As a founder it’s an advantage to interview lots of people, to learn about a particular role or industry and understand the different types of people out there, to make the best possible hiring decisions, at any given time. You will meet people whom you may not recruit in the first six months, but you may recruit them one or two years later when they are a perfect fit.

As your company evolves so you will need different people with various backgrounds and abilities. But the core of the type of person you hire should be in line and should add to your company culture and leadership style.

The internet is full of resources, if you need them, from hiring plan templates to workforce planning tools, or use a simple excel sheet, but as mentioned previously, sit with your core team such as Sales and Product and have somebody in your meeting who looks after finance and understands how to build business plans.

Top Tip:

Ask yourself these questions:

What are your company goals for next year? Will you be increasing sales by 100% from last year, building an App or building a customer service team? Build a people plan to understand the cost.

Are you targeting to do business in the Netherlands, Switzerland, the UK or other parts of the globe and if so, why is that important? What will it cost to hire these people and should they be full or part time? How can you get your candidate pool filled?

How much time and money do you need to set aside for training and education to ensure that you can build a resilient, engaged team?’

Many thanks to @zooloo2008 for inviting me to be part of this blog tour.

About the Authors

Margareta Sailer and Mareike Mutzberg met when they worked together during the
startup phase at Lilium, a unicorn aviation scale-up. Lilium’s all-electric vertical take-off
and landing passenger aircraft has made it one of the most exciting, highly capitalised,
game changing companies in Europe.

Mareike was employee number four at Lilium. Initially responsible for setting up and
implementing Lilium’s internal and external communications & marketing, she became
responsible for the culture and employee experience of its rapidly growing team.

Margareta Sailer was key to the people strategy at Tesla, of one of the boldest and most
successful brands of the 21st Century. As Head of Talent for Tesla in Europe, with just
one layer between her and legendary entrepreneur Elon Musk, she was responsible for
hiring and retaining great people and more recently becoming Global Head of
Recruitment at Lilium.

Their joint consultancy practice, advising founders and organisations on culture,
communication and people strategies helps their clients and readers to maximise their
potential and growth.

Follow Margareta at:
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Follow Mareike at:
Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/mareike.mutzberg/
Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100082277624983
Twitter : https://twitter.com/MareikeMutzberg

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