Building Authentic Leadership and Culture in Startups | Maria Goldsholl, Ep 01
Episode Summary
Maria Goldsholl, fractional Chief People Officer at TXO, discusses authentic leadership, building trust-based cultures in startups, and the value of fractional executive services. She emphasizes psychological safety, transparent communication, and learning from career setbacks as foundations for effective leadership and organizational growth.
Pull Quotes
“I think one of the best things that could happen to you is to be laid off or fired from a job. The reason you should aspire to be fired someday is because it's humbling, and the first thing you do is you prove to yourself that I'm okay, I'll figure it out.”
On nonlinear career paths
“If you plan things too perfectly, you're going to miss what's in the periphery. I left a regular role where I was making a really wonderful salary to do a startup once with someone, and she was paying half of what I was making. That set my career apart.”
On diagnosing toxic culture
“The fish stinks from the head. Very often I will tell people it probably begins with you, the leadership team, and how you're behaving and what you have allowed in the organization, what you've encouraged without even knowing.”
“You have to take the time as a leader to develop that trust before you can have the luxury of being candid with people. Think about your personal relationships. The people in your life who can be super candid with you are the people you have developed trust with.”
“When people are in the absence of communication, people make up stories, and those stories are generally not true. Isn't it better to just deliver that information and make sure they know so that they're not developing their own stories?”
Transcript
Hi, this is Todd Merrill. Welcome to Tales From The Sky Lounge. Tales From The Sky Lounge is a podcast about business consulting and venture investing where we talk to lots of people out there in the world who are making it happen, traveling out to clients and have a unique perspective on business and consulting in the world of technology. Come on in as we talk to our first guest, Maria Goldol, in the Sky Lounge.
Maria, hey Todd. Welcome to the Sky Lounge. It's so great to have you here. Maria, why don't you give us a little bit of background about who you are before we get going?
Yes, first of all thanks for having me. This is a lot of fun. I'm very excited. I'm a fractional Chief People Officer or CHRO, Chief Human Resource Officer, and generally what I do is I come in in a growth phase or some event, some trajectory of growth in an organization and help the organization professionalize their human resource function. So to your point, I'm actually brought in sometimes post capital raise to professionalize HR, compensation, organizational design, coaching of leaders to try to get them to the next level. And I do that with TXO, our company. And I also have a recruiting team and directors of HR here at Teix that report into me. Yes, and I've used that superpower of yours. That's hidden sometimes. The recruiting function, you and I and your team have built a lot of really great software teams with some of our tech CXO clients.
What, so I know that beyond software teams you recruit a lot of leadership, right? You recruit a lot of CXO type people. What do you look for when you're interviewing for that CRO or head of sales or even a CEO? What is it that really stands out to you at the C level?
Yeah, you know, as you can imagine, when I'm the recruiting function, I originally started to backfill some of our fractional people. So if you're fractional, it's not forever, and that client eventually needs a permanent replacement. And so that's how the recruiting practice started. And by virtue of the fact that we've done this over and over and over again, and I've seen as the HR leader and the executive coach very often inside of organizations, I've seen all kinds of leaders from super high egos to super humble and in learning mode. I will tell you where I sort of have netted out over the years is a concept called authentic leadership. And for those of us who have been in tech for a really long time, there's this great book in tech called Radical Candor. And it was written by a former Facebook exec who talked about the intersection of care and concern for your team and being able to deliver candid and good feedback as you would basically in your personal relationship.
Want to go deeper?
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