Webinar transcript

Hi, I’m Kathleen Weber, co-founder and CEO of Live REM. I’m really excited to be here today for our very first Quick Bites webinar. The concept behind Quick Bites is something I’ve been thinking about for a while. It’s a space where we can share knowledge, insights, and learnings on what it takes to excel in business, with a focus on HR, which is something we love. We're keeping these sessions short and impactful—a 30-minute lunch-and-learn format that we’ll host regularly, which is super exciting.

I hope you’ve grabbed something to eat and settled in because we’ve got an exciting session today. I’m delighted to welcome our very first guest, Gabrielle Cutfield from Emerging Engines. Welcome, Gabrielle!

Gabrielle: Thank you! I’m slightly terrified to be the first, but also excited. It’s an honor!

Kathleen: It was an easy choice for me! Gabrielle and I met a few months ago over coffee, and we really bonded over our shared desktop chaos and endless emails. Thankfully, we both have amazing people around us to keep things organized.

So, today’s topic is “Building High-Performance Leadership Teams: The Role of Strategic People Planning in Scaling Businesses." While it’s a formal title, we’re aiming for a casual discussion. I’ll quickly introduce Gabrielle before she shares more about herself.

Gabrielle is the founder of Emerging Engines, an HR consultancy focused on building high-performing teams that can scale. She brings extensive experience as Chief People Officer and Chief of Staff, working across APEC, North America, the UK, and Europe. According to her website, her mission is to show the simplicity and significant ROI that comes from focusing on building high-performance teams. Welcome to the first webinar!

Gabrielle: Thank you, Kathleen. I do have to update you, though. After a week with my team in Taupo, we’ve adjusted our mission. We’re now focused on enabling business growth through productivity via people. It’s about maximizing the potential of your team and making the process enjoyable along the way.

Kathleen: That’s fantastic, and I think it aligns perfectly with today’s session. Shall we dive in? Could you start by telling us a bit about Emerging Engines and your approach to people strategy, especially how you integrate data-driven decision-making?

Gabrielle: Sure! As I mentioned, our mission is to enable growth through productivity via people. There are generally two schools of thought when it comes to People and Culture (P&C) functions: one focuses on the employee experience, ensuring high engagement and happiness at work, and the other is more about driving productivity. We lean more toward the latter, especially in startup and scale-up environments. Our belief is that without a functioning and productive business, you can’t offer an amazing employee experience. What we focus on is aligning the business goals with people strategy and using data to measure and drive performance.

We start with a solid data baseline. We come into a business, align with their goals—whether it’s growth or managing turnover—and establish key processes to track progress. This data-driven approach allows us to make informed decisions with the executive team over time.

Kathleen: That’s really interesting. What kind of companies are you working with? When you talk about startups and scale-ups, what does that look like in your world?

Gabrielle: We typically work with companies in New Zealand. Our clients range from five-person startups to larger teams with around 65 full-time employees (FTE), often in the Series B funding stage with global teams. We offer fully embedded models where we act as a fractional Chief People Officer with a talent bolt-on, or we provide more flexible support depending on the company’s needs.

Kathleen: Do most companies already have some kind of baseline processes when you come in, or are they starting from scratch?

Gabrielle: It's a mixed bag. Some have fairly good processes, but they’re not doing anything with the data at the back end, while others have nothing, and people are struggling as a result of churn. No one's had a pay increase, or they haven’t had a conversation with their manager about performance or career progression. So, it's quite a varied landscape at the moment.

Kathleen: On the topic of data, why do you think it's crucial in people planning, and how have you seen it lead to better decisions?

Gabrielle: It's interesting. In P&C, you run these performance processes and engagement surveys, but people often say it’s hard to put metrics against PNC, so they just avoid it. One example where it didn’t go so well initially was with a client. The company had invested heavily in HR tech, had great benefits, and an awesome culture, but the frequency of processes was overwhelming. The processes were just filed away with no reflection on what was learned. My challenge to them was, "What value are we getting from this?" We halved the number of processes and extracted key data points to show the executive team exactly where to focus their investment.

On the flip side, there’s an example where we walked into a business with high engagement scores, but performance was low. We called it "weeding the garden"—focusing on getting to high performance through a change process. Some employees rose to the challenge, others opted out, and we hit our sales targets as a result. It's really about how transformational it can be when you lean into the data in P&C.

Kathleen: That’s exciting! You mentioned some people think you can’t put metrics around P&C—what’s that about? And what key metrics do you focus on?

Gabrielle: I think, like marketing can be dismissed as the “colouring-in department,” P&C can be seen as the “tea and tissues” department. People sometimes expect us to handle trivial things, and there’s this notion we can't have commercial conversations. But, to change that perception, you need a P&C leader who fronts up with metrics and holds their team accountable. Unfortunately, I don’t see this approach very often.

Kathleen: Why do you think that is?

Gabrielle: I can’t fully answer that—it’s probably a case-by-case thing, depending on the business and leadership. I’m fortunate to have CEOs who value people and support the changes I want to implement. It’s harder if you don’t have that leadership backing.

Kathleen: Do you think this openness is more common in startups versus corporates?

Gabrielle: It’s a generalization, but I think startups and corporates are just different. Startups often have founders doing extraordinary things but may avoid tough conversations because they're focused on growth. In those cases, I act as an EQ coach, helping bridge the gap. Corporate environments, on the other hand, tend to have more defined structures and baked-in views.

Kathleen: Yeah, in startups, founders sometimes haven’t managed large teams before. Scaling up can mean going from a few familiar people to 50 or more, which is a huge shift.

