Today’s guest is Jenny von Podewils, Co-Founder of Leapsome, a start-up providing performance enablement & employee engagement software that supports fast-growing companies such as Spotify, Trivago or Babbel in building high-performing teams and strong company cultures. Jenny currently participates in the German Accelerator New York program with the goal to expand Leapsome to the U.S. market.

In today’s conversation, we talk about feedback – feedback as rocket fuel for learning, feedback on feedback and what receiving feedback has to do with going to the dentist. We also talk about company culture and the role the founders play in shaping it. Towards the end of the conversation, Jenny shares her recommendations for successful distributed teams, great insights not only in times of corona!

In our conversation we talk about:

• How during rapid growth, organizational alignment has do be done intentionally or else employee engagement can deteriorate. This can be done through alignment on goals. How to get there and who does what - often with the support of OKRs.
• How Leapsome helps companies to set up a people enablement ecosystem through a data-driven understanding of what’s going on in the company in order to act upon it
• The key role that founders play in setting the stage for the company culture including a feedback and learning culture by ideally acting as role models in asking for feedback
• How a software such as the one from Leapsome can function as a tool to set up mechanisms and built habits, but that the actual feedback conversations still need to happen face-to-face
• Feedback on feedback – after giving feedback, ask each other: “How was the experience for you? Anything I can change for the next time or maintain that was helpful?” The benefits of having diverse peer mentors for different aspects
• How working with a business coach gives you space and forces you to think certain contexts through
• We also talk about organizational culture and how at Leapsome, even though there is a broad diversity in nationalities and background, a strong company culture is also built through hiring the right people with a growth mindset through a quite extensive hiring process
• Leapsome’s participation in the German Accelerator in New York Class 2020-1
• Many recommendations for successful distributed (and non-distributed) teams such as clarity, transparency, and accountability. Who is owning which initiatives that are linked to that? Having clearly defined routines around “How do we learn from one another?“
• Team happiness and how to measure it
• Remote onboarding
• What personalized learning might look like in 10 years with a rise of complexity at work, larger amounts of millennials in companies, and the challenge of re-skilling and upskilling due to the speed of technological changes
• The advice Jenny would give her younger self: Most things you learn while doing and you don’t necessarily have to have learned them to start doing them. Just start and be smart about learning on the way!

organizationalalignment #OKR #growthmindset #feedback #learning #organizationalculture #hiringprocess #values #purpose #remoteonboarding #leapsome #teamhappiness