[upbeat music] Hey there. It's Scott Amenta, the founder of the Chief of Staff Network. Welcome back to another Chief of Staff podcast.
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Today's guest is Lu Borko, chief of staff at ManyChat, a fast-scaling SaaS platform powering over a billion social media conversations every year.
Lu brings deep operational expertise from her time at companies like Deliveroo and Intercom, where she helped lead through the team through rapid growth and increased complexity.
In this episode, we talked about what operational excellence actually looks like on the ground and how to scale without adding unnecessary bureaucracy.
We also discussed how to build trust and drive alignment, especially in hybrid or remote leadership teams.
Whether you're just stepping into a chief of staff role or deep into org building at a scaling startup, this one's packed with lots of insights you'll wanna take notes on. Let's jump right into it. Hey, Lu.
Welcome to the podcast. Hello. Thank you very much for having me. I'm super excited. I'm really excited for you to be here. Yes, likewise.
So we've got a lot to talk about today in terms of kinda scaling without bureaucracy. Before we get into that, though, I'd love to just kinda hear a little bit about your backstory.
Can you kinda walk us through your journey on your way to the chief of staff role now at ManyChat? I started my career in delivery operations at Deliveroo.
At that time, Deliveroo was kind of post series D, gearing up for the IPO, and I was probably the most junior person in that incredibly kind of talented team.
And so that was the part of my career that I think of as, like, the sponge. So I was trying to just learn everything I could from the people that were kind of really exceptional at what they did.
And then from there, I moved to Intercom, and that's where I spent five years, primarily in the operations team within R&D, which is quite a large function encompassing product engineering, design, and analytics.
And that role, I think, was, like, crucial for me for two things. First one is kind of how to work effectively with engineers, which I did not know before then.
And then the second one was kind of what it truly means to operate within a very product-first company.
I learned to drive meaningful change from that lens, but within a very kind of cross-functional and complex environment. And now I'm at ManyChat, it's been a year, as chief of staff and loving it there.
Were there any, uh, defining moments at Intercom or Deliveroo that shaped the way that you're operating at ManyChat today? Anything that stands out in that career journey?
I joined at a very interesting time, actually, and there was a lot of international expansion going on, and so I thought of that as, like, one of the things that really shaped my experience there.
When I look at that time now, I learned that, like, what is the gap between planning for that and the execution and kind of getting the boots on the ground and how enormous it can be.
And so the key lesson there was understanding how to actually hire the right leaders for these mission-critical work streams.
And with an international expansion, what you'll obviously think about is like, "Hey, we need a team in that region." But actually, there's so much that needs to be covered from, like, partners.
We had riders on the ground, but then also, like, logistics, legal implications, comms, press, and there's just so much, and each of those things always kind of needs dedicated ownership, so that was a big takeaway from me.
And then at Intercom, maybe a slightly different lens, but Intercom was going through a hypergrowth phase when I was there within R&D specifically.
I actually led the work around hiring for that hypergrowth phase, and so we added around a hundred and fifty people in the organization in a single year.
Kind of learning how to plan for that scale and then execute it, which was mainly with recruiting and finance, I think that's, like, a playbook that I can take anywhere and super valuable.
Yeah, it sounds like at Deliveroo, as you were setting up kind of those international teams, did you think about each one of those being almost like its own organization within the broader parent company?
How did you go about picking the right leaders and thinking about the team structure, and, and, and what was the relationship between the local teams versus kind of the larger corporate?
Deliveroo was very interesting because the local teams operated as their own little hubs, but they were also dotted line reporting into the central team in London.
And so it was an interesting way of actually finalizing their objectives in their regions, but then also making sure that we are having global objectives and those two work hand in hand.
The way we kind of bridged that gap is we had a GM for each region, and that GM was reporting into our COO, but then we also had all the specific functions within that region as well.
Usually, they were saying, like, "Hey, you know, we need to report to different people for different things," and that was challenging for them.
But it did allow them to have the right level of support across these different functions because if we merged them all together, it-- I don't think it would've ever worked.
Yeah, so some level of independence kind of across those different team units probably allowed them to run more fluidly, given the geographic differences, and obviously time differences can have a huge impact just on how quickly decision-making happens.
We're gonna get into, like, operational excellence, and obviously as teams scale, operational excellence takes on a whole new meaning.You've been at ManyChat for about a year now. It's over three hundred people, I think.
