Alan Cairns on hiring in hyper-growth & a guide to culture and performance

0:00Alan Cairns:We don't say we have a high performance culture. You're always building that. You're always wanting it to be better.

0:11Welcome back to 40 Minute Mentor, the podcast on a mission to raise aspirations and inspire the next generation of category defining founders. All in just 40 minutes. Today, we're joined by Alan Cairns, former Chief People Officer at GoCardless, the fintech specializing in bank payments, including recurring payments, direct debit processing, and open banking, helping over 100 ,000 businesses get paid on time. Alan has over 30 years of experience in operations, people, and talent. Before joining GoCardless in 2023, he led some of the biggest brands through transition and growth, including Money Supermarket, Moo, Octopus Ventures, iTech Media and GE.

0:50With such a fascinating CV, I can't wait to dig into Alan's transition from Chief People Officer to COO and back to CPO. Here's some of his biggest scaling lessons and find out more about what it really takes to build inclusive, high-performing cultures, which Alan has done multiple times across multiple brands. So all that's left to say is a big welcome to 40 Minute Mentor, Alan.

1:12Alan Cairns:How are you? Feeling awesome and excited to share today. And thank you so much for the opportunity, James. Oh, the pleasure is all mine. Before we get on to the most recent experiences, we're going to delve back into time because I think so much of what we do in later in life comes from those sort of foundational early years. So do you mind sharing with our audience a little bit about your upbringing and what your early career aspirations were? Absolutely. Yeah. So I, born in the Northwest is where the accent comes from, of course. and my early career really was not associated with people at all it was mechanical engineering and it was my father had done the same thing so it was a natural kind of this is the career that maybe you would choose did that for a few years really enjoyed it and I think that starts to develop things like problem solving an opportunity to kind of get into the detail of things and then And from there, ultimately, I got into people through learning and development.

2:16Alan Cairns:So I took what was my first kind of managerial role running an apprentice training center. So it was still in engineering, but it was actually helping young people who'd just left school at 16. So first kind of steps into the world of work and helping those people to kind of gain engineering skills to ultimately do what would be a much bigger role in the future. And that really got me into the people part of the role. So from learning and development and then into people, but really what I'd gained even through the mechanical engineering part was I loved working with people, building the relationship, building the rapport, building the trust.

3:02Alan Cairns:And it felt like a really natural move to go from mechanical engineering and then into a people role. Amazing. Yeah. Not always the path I've seen, but actually makes total sense when you describe it like that. I mean, why do you think the people function and people roles are such a great sort of space to work in? I think that this might sound a bit critical and it's not meant to be, but I think that people role exists because line managers have so many different things to do that they can't be an expert in all of those things. So people, problems in inverted commas, become the thing that you're spending a lot of your time on, but actually you've another job to do at the same time.

3:46Alan Cairns:So I think the role almost exists to help managers to be the best that they can be. And sometimes that involves solving people problems. Sometimes it's about hiring the right people. Sometimes it's about how or when someone like that should be promoted and so on and so forth. But I think it exists really to help the business to grow. And as a few founders have said to me, almost every problem in a business, if you want to look at it through that terminology, is a people problem. Almost everything. Any aspect you want to talk about is about people. So that's the bit that's exciting because it's cross business as well.

4:29Alan Cairns:It's not stay in your lane. It's absolutely about working across the business and anticipating what might happen, trying to plan for that, thinking ahead, and then making changes to the business as a consequence of that. Yeah, so impactful. Thank you for sharing. I guess you have worked in some incredibly fast growing brands. You've navigated lots of different transitions over the years. So from all of those many achievements that you've got to choose from, what are some of the biggest moments and sort of biggest lessons you've learned over the years that kind of really stick out to you when you look back on your career?

5:06Alan Cairns:There's so many to choose from because I'm older than the hills. I think I'm going to pick three. So I think the first one would be hiring Peter, Peter Plum, who became the CEO of Money Supermarket. and the lesson from which i think applies to headhunting a lot is always look for wild cards as well so actually his role came about because we were searching for a cmo and a headhunter said i've got someone here who won't be suitable for the cmo role but has done some really interesting things has a great background someone you should meet and i think that simon who was the founder of Money Supermarket would enjoy spending some time with.

5:54Alan Cairns:Fast forward, we offered Peter two different roles, neither of which were suitable, but we found the third one that was, brought him into a role, which was a more commercial role. And ultimately within probably less than 12 months, he became CEO. So the kind of the most interesting part of that was none of that would have happened if we hadn't actually gone for the wildcard. So I always think it's interesting to meet people that might not be even for that role, but that are super interested. It doesn't mean you have to meet thousands and thousands of people, but sometimes the wildcard is the one that you want and it's the best kind of opportunity for you as a business as well.

