When Values Drive Growth: Authentic Leadership in Scaling Companies with Christina Luconi

In this episode, Christina Luconi, dubbed "the original people innovator," takes host Bill Banham on a fascinating journey through her pioneering career in transforming how fast-growing companies approach their most valuable asset - their people. With refreshing candor and hard-earned wisdom, she reveals how she's helped multiple tech startups scale from dozens to thousands of employees without sacrificing their cultural foundations.

The conversation explores Christina's unconventional entry into HR after studying psychology, where her willingness to question established norms ("why do we call humans 'resources'?") set her on a path of people-centered innovation. Her formative experience at Sapient during the 90s tech boom—where she helped scale from 150 to 3,500 employees in just four years—established her philosophy that culture isn't just important for growth; it's the essential foundation that makes rapid growth possible.

Christina shares practical strategies from her 14-year tenure at Rapid7, where she developed the concept of "scaling with soul." Rather than imposing values from the top down, she engaged employees directly in defining the company's identity and integrated these values throughout the employee lifecycle. The approach was so successful that even terminated employees would recommend the company to others—perhaps the ultimate test of cultural strength. She eloquently articulates how diversity of thought and cultural alignment can coexist when organizations focus on shared values while encouraging authentic self-expression.

Now launching her consulting practice, People Innovations, Christina aims to help early-stage companies recognize the critical importance of human-centered approaches from day one. Having faced personal health challenges that shifted her perspective, she's passionate about maximizing her impact across multiple organizations. Despite acknowledging the current difficulties in people leadership, she remains optimistic: "This could be one of the most pivotal and important roles in a company because ultimately, it doesn't matter what you're building or selling...AI might replace a lot of stuff, but it can't replace human relationships and trust and collaboration."

Ready to transform how your organization approaches culture and growth? Subscribe to the HRchat Show for more insights from visionary leaders who are redefining the world of work.

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome to the HR Chat Show
• 1:21 Christina Luconi: The Original People Innovator
• 6:43 Early Career and Scaling at Sapient
• 9:45 Scaling with Soul at Rapid7
• 17:31 The Future of People Leadership
• 19:55 People Innovations and Final Thoughts

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:03

Welcome to the HR Chat Show, one of the world's most downloaded and shared podcasts designed for HR pros, talent execs, tech enthusiasts and business leaders. For hundreds more episodes and what's new in the world of work, subscribe to the show, follow us on social media and visit hrgazettecom and visit hrgazettecom.

Speaker 2: 0:26

Welcome to another episode of the HR Chat Show. Hello listeners, this is your host today, bill Bannam, and in today's HR Chat episode we're going to consider the concept of scaling with soul and how companies can grow rapidly without losing their company's culture and their values. And here to enlighten us today is the amazing, awesome, wonderful christina laconi. Hey, christina, how are you?

Speaker 2: 0:51

hi bill, thanks for having me today thank you very much for being my guest. This is your first time on the show. We got here because we have the mutual friend that's jeff wold. So, jeff, if you're listening, thank you very much for another amazing introduction. Christina, you've been called the original people innovator. What does that title mean to you, and how has it shaped your approach to scaling startups and high growth companies?

Speaker 3: 1:21

To hear that out loud makes it sound like I'm really old, right, the original but I think that's probably pretty accurate. I think what it means is when. Just a little bit of context when I started my career I got tied to startups very early, my first job like an internship. I was a psych major. I thought I was going to go into clinical work and ended up realizing horrible thing to admit about oneself but realized, oh my gosh, I'm probably not as empathetic as I need to be to listen to people talk about their problems all day long. The irony is I do a lot of that anyway, but my dad had been a serial entrepreneur in the tech space and said hey, there's this thing called human resources and it's sort of the intersection of psychology and business. What he was really saying is kid, you need a job out of college. But what it did for me was get me working in a startup environment during my college years as an internship.

Speaker 3: 2:16

The company went public about three weeks into my internship, bizarrely, and I thought, as only a naive 20-year old could think, oh my gosh, if you get really smart people working together towards a mission, kind of rowing the boat in the same direction, you can really scale something together and, by the way, maybe people make money. That sounds like a really cool thing to do. That's what I want to do for a career path, right, because it's that easy? Obviously it's not, but when I graduated, that's what I looked for no-transcript, what normal companies look like. So I got a little bit spoiled, but what that environment did was I was the kid who said oh my gosh, look around, this is a great environment. I might be the most junior person on the team, but they're creating this environment where I can ask questions and push things, and I think one of my first questions probably very obnoxiously was why the heck do we call this team or this field human resources? Right, like my printer is a resource, but a human being isn't. That just feels wrong to me and instead of saying, christina, that's cute, shut up and go file or do whatever it was I was supposed to be doing, they said why don't you go think about that differently? What a gift to give to somebody who's 22 years old, who knows nothing. So I did think about it differently and because of that, I think it put me in a situation to say what are the right things to do versus how is it supposed to be done, right?