How has kind of your role evolved as the company has grown as well? We are now, I think, around three hundred and fifty. Joined a year ago. I actually thought about this the other day.
It's remarkable to look back at how much we've matured organizationally within that year.
I think initially when I was hired, my initial focus was on helping the executive team function a bit more cohesively and introducing the right operational practices there to essentially find a way to drive effectiveness from the top down, because that was what was missing primarily.
But then when I compare it to now, after kind of several, I would say, special projects, as we like to call them in the chief of staff role, I'm focused on more highest leverage initiatives.
So anything that's coming to the CEO and the COO, we work kind of as a triad on most of them.
And I think the recent maybe milestone that I'm super happy about is we published our three-year vision for the company starting from twenty twenty six, and I worked with the CEO directly on that.
So that, I think, is quite a big achievement and defines what we're doing next. So yeah, really exciting.
You mentioned taking kind of the first, let's call it, twelve months of your time at ManyChat to really focus on the executive team. Was it a new executive team?
What were some of the things as you were looking at, you know, how do we get this team to be more operationally efficient?
What were some of the things that had to be put into place to either change the rhythms of the business or the way that that team was working together or communications kind of across the company?
Looking back, what were some of those projects? So the team actually is very self-aware, I would say, uh, which is very interesting. That's good and unusual. [chuckles] Very unusual. And so that was one of their asks.
It didn't come directly from me.
Some folks were recently hired, but then some folks were super tenured, and so there was a kind of, um, difference, and we see that difference even more so I would say now when I'm in a year into the role because we keep hiring these leaders that are coming with different experiences from different companies.
And it kind of is sometimes a change because you have these leaders that have maybe grown up within one single company, and then you have folks who have gotten experience from different places, and they will often have kind of a different way of working or maybe a different just way of thinking about things.
And so that was my main priority.
How do we come up with an easygoing, super easygoing system for the executive team to be able to say, "Okay, we have some type of a cadence that we use for how we talk to each other, how we make the right decisions," without that being stale or feeling like kind of a box-ticking exercise.
And for me, it sounds very simple when I say it this way, but it did take a kind of a couple of iterations to really understand them as people as well, and also, like, understand what makes an executive team a team, because not every executive team will ever be a team, and there has to be a real connection between folks and the willingness to work together.
And so what I really worked on is that collaborative spirit in the way we make decisions, and that kind of happened mostly through really getting to know each other, really getting to know what are our priorities as different leaders, and then finding a way to bridge those together and making sure that the priorities are not clashing at the end, so we all have joint priorities as a team.
And I think now we're in a place where we actually get to decisions pretty quickly because all of that work is behind us. We kind of have those foundations.
And so we already know, like, hey, our marketing leader is coming from this perspective, and our product leader is coming from this perspective, and they are in sync already.
We know that because we've been through this journey together, and so we don't have to question that anymore.
We know that they are aligned, and so it-- the decisions now take much less, which is pretty remarkable, I think. So this practice of making a team, as you said, not, not every executive team is actually a team, right?
They're just a bunch of leaders working together, but very often in silos.
And, and yes, there might be a, a weekly meeting or, or some other forum where they're getting together, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they're acting kind of in unison with a common voice and vision for the organization.
Putting that into practice, what were some of the things that you felt needed to be implemented?
And looking at the pre-work that you guys did to get to the point that you are today, was it executive off-sites, or did you guys have to just kinda spend a lot of time together in person, not necessarily in the office, right, just lots of different contexts?
Was it putting together a matrix of how we're going to communicate and kind of across what formats? Email is great for this person. Slack is great for this person.
This person needs a three-page written memo for every, [chuckles] every large decision, et cetera, et cetera. Walk us through some of that.
Actually, our executive team and our company, but specifically executive team, is very hybrid, so I myself am remote and so is the COO.
And then we have some folks who are in hubs in either Europe or in the US, and so we are pretty spread out, and so we need to spend time together. I think these are the crucial moments, and now we do them quarterly.
So we meet quarterly to make the big decisions and to have those larger conversations that you either get really kind of tired on a Zoom call, or you don't get the same energy within the room if you're on a Zoom call.
So this is kind of how we think about things.