6:43Alan Cairns:I think a second one, and this is very, very different, is I joined a business that was in Chapter 11, so US protection from bankruptcy. And even the people who were interviewing me said, don't think this would be a good opportunity for you. Most people in that situation would probably say, well, actually, you know this really well. So you've got the advice. It's probably not the right thing to do. But despite that, I had the courage of my convictions. I thought, for me, it would be a great learning opportunity. And I joined the business and it was tough. It was probably one of the toughest roles that I had.

7:26Alan Cairns:And we had to do some incredibly tough things. To get out of chapter 11, we had to restructure of the company take out over 6 ,000 roles. And the big thing for me was we emerged successfully from chapter 11. We had a good balance sheet at the end. That business is still running today. So going through an experience like that, you learn so much, but maybe if I'd have been dissuaded at the time, I wouldn't have had that exposure, wouldn't have had that experience. It just, for me wouldn't have, it might have taken my career in a different direction, who knows. But I think the learning almost is take those opportunities as long as you can see what it might lead to.

8:17I think a third one, and given you hire so many COOs, I'm going to pick a COO role.

8:25Alan Cairns:There's a concept, not named by me, but called giving away your Lego. And not everyone is comfortable with that at all. So the principle at least is you go into a role and you have things that you're responsible for. And the hard part is actually giving all of that away to someone else when you hire a bigger role and then you transfer that to them and then having a new pile of Lego to work on. But a lot of people don't want to give the Lego away in the first place because it's like, this is mine. This is the thing I'm working on. And the big learning for me was it's actually enjoyable to give away Lego because firstly, you have to, I'll try and butcher this metaphor, but you have to build it in the right way, first of all, because if someone else is going to pick it up.

9:16Alan Cairns:You can't hand finance or UX and design over to someone else without it being in a good shape, first of all. Secondly, you have to know it really, really well in order to hand it over. And then thirdly, you have to think about the type of person that you'll hire into that role that has not only the skills, but that you can work with as well. Because what you're going to see is if you hire an expert in a given discipline, you're going to see someone that is better at that than you are. Because as a COO, you're a kind of master of many skills. So if you hire someone with the real specifics, they're going to be better at that than you.

9:58Alan Cairns:But you also have to work with that person. So they're probably going to, again, with the metaphor, they're going to undo some of the Lego and they're going to rebuild it in a different way. and that might be frustrating to you. They might not want to keep some of the people that you've hired. They might want to change the shape of the team. So there's a massive learning in the way that you kind of think about that and ultimately in the way that you've shaped the role for the person in the future. Love that. Thank you so much. Those are such good examples. There are a few of mine, but there are many, many other learnings as well.

10:37Yeah, I love it. Well, I know sort of in your varied career and you've obviously seen some incredible things. You also work with some really impressive founders. And I know this is a difficult question about a bit like choosing your favorite child, which is impossible. But of all those great founders you have worked, are there any particularly stand out to you that taught you a lot? Or I think I'd love to know what makes founders so special and perhaps the best founders you've worked with. What was it that set them apart?

11:03Alan Cairns:I think I'll steer away from the best because I've learned from every single founder that I've worked with, and I've worked with quite a few as well. Three that stand out, I would say Simon Nixon, who founded Money Supermarket. Incredibly smart person, but also very prescient too, because he didn't just invent a business, price comparison, but he invented a category as well, because there wasn't really price comparison before he set up the business. Remember, this was pre-Google. So you couldn't really search for, not in the way that you can today, if you want to compare anything. And so massive learnings from Simon about just having the foresight to see that something could be done.

11:54Alan Cairns:And also, he made it free. That I think was fundamental, that he created a category, introduced price comparison, but then made it free for people as well. I think another one would be Richard. So Richard Moros, MBE, who founded Moo. And what I learned from Richard, and I think one of his defining skills is he has a kind of Steve Jobs-esque attention to creative detail. So he would look at something and it might be a new piece of merchandise or it might be a particular product design or something. And immediately his eye would be, that needs to be a slightly different color. That doesn't line up with this.

12:42Alan Cairns:And he just had this super creative eye. It even applied to almost interior design. So the office that we set up in Farringdon, the lighting in the offices, the furniture, the chairs, he wanted to really kind of, you know, I want this light. I want that chair. And when you saw the whole thing together, it was magical. The way that he set up a particular office and so on, it was beautiful. It was all about having this kind of design eye. This will work with this, but we'll work with that. So there are things like that. And then, of course, working with Hiroki, so co-founder and CEO of GoCardless.