Speaker 3: 4:08

So I think the field of HR, especially back then, was so focused on compliance and rules and all of the tactical stuff that make people hate the field Candidly. It's important, but not as the driving force, right. And I was just gifted an opportunity to be thinking about it differently and because I didn't know what I didn't know, it opened up a world of possibilities, and after several years of doing that I won't bore you with the details of those first four years, but I had been able to both do it on the team side, but also went back to school at night became a consultant in that business, did organizational development consulting for a couple of years, just so I could understand it from a customer perspective. And then, you know, as only an arrogant whatever 26 year old could do, I thought, oh my God, I have four years of experience, I'm ready to go run the show somewhere, and I've been humbled much since then.

Speaker 3: 5:08

But at that time I ended up then joining a very hyper growth company called Sapient. It's a very large, totally different organization now, but at that stage it was a very hyper growth young tech company and I think the reason that my whopping four years of experience landed there was because the entire leadership of that company was in our 20s. That's very common in today's world. It sure wasn't in the mid 90s and we didn't know the word no. If something didn't work, we dusted ourselves off. We tried something different.

Speaker 3: 5:45

But the beauty in that was there were two CEOs. They were already sort of purpose built to think differently and we really focused on. Culture is going to be a really big part of how we scale this really quickly. So for context, I went from, I think I joined around 150 people and it was 3,500 global and public four years later. So it was just insane growth. But I think the culture really helped us, sort of set the foundation for how we were going to grow that quickly. And then I've been sort of rinse and repeat. I'd like to think I've gotten better over the years, but that's that's sort of the model that I've been following for the rest of my career. So very long-winded answer, but I think that's I've been doing this since, I think before culture was even a big word that people were using, so I guess that makes me sort of a unique original voice in this.

Speaker 4: 6:42

Thanks for listening to this episode of the HR Chat Podcast. If you enjoy the audio content we produce, you'll love our articles on the HR Gazette. Learn more at hrgazettecom. And now back to the show.

Speaker 2: 6:58

In terms of the benefits to a fast scaling company of having diversity of their employees and the different perspectives that they come with, and how that shapes the company culture in the longer term. How did that shape your career? How did that shape your leadership style to have that experience back in the early 90s of your first role having such a diverse workforce?

Speaker 3: 7:22

Sure, I think that first role really helped me understand to be a little bit fearless, right, to think a little bit differently is one thing, but to have the courage to be able to then share your ideas and share things that are different, I think some of that is the beauty of being young. Right, I didn't. I wasn't afraid. I was too naive to realize, oh my gosh, in some environments if you push totally radical ideas you could be fired, like I didn't. I didn't operate that way. Instead, I really operated from a place of what do I think is the right thing to do, and because I was surrounded by very innovative thinkers, that gave me a playground to try a lot of different ideas and become pretty fearless. So I think that created a model for me to think, to really sort of build and try things out.

Speaker 3: 8:18

And I don't think there's one solid roadmap. You always talk about culture and you see people point to Netflix or HubSpot or whatever the culture stuff came out, and I think those are great learnings and great things for people to adapt, but there's no one size fits all to all of this. I think you can have some basic foundational steps, but it's going to be different for every company and being able to sort of navigate that and really understand. You know, I always start with who does the company identify themselves as and who do they aspire to be. And if you can build that foundation as early as possible in a company, you can build everything else on top of that, but you need to have the solid foundation.

Speaker 2: 9:03

And, on that note, we've had lots of folks on this show leaders on this show who have spoken about the challenges of scaling rapidly and how they may be. A co-founder or two had one vision, co-founder or two had one vision, but then they were finding, when they hit 50 employees and approaching 100 employees plus, they can no longer control the recruitment process and they had to look to to other folks within the team who maybe didn't didn't start the journey with. Right at rapid seven, you led the concept of scaling with soul, as I mentioned in the intro. Can you now share what that looks like in practice and how companies can grow rapidly without losing their cultural business?