But then it was also about like what-Questions we are asking ourselves, and one of the really interesting exercises we've done as one of these early offsites was kind of understanding each other's motivation for the work we do, not just, "Hey, I am, um, a chief of staff in ManyChat, and I want to become something else down the line," or, "I want to make this company go to an IPO," or something like a very blanket statement, but more our, like, personal motivations that drive us to be in this role, but also, like, to think the way we think.
And it was really powerful because it explained people's motivations around maybe some of the decisions that they end up making a couple of months later and you remember, "Hey, this is actually, like, totally in line with what they shared."
This practice doesn't need to be only kind of limited to executive teams. It can be with a wider leadership team.
Sometimes it can be a bit less intense, and you can do it with different methodologies, but those honest conversations are, like, super impactful, and also having them at a regular cadence, especially if you add a new person to the team or maybe something has changed where, you know, someone's having more struggles within their organization or maybe they're hiring a lot of new people, so they're having a different environment within their org.
Now, we are at a place where I see that the effects of those conversations where someone will come and say directly, "Hey, I'm struggling with a couple of hires that I've made because they're not maybe fitting in," or, "I made this bet, but it's not going the way I planned."
The first thing that other people say is, "How can I help?" And I think that's quite a cool thing to see overall.
So I wouldn't say there is a prescriptive way of doing things, but I'm a big believer in honest conversations. Sometimes those are hard to do, so some...
you need to start small and then build up to them, but as long as there is willingness within the group, it's definitely achievable. Yeah.
So at least what I'm hearing is that, you know, one of the most important things that you and your team have done is be kind of particularly deliberate about doing that on rep- some repetition, right?
So as you said, you know, you're actively meeting on a quarterly basis.
You might be going even out of your way if someone new is joining the team to be meeting in person, and of course, we both know that [laughs] working remotely, working hybrid certainly has a lot of its perks and benefits, but can be a real challenge when it comes to building the necessary relationships and trust that you need to really operate as a team.
What was your role in acting as a facilitator between the executives? Did you all bring in an executive coach or someone else to facilitate?
How did you kind of think about who was gonna lead those exercises and get these folks to open up? I think that is an evolving question for us in a way.
When I first came in, I expected the chief of staff role to be very heavy on the facilitation and maybe less so on contribution, at least for the start, whilst I gain relevant context and kind of establish myself within the role.
But actually, team brought me into the conversations pretty early on, and so I moved on from that facilitator role pretty quickly.
Having said that, I still organize the actual happening and us meeting, and I prepare the agenda. I usually bring the list of things that we should be discussing.
The team will obviously have their inputs, but I'm kind of making sure that we're doing the right things within those couple of days that we have together.
It is interesting then going from I've done all of this prep work into sitting in the session and contributing in the session with someone who maybe hasn't thought about it at all and is only coming to the table and thinking about it at that point.
So that was a challenge for me, actually.
Making sure that whoever is, we call it like a sponsor of that topic that we're discussing, and it can't be just me, unless it's like fully my area, so for example, operations, it would be someone else as well that is the sponsor of that topic, that they are clear on the asks of that session.
And so the ask could be something like, "We just want to discuss this. There is no necessary outcome, and we just need, I don't know, an hour to discuss this topic because we've never discussed it before.
Let's open it up. Let's see where it goes." Or it could be, "I actually already have come with a proposal, and so I'm gonna start with a proposal.
That can lead into a discussion, but I already have an idea of where I want it to go." Or it could be, "Hey, I have a problem, and I think we need to address this problem.
I have a couple of ideas, but I would also like to hear your ideas."
These are three main avenues that we like to go with, and that really helps because sometimes if the person doesn't state that directly, there's a lot of frustration within the group of like, "What are we doing?
What is happening right now?" And so stating that in the beginning of the session, this is what I would like out of it, helps.
We still go into sometimes a rabbit hole and spend two hours on this one problem that came out of nowhere, and that is fine. That's why you always build a little block that is just there for if you need more time.
But that would be, I think, the main thing. We haven't brought in a facilitator.
We have thought about it, and I think if we had a specific agenda that was particularly focused on one thing, and then we need to distill it into a couple of sessions, we would, I think, bring in a facilitator because an external person would have less trouble saying, "Okay, stop now."Versus me [laughs] to the team and in that case, I think there is value, but currently, because we meet quarterly and that is still quite a long time in between our meetings we do go through a multitude of topics that are not necessarily always connected and so from that perspective, sometimes bringing in a facilitator seems like maybe not the right option but I see clear benefits to both approaches, if that makes sense.