13:24Alan Cairns:And Hiroki, supremely intelligent, very mathsy. any set of figures that you'll put in front of him, he'll immediately be able to tell within microseconds, you know, that number there doesn't look right. And it's that ability, you just, it's incredible. Yeah, such an inspiring founder. And yeah, we'll definitely come on to talk more about GoCard less shortly. I'd love to dig into your CPA role before then. In your opinion, what makes a successful chief people officer? And what are the most crucial skills that you really had to learn over the years to be that? The things that you absolutely need are, firstly, you're going to be solving some thorny issues.

14:09Alan Cairns:Almost every business I've been in, I've had to do some form of restructuring. So it's not for the faint-hearted, first of all. You have to do some things that are painful for the individuals and for the business at large. so you have to have empathy the day that you don't feel bad when someone is leaving a business through whatever means you've lost something fundamental there so i think empathy is an absolute critical key i think the second one is you have to think three steps ahead all the time so you have to anticipate what is likely to happen you know if you hire a given person and that person comes in to do this role, this type of person will immediately say, I want to build a team.

14:56Alan Cairns:So you're not hiring one person, you're actually hiring what might be three, four, five, 10 people as a result. You hire a different type of person who might be a kind of a real sleeves rolled up type of person. And they might be, I don't need a team, I'm going to get this done. Each one of those is right for a certain stage of growth and for a certain type of business. And it really depends. It's situational, of course. So I think things like that. I think the third one is when you think about the roles that CPOs do, you have to have a wide appreciation of the business. You're not going to be an expert in every single area if you take product development.

15:39Alan Cairns:You're not going to be better than the CTO or the CPO. But the way that you have to be able to think about it is, how is the shape of that team constructed? What are the spans of control? What's the right way to think about the geographical distribution of the team? Do you need all your team in one location? Do you have hybrid teams? Do you have some teams that are completely remote? If you're going to pick a new location, where are you going to pick and why? So you have to have this very wide appreciation of how to do those things. And then, of course, when you start thinking about things like remuneration, you really have to think about the shape of an equity plan.

16:26Alan Cairns:You have to think about how salaries will change over the course of a business. You have to think about how you give out equity to people, who you give it to, in what proportions and so on. So you have to be mathematical as well. you have to be able to work with data to use benchmarking things like that so i think there's quite a wide set of skills that you actually need in order to do that yeah absolutely it's such an interesting role and actually much broader than people that may think of hr people or hr in the traditional sense maybe wouldn't have sort of thought of all the different aspects that particularly to be a cpo in a hyper growth company particularly in the tech space you know it's just There's so much to it, but it's also why it's such an interesting gig and so strategically important to a business.

17:12I guess part of succeeding as a CPO will be around how you build relationships with the C-suite and the founder and the importance of that. So how do you make sure that you maintain and have strong relationships with those types of stakeholders whilst also navigating tough challenges sort of on the people side?

17:31Alan Cairns:So I think it starts with, you've got to, if you think of the very classic Lencioni book, Five Dysfunctions of a Team, it starts with trust. You have to be vulnerable and to share a lot of you and the way that you think and your background experience with other execs in order to build the trust. So if you don't do that, if you do it in a more clinical way, You're not really building the relationship and you need the, I've always said, better to be respected than liked. You're not trying to do this to people please. You're trying to do this role to gain the trust and the respect of fellow execs so that they believe that if you give a piece of advice, it's going to be the right advice.

18:24Alan Cairns:that if you're leading what might be something very tough across the business, that you'll be consistent about it, that you'll do that in the best way, and that you're going to tread very carefully the line between doing something legally and morally and ethically the right thing to do. I think the other part of building relationships is execs, they want action. They want you to get shit done. And it's very easy to stuff almost the calendar with thousands of things that you want to get done. But inevitably, you have to prioritize those. Because I think people have a finite capacity for people things.

19:09Alan Cairns:You might have 20 initiatives that you want to drive in a year, but no execs will have the bandwidth to do all of those 20. So you have to think, not what would I like to get done, but what does the business need to get done? And I think if you can design your people strategy in very, very close proximity to the overall business strategy, you're doing the right things first. There's plenty of nice to do things. And I have a list, a very long list of things I'd like to be able to do. But you start with the things that you absolutely have to get done. Yeah, great. Thank you for sharing. You made the transition from CPO to COO at iTech Media Group before coming back to the CPO role at GoCardless.

19:56So JBM sort of specializes in placing COOs. It's something that I'm particularly passionate about. And we have lots of listeners that are aspiring COOs or current COOs. So I thought we could talk about that briefly. Why did you decide to make that move? And how did you find that transition from people to operational leadership?

