Q&A with Colleen McCreary: building high-performing culture as a CPO
We sat down with Colleen McCreary – former Chief People Officer at Credit Karma – to discuss the importance of ‘company culture’ for unlocking talent.
Tell us about your background – how did you become Chief People, Places and Publicity Officer at Credit Karma?
I started in the technology industry 25 years ago. I had always been fascinated by how people make their life choices – in graduate school, I studied higher education administration and did my thesis on the retention of women in engineering and computer science programmes – and I was thinking of getting my PhD in academia to work with college students. However, things took a different turn, and I started working for Microsoft on its college and university recruiting programme. I spent seven years there before moving to the video game company Electronic Arts where I took a human resources role; I loved the company and had a great opportunity to work in Hyderabad, India, for six months during my time there.
Then in 2009, a startup founder came knocking on my door. When I first took the role the company employed 130 people, and in three years it grew to 4,000 and over a billion dollars in revenue – that company was Zynga. After that, I took various chief officer jobs at companies including The Climate Corporation (which was acquired by Monsanto) and Vevo, before I started my most recent role at Credit Karma in 2018. They were going through rapid growth and scaling problems, which I had been through before, and I took on various roles, including chief of staff for the CEO, communications, real estate and security. I’ve only very recently stepped down from that role to take a bit of a break – and that’s where I am now. It’s been a journey focused on unlocking talent.
What have you seen as the biggest culture-based barriers to teams failing?
“When it comes to communication, I always say there are three Cs involved in all employee relations: clarity, context and consistency.”
There are usually two things: leadership and communication. It’s usually the lack of a leader – whether a chief officer or a mid-level manager – willing to commit to or communicate what decisions have been or will be made. There needs to be alignment; that doesn’t mean everyone has to agree; it means everyone knows their role and what they must do to move forward, and they are able to communicate that to each person on the team. When it comes to communication, I always say there are three Cs involved in all employee relations: clarity, context and consistency. Clarity means being clear on the message or outcome you are trying to get; context means letting people know why or how a decision has been made; and consistency is about repeating the message again and again, using the same channels, until it sinks in. Leadership and communication – these are the two things that define success.
In your view, what does ‘company culture’ mean, and why is a good culture so important for a company's growth?
“I define culture as the systems, tools and rituals used for decision-making.”
I think culture is one of those things that’s really misunderstood. I often joke that I’m not the CEO of culture – or of happiness, which is something else I’ve been called. In fact, I coach companies and teams not to use happiness to describe the culture they are trying to create because happiness is an intrinsic feeling and some people will never be happy at work. I define culture as the systems, tools and rituals used for decision-making. It’s not the values written on the wall or the thing you’re building – it’s HOW you get things done and how those decisions are made.
How would you go about building high-performance culture within a company?
“The best leadership teams will spend time with each other deciding how they want to operate as a group, as a reflection of the company.”
This isn’t going to be done in a day, a week or a month. Culture is built on what happens over time, and the best leadership teams will spend time with each other deciding how they want to operate as a group, as a reflection of the company. You must be aligned and really commit. I often find that company leaders are good in their own ‘swim lanes’. Swimming is an individual sport – even in a relay, swim teams don’t really have to talk to each other. That doesn’t work in a company; there’s always some crossover, and you can’t live in your own silo. To use another sporting analogy, a football team is a great example of how a leadership team should respond and act: they work together, pay attention to what is happening around them, and cover for each other.
Credit Karma went through an acquisition in 2020 – how did you and the management team bring your employees with you on that journey?
In 2020, Credit Karma was acquired by Intuit [a business software company that specialises in financial software]. It wasn’t a simple acquisition for several reasons. First, Credit Karma’s employee population wasn’t a huge fan – Intuit had a very popular product called Turbo Tax, and we also made a tax product of our own, so saw ourselves as the ‘scrappy competitor’. When we announced the acquisition, the CEO gave a lot of context: he believed Intuit would give us a better platform for our mission: to help people find financial power and prosperity. I also ran 17 information sessions in small groups to talk it through and get people comfortable with the idea.
Second, we announced the acquisition to employees on 24 February 2020; a few weeks later the pandemic hit, and we sent all our employees to the US, Canada and the UK home. We went from an in-the-office-five-days-a-week company to suddenly working from home. By the end of March 2020, Credit Karma’s revenue had fallen almost 70%. We didn’t want to go through a layoff, so the CEO and I persuaded the board to let us do pay cuts – employees took a 15% cut, the leadership team took a 50% cut, and the CEO went down to nothing. We also had to redistribute around 90 people who were working in recruitment and growth marketing; we turned into executive recruiters, looked into their backgrounds and placed them in different roles. It was probably the best career growth they ever experienced.
All through this, we were still waiting for the acquisition, and communication was essential. When the pandemic hit, I started writing an email to the company every Sunday, giving them updates – I ended up sending that email every week for two years. It became a great communication tool; we didn’t just discuss the business, we’d talk about what was happening in society, and I’d drop in TV, movie or book recommendations. Even now, people comment that the emails helped them overcome that hard time. In December 2020 we finally closed the acquisition – it was a long journey!
Are there key tools and systems that you use when helping an organisation codify its culture?
I’m a big believer in the art of writing things down, which is something that Amazon has preached and practised – it has a history of using a six-pager to define its strategy and direction. At Credit Karma, I interviewed 100 employees – a cross-section of the business – in my first 30 days, and I wrote up a six-pager on my findings. Remember, too, that there’s the culture of the organisation and the culture of each employee, and it’s important to understand how your employees like to work. When building a company's culture, you need metrics to determine if people are engaged. I love the manager-employee feedback system 15Five: employees take 15 minutes to answer questions, and the manager takes five minutes to respond. It’s a great framing tool to get an overall feel of how the workforce is doing.
Which product leader should I interview next and why?
At Credit Karma, I worked with a super interesting woman, Poulomi Damany, who built our checking and savings product and Lightbox. Previously, she worked for the Obama administration in the first technology office and also built and sold her own technology company. She’s fascinating and a strong female technical leader, a demographic I don’t think we don’t hear from enough.
What are your top three takeaways for product leaders looking to build that high-performing culture, especially in a challenging economic environment?
Find what winning looks like for your company. By this, I don’t mean if revenue is up or stock price is up – it’s easy to devolve down to those metrics, but it’s dangerous – I mean something that you can actually control. That could be shipping a product in a certain amount of time or hitting certain customer needs.
I’m returning to those three Cs of communication here: clarity, context and consistency.
You have to build trust with your employees; anything you can do to define certainty will go a long way to building and keeping that trust. That can be very difficult in a downturn –but sometimes trust is just about being honest that you can’t give them certainty about anything.
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