And in some sessions it, it might be helpful to have that additional third party in the room to help drive it.
I love the way that you kinda distilled those three options for here's how or what we're gonna talk about and some versions may have a definitive outcome, right? With like, "We need to make this explicit decision."
Some are more just like, "Hey, we need to talk about this because we never talked about it." And others are like, "Hey, there's a problem.
We don't necessarily need to come up with a solution, but I would love to hear feedback," to kinda get a variety of input from the room and at least walking into each conversation knowing kinda roughly where it's going to end and as you said, it could go down a tangent, but at least knowing that the group is starting on the same page is really helpful.
Yeah, exactly. We've talked about the executive room. Let's zoom out a little bit more and talk more about the organization.
You've worked between Deliveroo, Intercom, and, and now ManyChat, like, you're working at some pretty operationally intense companies.
What does, like, great operations or operational excellency really look like for you on the ground? That's probably one of the hardest questions you can ask. It's, it's the biggest question.
[laughs] I don't believe there's a single right answer that works for all companies or all chiefs of staff. My recommendation is to think about what you're trying to solve with operational excellence from two angles.
The first angle is thinking about what stage your company is at. So are there no processes at all and so you are required to build systems from scratch?
If that's the case, that's quite typical for kind of pre-seed through Series A. You're starting small, you still want to stay super agile, and you wanna preserve that energy within the company.
That's kind of one part of it. Then there's also kind of the middle ground, I would say, which is there are some existing processes, but they're breaking and you can see them break, and that's a different challenge.
In that case, I would say, like, look at it from a perspective of being almost like an investigator.
Investigate what's wrong, what's working, what's not working, talk to some people, and translate their pain into solutions that work.
The third scenario here is where I'm currently at, which is building for the next phase.
This could be, like, you've raised a series, so let's say Series C, and you are thinking already about the challenges that you'll see with Series D, so you're planning ahead.
In that case, you're putting infrastructure in place in a proactive way that gives you more time to think about things.
Maybe you wanna change a larger system and you wanna kind of introduce bigger changes and you have time to do so. So thinking about, like, "Where am I within my company? What, what makes sense?"
And then the second angle that is equally as important for me is understanding what your company optimizes for, so it can be profit, product, or people, the three Ps we all know.
And each company always emphasizes one of these more than the others, and knowing which one can help you frame these solutions to serve your core business model.
At ManyChat, we always design with people in mind, and so how I think about things is, like, I ask myself, "Will what I'm trying to build with this operational excellence system serve our employees well at our next inflection point?"
Because in the first angle, I thought about planning ahead, and then in this one, I thought about people, and so I put those two together and have that question as kind of my North Star for building.
Okay, that's an interesting matrix. So you're kinda connecting the dots between, "Okay, I'm wearing my future hat," and also people is not just the organization priority, people is also my priority.
Let me make sure that the decisions I'm making, how will that impact not just the team that we have today, but the larger team that we have tomorrow?
Talk to us a little bit about kind of what some of those decisions look like.
How are you introducing structure, we can take any example you like, into a fast-moving company without adding all this extra bureaucracy and red tape that, you know, your employees have to jump through?
Is it finger in the wind kinda pulse check as you introduce new things and, you know, if people are, uh, batting their eyes and getting frustrated, you're like, "Okay, if this doesn't work now, it's certainly not gonna work in the future."
Or are there moments where you're like, "Well, it doesn't work now, but this will be better in the future, and so we have to kinda push through"?
One of the things I've really thought about recently is why do structures break down a lot?
These structures can sometimes be, like, reporting structures, sometimes they can be ownership structures in terms of ownership over areas, but it can also be structures that you have in place, such as knowledge management or some of the processes that you have.
And they all kind of have one thing, I think, in common, which is that people stop using them because there's too many things that they're owning, and I'm not saying busywork, like too many things on their plate, but they have ownership over too many areas, and so they're only giving maybe 20 or 30% to each of them rather than thinking about something in depth with the right focus.
And this is very common. If you talk to probably, like, 10 chiefs of staff in a hypergrowth company, they'll all say the same. Like, this is very common and you see it everywhere.