Speaker 3: 9:48

Sure, I mean, I think, at the high level. When I joined Rapid7, we were 75 people and, like every company I've ever walked into, whether I've been consulting or joined them, you know they'll give you the prioritization list of these are the things that we need you to focus on as the people person, and I've always said those are fantastic. However, before we jump into any of this work, let's focus on that very basic, foundational piece of who are we and who do we aspire to be. I think what I've found with a lot of founders, especially in the tech space, is they might have a brilliant product idea and maybe they went to business school, or maybe they didn't at all, but nobody thinks about the scaling piece of this, right? Maybe you're thinking about in terms of revenue or product enhancements and stuff, but you're not thinking about the people pieces. Often has been my experience and I think if you can think about that and be as mindful about how you're planning your people strategies as you are about your financials, your product evolution, et cetera, you set yourself up for far better success, right? I forget what the statistic is, but a very large percentage of startup organizations fail for a lot of reasons, and it's not always about funding and product market fit. It's about the human side of it, right? Because you can, generally we see people start companies and they take a few people they've worked with before or this was my roommate in college. They're really good at this tech or whatever, and they sort of cobble something together, but that doesn't scale well, right, you can't have everybody who's like-minded. You need diversity of thought. You need to be able to have different points of view, different scale sets that complement, and if your entire culture is based on your vision of what everything should be, that's really hard unless you're really working hard to bring people along that journey and they buy into it.

Speaker 3: 11:46

So my process when I came to Rapid7 was to take a third of the company. At the time, you know, we were 75 people when I started. We took a third of those people that we thought were really good whatever we were going to define as culture fits, but people that were really sort of great on a number of levels, and we spent a couple of weeks really talking about who are we and who do we aspire to be, and each time we would make work on that and try to identify some of our value sets and the language and what we meant by it. Then I would take it back to the leadership team so they had a voice in crafting it. But it was really largely led by our people, by our people, for our people, with, ultimately, some executive sign off and support. And because we did it that way, we had a third of the company already completely bought in by the time we rolled it out. But because we did it relatively early in our journey, it was really easy to then jump to. How do we get this traction? It's not just hanging up a bunch of core values on a wall or on a coffee cup and saying everybody memorize these. This is what we're about.

Speaker 3: 13:05

Instead, we were really thoughtful about prioritizing them into different areas of the employee life cycle, how we hire people, the questions we ask. It's not just Bill has a phenomenal CV, let's hire him, but you could have a fantastic background. But if collaboration is really important to us, I'm going to ask you some questions to really figure out is that important to you? I've never in my life made met anyone who says hey, I am not a team player at all. I really like to be in my silo, I want to work by myself.

Speaker 3: 13:33

So it's my job, then to really dig at those things and make sure, if collaboration is important to us, that I don't just take it on face value and say, oh yes, I'd love to work with others, but really do you, how do you, how does that manifest for you, etc.

Speaker 3: 13:47

So we, we would tie it into the, the hiring process, then you tie it into your performance management. You tie it into how you're promoting people and rewarding people to working all your way around the employee life cycle to the part where, when you part ways with someone, whether they quit or whether you terminate them my goal was always these values that we believe in are still going to show up in how we end with people. Because my goal was I want people, even if we fire them, to say I had such an exceptional experience here. I would still refer someone to this company. That sounds insane, but that has happened. Like I hold that bar incredibly high to make sure that we're constantly revisiting and tying these back into our everyday work. Not just this is what we say we are.

Speaker 2: 14:36

Okay, I can see why you are so well-respected If you're able to fire someone but they still say that was a great company loved it. You know you are doing your job very, very well. Um, a couple of things that you mentioned in your previous answer, that you spoke about diversity of thought and how important that was. You also spoke about the concept of culture fit. I guess my follow-up for you there then is can we have both? How can we have both? What? What's the secret source of go to collaboration if you've got diversity of thought but also you're looking for people who fit within?

Speaker 3: 15:12

yeah, I mean I. I look at the, the core values of a company and the in the culture is. That is the one thing. No matter who you are, no matter how senior or junior you are, no matter what role you play you're a go-to customer or you're in technology or whatever it is that the one thing that we all share in common, aside from being human beings, are this belief in this set of values. Those values should scale across across. So I could be a very senior level tech guy or I could be a really junior level salesperson, but we still believe in impact together as one of our core values. We really truly believe in making impact as we work together. One plus one equals three, for example. So that, for me, is if we all share that common value set.

Speaker 3: 16:02

Of course, we're not looking for, like you know, it's not lost on me that the word cult is in culture. We're not trying to build a cult where everyone thinks exactly the same way, but we are saying, if we start with a foundation, that this is something that we all believe in. These values are something we all believe in and will operate by. That gives a lot of latitude as to how you live your life or how you experience this company and contribute. So, for example, one of our core values here at Rapid7 is bring you.

Speaker 3: 16:36

That sounds a little touchy-feely, but what that means is we have created an environment where we want everyone to truly be their authentic self at work. The nuance to that is that you also have to be empathetic enough to realize everyone else is letting their freak flag fly. If we are all sort of being unique and bringing authenticity to our roles, you still have to be open-minded that everyone else is doing that too, and you're not going to. Everyone's creative, unique personalities are not going to resonate with a hundred percent of people, but we still have to respect each other. We still have to work with each other and respect the fact that everyone's kind of bringing their own uniqueness to the party and that actually benefits our clients and customers benefits each other because we're learning. I think we all realize we learn with different diversity of thought we are learning, we are evolving, we are changing.