Gabrielle: Exactly. When you’re not comfortable with tough conversations, you avoid them, and things reach a boiling point. My job is to prevent that by encouraging leaders to address issues earlier.

Kathleen: How do leadership teams respond to adopting data-driven approaches? Are they open to it?

Gabrielle: I think the key is stepping out of the P&C box. When you're part of a leadership team, you need to understand the business’s core metrics—AR, churn, burn—because these are what drive growth. You can’t just focus on engagement scores and expect to be taken seriously. P&C metrics are important but should be seen as leading indicators of performance.

Kathleen: Do your metrics change depending on the size or stage of the startup?

Gabrielle: Yes, but the fundamentals are the same: Are we happy? Are we high performing? Are we clear on what we’re doing? As teams grow, you start assessing potential and creating space for development. Bigger teams mean more data points and more exciting analysis, but the principles don’t change.

Kathleen: It’s definitely a shift when you move from a small team to a larger one, and suddenly you don’t know everyone anymore.

Gabrielle: Exactly. In the early startup days, everyone’s wearing multiple hats. But at a certain point, you need to separate roles and introduce leadership. Some people naturally opt out at that stage, and founders can struggle to let them go. But you need accountability, or it leads to chaos. Sometimes, the kindest thing is to help people move on to excel elsewhere.

Kathleen: That’s so true! So, when you’re implementing processes, how does the data you gather influence the tech and processes you use?

Gabrielle: In the beginning, you have limited resources, so you have to prioritize the fundamentals: performance reviews, feedback processes, and engagement surveys. Then, you assess what tech is needed to support those processes. I've seen companies overinvest in HR tech, which can be a mistake if you’re not clear on the needs you're addressing.

What’s important is whether the data extracted from the tech is meaningful. For example, in performance reviews, if you see low performance but high retention desires, that might indicate people are avoiding tough conversations. You can then adjust your approach based on that insight.

Kathleen: I love that you’re spotting connections between seemingly unrelated data points. It’s fascinating how data like turnover can be broken down to understand where problems might lie, like in specific teams or time periods.

Gabrielle: Absolutely. While turnover isn’t the only metric, it’s important. You can’t underestimate the impact of poor leadership on turnover. And, as you mentioned, it’s also about knowing the right level of churn to keep things fresh.

Kathleen: Yeah, I’ve heard people say if employees leave within 12 months, they want their money back, and I get that. It’s a big investment to onboard someone, and losing them early is costly.

Gabrielle: Exactly. We recently did an analysis for a client, and churn cost them over $670,000 in just one quarter. That’s a compelling reason to have hard conversations with managers about performance.

Kathleen: That’s a huge figure. It really highlights the value of up-to-date data, especially when it comes to making decisions that impact the bottom line.

Gabrielle: Totally. And watching trends over time is important too, like seeing developer salaries skyrocket post-COVID and then come back down. Trends like that tell a story over time.

Gabrielle: Yeah, absolutely. So we’re definitely seeing a focus on kind of diversity and inclusion metrics coming through, particularly with global teams, because we’re seeing a lot of that in terms of gender split. But we also look at different departments, different geographies, all of that, because the more you can segment your data, the more you can actually target what’s going wrong, where. And again, in my experience, I’ve seen turnover being really high in some areas and very low in others, and it’s usually a leadership issue rather than a company-wide one. So once you start diving into that, you can start having those conversations with managers about what's going wrong in their team and support them through that.

Kathleen: That’s really interesting. So just backtracking a bit, what kind of leadership development are you seeing, or would you recommend, for companies as they grow?

Gabrielle: I think it depends on the stage of the business, right? When you're in that early startup phase, it’s about founders learning to let go and to trust their leadership team, and also teaching their leaders how to manage people. You'd be surprised at how many leaders don’t get taught how to give feedback or how to coach people, so that’s usually the first thing we do. We get them comfortable having difficult conversations, holding people accountable, and setting clear expectations.

As companies scale, the leadership focus shifts more towards strategy and leading through others. So it’s less about doing the day-to-day and more about how do you empower your team to make decisions, how do you coach them to deliver results, and how do you align everyone around the same goals. We focus a lot on communication and trust-building within leadership teams at that stage because that's where we see most of the challenges when teams start to grow.

Kathleen: Yeah, I think that’s a big one, especially when you've got people who’ve been promoted into leadership positions but haven’t necessarily had that kind of experience before.

Gabrielle: Exactly. And it’s not always intuitive. We see a lot of high-performing individuals get promoted into leadership roles, but managing people is a completely different skill set. So we spend a lot of time helping them shift their mindset from being the expert in their field to being the person who enables others to be successful.

Kathleen: That’s a great point. So, just to wrap up, Gabrielle, what would be your key piece of advice for companies that are looking to build high-performing teams as they scale?

Gabrielle: I think my biggest piece of advice is to invest in your people early. Don’t wait until you’re 100 people and things are falling apart to start thinking about your people strategy. If you set up strong foundations early on—things like performance management, clear expectations, feedback loops, and leadership development—you’ll save yourself a lot of pain down the line. And make sure you’re using data to inform your decisions. It’s not just about gut feel or what’s trendy; it’s about looking at the numbers and seeing what’s working and what’s not.

Kathleen: That’s brilliant advice. Thank you so much, Gabrielle, for joining us today and sharing all your insights. It’s been a really valuable discussion.

Gabrielle: Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

Kathleen: Well, that’s it for today’s Quick Bites session. Thanks again to Gabrielle for joining us and to all of you for tuning in. We’ll be back soon with another Quick Bites webinar, so keep an eye out for that. Have a great rest of your day!