20:12Alan Cairns:So I think looking across my career, I started in mechanical engineering. So there was a more kind of operational focus at the beginning. So I probably always had a bit of that. A number of years before, when I was in JCB, I did an HR role for two and a half years. And then I stepped out of HR for another two and a half years. And I did an operational role and ultimately ran a small manufacturing unit making excavators. So I'd done that once before. then in this particular case i got a reach out from the founder it's amazing how these things work sometimes but he'd read an article i wrote a couple of years before on medium read the article and thought that's the type of person that i want and what he liked was he wanted a combination of operational experience and people experience he didn't want your classic coo but he wanted a mix of the two.

21:07Alan Cairns:And for me, it was just a great opportunity to do something that excited and scared me in equal measures because I'd be running functions I'd never run before. But equally, it was a great opportunity to develop and hone my commerciality because you're completely outside of HR. You're bound to do the role in a people-centric way. I do the role differently than probably many of the COOs that you would be hiring. But the way that I would go about it, more people centric, will probably shape the business in a different way. Yeah, amazing. And yeah, and you alluded to the fact that it was probably quite daunting, but very exciting to learn new things, but also bring your sort of blend of people and operational skills to that role.

21:55What were the biggest adjustments when you made that transition? And what were the maybe surprising or obvious transferable skills that helped you have such an impact? Because I know you did. I know the business went through a really exciting growth journey while you were there.

22:08Alan Cairns:So I think the things that firstly that would surprise me is it's amazing, a bit back to the all problems of people problems. It's amazing how much of a people background you need in most of those roles. If I could think about many COOs that I know, all will benefit from having a kind of a people centricity. Because it's a continuum. And if you're super focused on the numbers or on revenue, maybe you're a bit less focused on the people thing. So without a doubt, that's one of them. I think the other is recognizing and being humble enough to say, I'm not going to be an expert at what you do. So I worked with a great head of UX and design, Anthony.

23:02Alan Cairns:And I knew that I couldn't and wouldn't know more about UX and design than he would. So then you start thinking, well, what's the role that I've got? How do I help him to be the best that he can be? What you find is it's many things, actually. It is how he collaborates with other managers and directors and so on. So you can help the person to say, this is, you know, you might want to share that first, see what people think, and then take their feedback and then actually present it formally. The second is the shaping of the team. Now, I want to hire, I think Anthony started with a team of about two and grew it to a team of over 30.

23:46Alan Cairns:But the shape of that team, who you hire first, what types of skills you hire, whether you hire someone who is a natural leader, whether he's going to do the leading and all of his team or not, and so on, all of those things you can actually help with. And ultimately, what I think you spend a lot of time doing is mentoring. Talk to me about a problem that you're facing, okay, have you thought about doing it this way? Have you thought about doing it that way? And that is really what you can start to add value to. I think I'd also go back to the giving away your Lego piece, that to me, the best COOs, there's a great HBR article on the seven types of COO.

24:30Alan Cairns:To me, one aspect is, unless you know you're ultimately going to be CEO of the business, a lot of the role is actually about, as the business scales, it's about giving things away. And not everyone is comfortable with that. But ultimately, you give away most of your role until you get to a point where your role is so small that you're like, I'm not really needed here anymore. And I think you have to be humble enough to be able to see that, to anticipate it, not to put blockers in the way of that. It's easy to hire B and C players into roles. And then ultimately, well, you still need me because it's got all of these people around and so on.

25:14Alan Cairns:But actually, if you hire really star performers, you do have to step out of the way. You still mentor, you still coach, you still develop that individual, but you're getting out of the day-to-day way of that individual. And that's a massive learning for me, certainly. I love that. And any just bits of advice, little tips for CPOs listening to this, inspired by what you've said and thinking, okay, I'd love to make that transition to become a COO. Is there anything particularly they should think about or prepare for? I think commerciality is probably the biggest one. So if you're in a CPO role, try and own something else in the business.

25:53Alan Cairns:It might be a super small team. It might be a project, but do something that is non-HR related first. And you'll get a sense of, do actually enjoy this. For some people, they won't, and that's okay as well. But if you find something and you're in Money Supermarket, I had responsibility for the contact center. And I really enjoyed that. It was a great opportunity to listen to direct customer calls, to talk to the groups of people who were the closest to actual customers. And you get real feedback on how are customers perceiving this business. Now, that's the sort of thing that I think for many, you could have an opportunity to do that.

26:37Alan Cairns:If you can't do that, do call listening. If there is a contact center, sit in there for a day, not an hour or two, but a day, and listen to the real problems that customers face or listen to how your sales teams operate. and then from there you can kind of gradually pick up more but it gives you a sense of would i really enjoy this but i think that the bulk of cpos that i've met have the skills to do that it's whether they have the will to do that whether they would actually really want to go and do that and ultimately for some it's what's the shape of my career some people will go into a coo role because they want to change forever the course of their career and they want to do bigger and bigger COO roles.