3 Rules for Building a More Caring Culture — This Chief People Officer Shares Lessons from Lambda School & InVision

Over the course of his career, Mark Frein has tackled everything from running a leadership development consultancy, to earning a Ph.D. in Education and teaching organizational theory as an adjunct professor. But for the last decade, he’s carved out a signature focus: serving as the Chief People Officer charged with building out the HR function at venture-backed startups.

After a three-year stretch at Return Path, Frein joined InVision in 2017, when the design platform was around 250 people. He spent the next few years setting up the HR departments that under his tenure grew the company to almost 900 employees. In early 2020, Frein signed on for his latest adventure when he joined Lambda School as the Chief People Officer & Head of Alumni Programs.

Eager to tap into the collection of top-notch people practices he’s accumulated over the years, we sat down with Frein for a conversation about the lessons he’s learned as a repeat Chief People Officer — and some common threads quickly surfaced.

“Every single company that I walk into, if I'm in charge of the people function, there are a few fundamentals that are really important to me: creating a great employee experience, enabling a workforce that feels seen and heard, and making an environment where people feel developed,” says Frein.

In this exclusive interview, he walks us through each of these elements in turn, opening up his playbooks for building the people function from the ground up. Frein sketches out what a great employee experience looks like and offers tested practices for training managers and developing talent.

He shares plenty of more philosophical musings — such as why leadership is an exercise in caring and why supervision is fundamentally about development. But there are tons of tactical nuggets as well, from how to custom-tailor employee onboarding to his unique approach to skip-levels.

We think it makes for a particularly helpful read for both founders and early-stage people leaders trying to thoughtfully set a foundation for this function, but managers of all stripes will walk away with practical pointers and thoughtful perspectives to pocket for later. Let’s dive in.

Thanks, as always, for reading and sharing!

-The Review editors

Here's a sneak peek at the tips:

- Rule #1: Make employees feel connected by building an employee experience that matches the company. "My people philosophy is almost always going to start with the strategy of the company. In many ways, building a great culture is about matching the employee experience to the competitive positioning of that company."

- "Rule #2: Make employees feel seen and heard by building managers' empathy muscles. "A manager's ability to read emotions is a little bit like training yourself to be a sommelier. You pick up a whole new language about it. If I can start to get people to really work that muscle — the curiosity before judgment, the listening before developing an action plan — I know I can get them down a road where they become empathetic leaders and amazing listeners who will create very safe, transparent environments for people to feel seen and heard."

- Rule #3: Make sure that people are growing by remembering that supervision = development. "I think supervision fundamentally is development. A lot of people might think, ‘Well, as a supervisor, aren't you trying to make sure they get the work done’. It's like, well, yeah, of course. But that's the easy part. Quite frankly, the hard part is to develop your people. We're all in this journey in our lives of trying to be decent people and the best development in the workplace is often just about exploring what it means to be decent with each other."

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