And so-It's normal for like companies who are super small to have people wear multiple hats because the risks are lower, especially associated with like ARR.
There are fewer people overall, and so you kind of figure it out, and there's more communication directly in between people.
But once you're starting to employ hundreds of people, you really need to start thinking about that in terms of the structure starting to break.
And so I'm, as a chief of staff, a really strong believer that you should be the person that's sounding the alarm, especially with like the CEO or your principal saying, "Hey, we need someone at this seniority level to own this work stream, and here's why."
This could be something like, "I see this person owning three streams, and they're not delivering on any of them. It's not because they're not good, it's because they don't have the time to think about it."
Or it could be like, "Hey, I actually think they need more support on the lower levels, and then we can kind of split things into multiple sub-streams, and they can then be the right person because they have the support."
Or it can be like, "Hey, we said we would do this thing, but we never assigned anyone to do it, and so obviously it's not getting done. We haven't assigned actual importance to it."
All of these things sound very basic, but when you think about them in practice, they have real implications around spending money, right? Because you need to hire these people.
How do you then draw the new kind of organizational structures?
How do you make sure that these people have the right ownership of what they need to do and that they are contributing to the company goals in the right ways?
And so the chief of staff to me is the right person because you have all this context coming from everywhere, and you really get to see what's working, what's not.
I would even before processes and putting into place like a prescriptive way of working, think about what you have currently within the company, and do you have enough people to do what you said you would do?
Yeah, it's interesting. There's probably a better metaphor here, but in some ways it kind of feels like you're the chess player picking and choosing which players are going to execute which moves at a given time.
You know, obviously you don't wanna make all the pawns expendable, but you know that those pawns are critical, right?
And how you are kind of keeping your ear to the ground, having the conversations across the organization, and then using that knowledge to recognize where there are gaps, where people may be strapped, right, kind of focused on too many different work streams at once without any kind of clear prioritization, or where projects that were once talked about in the executive room and are now falling flat outside of that space because nobody's actually taken it on, which is gonna result in maybe a missed OKR or something else down the road, and recognizing that, you know, having enough foresight to say, "Hey, this is how the organization needs to shift, and let's make sure that we have the systems in place, not just to gather that information, but also to make the changes that are necessary."
Yeah, exactly. And one of the maybe things that's really important here is it will take you always less time to put, um, framework or a system in place that doesn't require people changes.
Because people changes take time, right?
People changes are always welcome as soon as possible because you need time to like sometimes it's maybe coach someone or hire someone and then onboard them, or maybe it's just like a change of focus for them, but that also takes time with like their teams and adjusting to them.
And so that component is really important. How do you go about building trust and authority when you don't have direct ownership over that org chart? The ultimate chief of staff conundrum. Yes.
It's, I believe, what makes or breaks someone in this role, truly. I will say it can be extraordinarily difficult to do it if you don't have the right support from your CEO or your principal.
Because if they are not showing that to the company, like that support, for you to build that kind of influence will be kind of a very high mountain to climb in a way.
So the foundation would be building trust with your CEO, your principal, your whole exec team. But then when you have that or foundations of that, then it's a building trust.
First, I believe in talking to people a lot, so what I do in any role that I take on is I go on a listening tour, and these, you know, are a cliché for a reason because they actually end up giving you some really cool insight.
At the end of my listening tour at ManyChat, I actually didn't take any actions based on the listening tour. It was just for my reference and the CEO and the COO to be like, "This is my read on where we are right now."
And that was enough for us at that point.
If I did it now, I would have probably an angle that I would go in with, and so there would be something that I wanted to investigate, and maybe there would be outcomes that I would drive from it.
So also knowing like why you're doing it, for me, it was just like meet people, understand how they're ticking, what is their priority, and then keeping that up through consistency.
How you can prove yourself to people is always delivering results.
And so a chief of staff is oftentimes like a role where people who are maybe not as close to you because they're maybe not in leadership positions will ask like, "What do you do?"
And then being able to like deliver results on a company level scale where you get visibility, and you are able to demonstrate that you understand the business deeply, and you're driving really important business results can help kind of establish that influence overall.
But sometimes you don't need that influence across the company.
