Supporting Paradox in the Workplace to Build Leaders

Soo Hong, Chief People Officer, Sunbit

The end of the year often presents a host of paradoxical emotions: holidays to spend time with cherished friends and family, while those same holidays can bring longing and grief for those we've lost over the years. The exhilaration of reaching a quarterly goal and the challenge and burnout that comes with pushing to that goal. But we – and our teams – live in a constant state of paradox throughout the year. That's the reality of modern-day life, and frankly, that's the reality of being human–in life and at work. There is no hermetic seal to close up and cocoon away our teams from the stressors in the world, both macro (think: wars, pandemics, recessions) and micro (think: death of a loved one, failed project, missed promotion) that create a paradox to joys that also are a large part of our workplace and lives. So, how can we support our teams with paradoxes in the workplace?

Create, Teach, and Insist on Healthy Paradoxes Supported by Values

From the beginning, our founding team built the company with a clear vision of their values. From day one, it influenced how they made business decisions, how they hired, how they sold, and how they built products. Our leadership team has always agreed that values are where we build our value–period, full stop. But how do we make this focus on values scalable as an organization grows? Shortly after I joined Sunbit, we set about memorializing these core values. As an HR leader, it was my job to observe, listen, and help bring these values to light in a tangible, visible way for the organization so that every employee and every new hire is always aligned. What came out were six core value statements that define how we do absolutely everything:

● Serve others before self.

● Act Fast

● On the Impact

● Connect Genuinely

● Include Always

● Innovate for the Good

While on the surface, these values are appealing and make sense to anyone in a technology organization scaling up, there is an inherent tension between them in combination. When you act fast, can you always include? And what if you also need to connect genuinely (actually speaking with a co-worker versus dashing off a quick Slack)? Or innovate for a good while serving others before self?

Thinking about these tensions, I look to legendary UCLA men’s basketball coach John Wooden, who led the Bruins to a record ten national championship titles with four perfect 30-0 seasons, just up the street from our Los Angeles headquarters. He would tell his team, “Be quick, but don’t hurry.” While there are many acolytes of Wooden’s leadership lessons, not many remember this paradox and gem of his coaching philosophy.

"Core values – whether paradoxical or not – mean nothing if leaders are not held accountable to them."

Rather, Silicon Valley and tech are full of people who will remember the value of "move fast, break things." That's hardly a paradox. That's a matador call. Ultimately, things break, and additional guidepost values get added. Because the truth is when we want our teammates to act fast, we are not asking them to act recklessly. We ask them to get things done with a sense of ownership because not doing so impacts something and someone we care about, whether customer, colleague, or client. At Sunbit, we expect our teams to employ good judgment because we are not asking them to act fast but insisting that they flex all of our core values and that they think and care about others. We insist that they live in paradox.

Ensure Your Talent Definitions Are Explicit about Your Core Values Being the Standards for Success (And Promotion)

Core values – whether paradoxical or not – mean nothing if leaders are not held accountable to them. As a younger organization, it was easier for our teams and leaders to ‘see’ when someone was or wasn’t living up to our values. Now that we’re larger with distributed and cross-functional teams, it’s natural that we cannot have the same direct visibility of how our people perform.

Typically, dashboards are an easy way of creating transparency across geographies and teams. But do they give an organization a picture of how the team is achieving those numbers? With our core values, would we accept hitting our numbers quickly while burning a customer or a colleague in the process? Unequivocally, no. At Sunbit, it’s not just enough to achieve value. To become a leader at Sunbit, we are vigilant about how that value is achieved.

Like many organizations, Sunbit conducts assessments with cross-functional input. For our leaders and emerging leaders, we also allot time during a cross-functional meeting for the supervisor to present the leader and provide an overview of his/her core competencies. We then open the floor to those in attendance to provide supportive feedback and discuss how and who will mentor the leader as they develop. In addition to giving the direct report clear and supportive feedback, the process gives our entire leadership team clarity about consistent standards for our teams and ourselves.

Core values can be just something on the walls. But when embraced and leveraged to help people think and care (not just do), core values become the heart of driving and achieving value.

Author’s Bio

Soo J. Hong is Sunbit’s Chief People Officer, leading the company's recruiting, development, and support of team members throughout their career journey with Sunbit. She has over two decades of experience in human capital programs across five continents, serving companies ranging from hyper-growth start-ups to global private equity to F500. As the first CHRO/CPO in organizations such as WeWork, Tinder, and National Veterinary Associates, she has supported building organizations of scale during transformative growth. Soo has been recognized for her innovative work, being named one of Hot Topic's Tech HR100, and received the Tri-State National Diversity Council's Most Influential Woman of the Year award for supporting diversity and women's leadership in the workplace. Soo received her MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.