Speaker 2: 17:30

What's your take, then, on the evolving role of the chief people officer? How should today's cpos be thinking about their impact beyond traditional hr boundaries? You gave a wonderful example in terms of firing someone, but they still say nice things. That's a great legacy.

Speaker 3: 17:46

Honestly, I think, um, like, look, I'll give this field a little bit of credit. When I started my career, it was literally making the transition I'm so old at this point, bill, but like it was making the transition from personnel to human resources. So HR when I came out of school was like the newfangled thing. And yet I think there's a lot. You know, culture became really popular over the last 10 years, but I think we're still in that place where, for a lot of companies, culture still means hey, we have this really friendly girl who sits at the front desk and she plans our party. She's our culture person. Like that is not culture, that's like some nice stuff that you do, but that's not necessarily going to provide the foundation for your company to scale. And so I think we're on the track, but it's not there yet.

Speaker 3: 18:37

I think the biggest challenge we still face is getting people in those senior people roles to. They're still saying I want a seat at the table God, I hate that expression because you can get the seat, because you have the title. It's what you do with the seat when you have it and really being able to sort of say I look at the job as here's the business strategy that we're setting out as a company and our job as people leaders is then to work backwards and say do we have the right people strategies to support those business strategies? That is not rocket science or really creative thinking, but I'm surprised most people don't do it that way. It's rather, we still are digging out of the hole of. These are the people that you go to if you need to fire someone or they're holding down the policies like handbooks and all of that stuff. I get it, I know it's important, but, my God, if that's what we think the value add contribution is to our role, we are really missing the mark. I think.

Speaker 2: 19:41

I agree, okay. So, christina, you're about to embark on a new journey, an exciting new journey, launching your new consulting practice called People Innovations Congratulations. Can you tell me more about that?

Speaker 3: 19:55

I can and I'll give you a little context. I would stay at Rapid7 for a really long time. So for somebody who has spent, I've done six startups, I'm really passionate about building from scratch and I've been here for 14 years, which is insane to me how long I've been, and yet we have a pretty remarkable CEO and this journey has been an exceptional one. I'll be really honest and say I've been on a cancer battle. I'm in remission now. I'm doing great, but I know it doesn't have a cure, so I know it's going to come back.

Speaker 3: 20:27

And I was super motivated, I think as anyone, when they're sort of facing life and death stuff, like what do I want to do with the time that I have, and I think I realized, okay, I've given pretty much everything I could possibly give to Rapid7. And as much as I love this place, I think I have one more big thing left in me and for me, that is I've been doing this work for individual companies. I've consulted in between jobs, but really been working with companies and helping them scale well over the years, and I think at this point I'm much more interested in trying to help a multitude of companies all at once. So People Innovations is really going to be working on. How do you actually help companies in those early stages sort of you know, past seed funding, so picture series, data you know just post IPO truly figure out how important or realize how important the human side of the business is to think about and plan for and begin to to operate with as early as possible in their evolution? And then we'll teach you how to do it, whether you need help doing it or whether we can guide you through that process.

Speaker 2: 21:39

Well, okay, so I really liked you. I've now got so much more respect for you for sharing that with me and with our listeners. Thank you and, and, and and I. I wish you, I wish you every health.

Speaker 3: 21:52

Oh, thank you. I appreciate that. I appreciate that I'm doing great right now, so I'm going to max it out for as long as I've got.

Speaker 2: 22:00

Just finally for today, Christina. What's exciting you right now in the world of work, and what should HR pros be paying close attention to in the next 12 to 18 months?

Speaker 3: 22:12

What is exciting me, aside from my own personal journey of trying to figure out how to do this on a large scale is I think it's a very difficult time to be a people leader.

Speaker 3: 22:23

There's a lot going on in the world on so many levels, especially post-pandemic, but I also think that it is an extraordinary time to be a people person. A lot of companies don't know how to do this stuff well, and if you have an innovative mind and you're willing to put yourself out there and be comfortable. There's no playbook and no perfect answer to any of this world. A lot of it we're making it up as we go along. What an extraordinary time to be in this role. I think this could be one of the most pivotal and important roles in a company because ultimately, it doesn't matter what you're building or selling. It matters you know like the people are the ones that are doing it, and AI might replace a lot of stuff, but it can't replace human relationships and trust and collaboration. We have a really amazing opportunity as people leaders over the next decade or so.

Speaker 2: 23:18

Wonderful. Well, that just leaves me to say for today Christina Laconi, you awesome human being, Thank you very much for your time today.

Speaker 3: 23:26

Thank you, I appreciate the conversation.

Speaker 2: 23:28

And listeners as always. Until next time, happy working.

Speaker 1: 23:54

Until next time, happy working.