Maybe you need it with a twenty people who are the business leaders team or whatever you call it.In that case, it's a maybe a slightly different approach, and you work one-on-one with them but I like to think about it as, like, I bring value by connecting dots that others can't see sometimes.
So I will have context from here and here, and maybe that person will have partial context.
I also always try to move things forward when they're stuck, so I will always raise my hand and say, like, "Hey, I will help here.
I'm not gonna own this for you in any way, but, like, I can help, and we'll get you unstuck."
And finally, keeping that first principle that you were hired for, so for me, that was always I make our exec team more effective and focused on the right things. I keep doing that. That hasn't changed from day one.
There are many, many other things that I do now, but that's still the case. I think even if you get hired as a CEO or even as a chief of staff, it doesn't matter, you don't automatically get authority.
You will get management, you know, management responsibilities, and kind of that side of things, but authority is something that you earn, and that happens over time and by showing your value.
And to me, I think from multiple examples I've hopefully given in, in this chat as well, like, working with people is a real value that I think a chief of staff brings.
Yeah, and I think it's also not just in the explicit results, right? It's also a lot of the implicit work that goes into the end goal.
I think a lot of the work that chiefs of staff do, and I hear this often from chiefs of staff, they have a hard time tying the things that they're doing to the organizational results.
That's because a lot of the things that they're doing are having conversations between people, as you said, connecting dots between teams, sharing context to executives that might not have all of the details to make the next decision.
And even if you're not the one out selling the deal or writing the code or building the marketing campaign, a lot of that work that you're doing behind the scenes, and it very often is behind-the-scenes type of work, goes into that kind of ultimate contribution to hopefully reach that final metric.
And, you know, it's not crazy for a chief of staff to put that final metric on their resume, so long as they can describe, "Hey, here are the things that I was doing to help move that forward."
And those are real results. But yeah, I think it's important that we're able to kinda tie that work together to real business performance.
What you said is really interesting because maybe a very easy way of describing this is if you look at any company's OKRs, you are very rarely going to see a chief of staff driving an OKR.
They are not gonna be listed as a driver or an owner of things because, as you said, the work that we do happens behind the scenes, and it's usually on every single one [laughs] of these OKRs.
And so if you went through, like, who was involved in decisions and unblocking of things and making sure that things happen, you would list our names on every one of them, but they don't necessarily come with that, like, end goal recognition.
But I do agree with you.
Like, sometimes you end up being in a position where you can't tie specific work that you've done to business outcomes and numbers because you contributed in such a way that was extremely meaningful.
And I tell this to people that I work with that are maybe more junior or that if I'm mentoring them, I'm always like, "Don't sell yourself short. Be very intentional about the words that you use for your work."
Instead of saying, "I helped," did you just help? Think about how you actually describe the results that are tied to the project that you were working on, and I think that's a really big thing for chiefs of staff.
Sometimes we sell ourselves short, and we're just like, "Oh, you know, I was, I was there." It's like, were you just there, or did you actually part of the conversation that ended up getting us to where we needed to be?
Because that's a big difference. Yeah. Physical presence isn't everything, right? It's, it's what you're contributing in the room that matters or sometimes outside the room, right? Bringing in other third parties.
Last question on this topic, when something's not working cross-functionally, right?
So when you've identified a problem, two teams are not collaborating well together, two stakeholders are at odds in terms of what the final goal or deliverable should actually be, a decision can't be made, what's your first move?
Do you go right back to your principal? Do you try to solve the problem yourself? How do you kinda think about... and I know this is kind of a vague example.
I love this question, and the reason why I love it is it's one of my interview questions. You get interesting answers.
For me, and my answer might sound slightly basic, but my approach is to always talk to people before making assumptions.
And so for me, when I think about, like, how I like to work, one of my core principles is assuming best intentions.
And I actually didn't know about this kind of concept until I started working in tech, where this is quite a common phrase that's used.
I try to approach conversations with genuine openness when I go in, and I first start, like, understanding what's happening in their world, especially if we haven't spoken in a while. "Oh, what are you doing right now?
What are you trying to achieve? What's really important to you? Are there any things that you've tried and they haven't been working?"
And sometimes it's just a matter of them sharing the context that you didn't have to understand what they're trying to work towards and see that they're already maybe there, but they are just missing something, a piece of the puzzle, or they maybe didn't even know about the competing priority on the other side.
And sometimes it can be about introducing them to the right people, something you've mentioned, like making sure that those conversations happen with the right people involved.
And there's also an option that-Things are really broken, it's not going well, and then I'm like, "Okay, this might be a bit more in- intensive, and I'll step in, and let me figure out a way for us to work through this phase together, and then I'll kind of be the connector, like very present, and we'll go from point A to point B together."
But giving people space, general space to share their objectives and what they're trying to do, that's always step one, and then building from there. Yeah.
The concept of starting with good intention and approaching a problem knowing that that person is not your mortal enemy.
[laughs] You know, if, if two people walk in a room and they're at odds about something or other, then, you know, even if it's a totally different subject that they're talking about, they will still be at odds, right?
Just because of the nature of where that relationship might have started.
And so assuming best intentions, I think is great advice for anyone, especially kind of on this concept of leading without authority and building trust.
The best way to build trust is just to trust the person off the bat, right? And let them prove you wrong. Yes. I agree with that.
Also, I would add maybe sometimes the easiest thing to do is just split those conversations to start with and get them from two separate conversations, if you have, like, two conflicting sides.
Because in a room together, they might not be as open, or it would be harder to get to the kind of where you want them to arrive.
And when you're just talking one-on-one, especially if you already have a working relationship with that person, you will get them to open up, and y- you will understand it from just, like, how they're speaking, and that will help you then unlock things.
All right, Lu, before we wrap up here, I'd love to ask you just a couple lightning round questions.
So very quickly, what's a book or framework that you often return to, whether it's in decision-making or any of the systems that you've set up to kind of help your team organize themselves better?
What's something that you're often looking at? One book I read a while back, and I come back to it very often, and I have notes from it to kind of inspire how I work, is The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle.
He goes into exploring high-performance groups and how to build those cultures through very easy concepts that are not easy to put into practice [laughs] in a business environment.
And so he puts it, like, as three main things, which is safety cues that would foster connection, shared vulnerability, so those moments where you are able to build trust between people, and also clear signals to people that will help them understand their purpose and their identity within that group.
And to me, when I'm facing, like, struggles or when I am thinking about, like, how to tie things together or move things forward, I really go back to people kind of seeing what that means. And he really talks about...
a lot about, like, starting with this narrative when you join a company or maybe someone new joins the company, and then you start from there, and I think it's a wonderful book. Super easy.
Would definitely recommend it to any chief of staff because it's, I think, so close to how we need to work.
Yeah, I think for all of the chief of staff books out there, really helpful to kinda learn their perspective of the role. But books like Culture Code, what's Patrick Lencioni's book?
The Hierarchy of Leadership, I think those books are even more impactful in terms of how to actually drive a team, how to think about the changing dynamics of a growing culture.
And so yeah, Culture Code has come up once or twice on this podcast. I'll, I'll make sure I link it below on this episode. [laughs] All right, last question: Any advice that you'd give to a first-time chief of staff?
So you, you've done this role now in at least two or three walks of life. Looking back, what advice would you give to yourself?
I would say get a mentor or a coach and then also build your network and continuously learn about other people's practices.
The more you're able to do this, the better you'll become at recognizing which processes work for you and which don't.
And so now, when I go to conferences or when I speak to people, I'm like, "Oh, this is not a fit for us," or, "This would be cool, but only this specific part," you know, this, like, one part of the whole framework.
The reason why I say this is this role can take so many different forms, and it's really the person in the role that is going to shape what that becomes. You don't really have a playbook to go to that you can use.
You don't have a person that you can reference in the company. And so what you have to do is you have to consistently learn, and you also need to evolve your thinking.
And so we are not in any way static in our roles, and that's how I think about my approach.
And so I really love learning from other people outside of just my organization, and that would be kind of my warmest recommendation. I love it.
You gave me the perfect opportunity to tee up a thank you in advance for participating and speaking at Chief of Staff Connect coming up in London this November.
So Lu, I'm excited to meet you in London, and thank you so much for joining today. It was really insightful. Thank you so much, Scott.
I want to thank Lu again for joining the podcast and for such a thoughtful conversation.
One idea that really stood out was her reminder that not every executive team is actually a team, and that real alignment starts with shared vulnerability, consistent cadence, and also understanding what actually motivates the people in the room.
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