"Grown, not Born" is our new interview series. Welcome to our 3rd episode. The series dives into the journeys of remarkable leaders and their personal connection to management. We're thrilled to hear from Helen!

Helen Hodges is a Fractional Chief of Staff & Leadership Coach, and the former Chief of Staff & Operations at Urban Jungle. She has scaled startups and helped companies with strategic and operational leadership with over 15 years of experience. Sarah, our founder sat with Helen to discuss her views on management, particularly in the startups she’s worked with.

Sarah: I'm exploring the misconception that good managers are born, not made. How do you feel about this statement?

Helen: I think some people are born with a skill set that leans towards management but every great manager has been ‘made’ to some degree. And there are two parts to that:

• skills or competencies, some people naturally have more relevant abilities than others but, equally, if there are missing skills you can learn them, if they are missing behaviours, then you can learn them.
• the other part of it is how you, as a manager, feel about it. Whether you feel confident in those skills, and how comfortable you are using them.

I think that those two things and how they play out together help you navigate how you act as a manager and understand what the person being managed needs from you.

Sarah: Tell me more about how you started on your Management journey.

Helen: My journey started in strategy consulting, where progression was linear and management was output focussed. After leaving consultancy, I had a lot of freedom within the in-house strategy team I joined to be self-managing, and I worked with a lot of different leaders and got to think about how you manage people and not just output.

Then, when I joined Urban Jungle, we had the chance to build our team from scratch and decide how we wanted to manage people. In startups, there is a limited amount of structure and we hired people who’d thrive in that environment. Part of that ethos was being coaching-led, hiring smart people and helping them figure out things themselves. For example by giving them more space and encouraging debate and challenge. We had junior engineers debating with the CEO quite frequently (and in a constructive way).

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We had junior engineers debating with the CEO quite frequently (and in a constructive way).

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Sarah: The role of founders in shaping the managerial culture is fascinating. Do you know why they decided to prioritise coaching?

Helen: I think both co-founders believed the team is very important to both business success and being a place they wanted to work. The founders are some of the most learning-focused people I’ve worked with and their approach to managing and growing the team reflected these values.

They wanted to hire smart people able to solve their own problems and not teach everyone to do things automatically the same way. Growing talent internally was also prioritised; bringing people in at junior levels and having them progress within the business helped with both the talent and the economic model.

Sarah: How were you supported when you became a manager for the first time?

Helen: In my first experiences, I don’t think I had much support, and was growing my team one at a time. At Urban Jungle, I had five functions which we got off the ground and grew in a slightly staggered way. Most of the support and help I got here was through 1-1s, peer discussions and coaching.

Sarah: What was the most challenging aspect of managing for you initially?

Helen: Gauging skill sets in areas I didn’t know particularly well, especially at Urban Jungle where we were building teams from scratch and quickly was hard. It’s a challenge to set parameters and know where and how to help, and what feedback to give, when you’re also figuring out where the parameters should be!

Having a peer group has always been really helpful for me. We brought in regular peer group discussions across the business at Urban Jungle, for example for newly promoted managers, to discuss different aspects of management to try to encourage more peer coaching.

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It’s a challenge to set parameters and know where and how to help, and what feedback to give, when you’re also figuring out where the parameters should be!

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Sarah: Interesting, how would you then go about measuring performance within your team?

Helen: It depends on how you define performance. I tend to frame it in two buckets  - what you do, and how you do it. To be really clear about performance, you need to set clear objectives to review against, including business (for me the ‘what’) and personal development (the ‘how’) areas.

I’ve worked in two places where progression was closely tied to performance, and where there were quarterly reviews, the full year and half year being more detailed and aligned to the promotion window. When we were starting from scratch at Urban Jungle I realised people often hold different opinions in their heads on what performance and competencies look like  - it was quite messy to start with and over time we started developing our own internal framework to help explain it to each other and the team. We wanted to balance clarity of expectation without over-specifying.

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I tend to frame performance in two buckets  - what you do, and how you do it.

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Sarah: Do you prefer WFH, in-office or hybrid working?

Helen: I love this question because there's no one answer to it. It's so specific to the context of the business and what you're trying to do.

I have worked in a 100% in-person culture which was very useful for quick answers and collaborating, but it can lose some of the feeling of the employee being in control of what they’re doing and how they do it (depending on how it's done). I've also worked for managers in different countries and different timezones where the level of delegation and the relationship is very different. Some were almost more like sponsors.

When I was at Urban Jungle we were early stage as a business and had a young team - for us to collectively learn as a business, be able to make fast decisions, and help the team develop fast, it made most sense to be an in-office culture. There were some trade offs though, as not everyone wants to do that so it can make it harder to hire particularly mid- and senior-level people who we found often wanted a bit more autonomy and freedom.

At the end of the day, I think that whatever you choose you need to be intentional about it. Pretending to be one when you're the other does not work. For me, saying that you’re one and you're kind of somewhere in the middle is the hardest because then you lose the best of either option.

It can also change over time - the business changes, the context changes, you get bigger, you have teams in different places, so what I’ve learnt is to be intentional.

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Whatever you choose you need to be intentional about it. Pretending to be one when you're the other does not work. For me, saying that you’re one and you're kind of somewhere in the middle is the hardest because then you lose the best of either option.

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Sarah: How do you feel this impacts setting company culture?

Helen: One thing I noticed when I was at Urban Jungle, particularly when we were hiring people remotely in 2020/21 and often into their first graduate role, is that being in-person helped people to understand our ways of working faster. Things like although we might come to work very dressed down and talk to each other very freely, there's still a certain level of understood shared behaviour or etiquette that we felt was professional for the workplace.

It’s easy, particularly in startups, and where you might not have seen any other working environment, to not align on this with remote teams. I think the best remote teams make a point of defining this as well, but they do it differently, for example with more documentation.

Despite wanting to be in-person, we did find some benefits to being remote during COVID that helped illustrate our culture. Transparency is a core value at Urban Jungle, and one of my favourite examples is that we made some of our senior team meetings open to everyone so you could sit in and listen to how the leadership team were talking about things, in my memory often around lunchtimes so people could eat and listen. The team had the opportunity to hear what we were discussing and how decisions were made with the context behind them in real-time. They also listened to us debating and disagreeing with each other - calling each other out or challenging each other on something. We wouldn't discuss anything sensitive or people-related but for business decisions that we were going to be transparent about anyway, we opened up our decision-making process to the team.

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Sarah: I like this idea because then you can also understand the thought process and not just the outcome of the conversation. Let’s move on to talking about burnout or stress. How do you manage burnout?

Helen: I have definitely felt burned out at least once, possibly twice, and depending on how you define it, potentially three times.

Some burnout, I think, is a response to there being physically too much to do. I think more recent definitions focus on mental health. You can be physically feeling okay but mentally tired or stressed. Sometimes it's stressful because the work itself is stressful for you and sometimes it's stressful because there is a misalignment between where you are and where you want to or think you should be.

In my experience, a job where I was underutilized quite a lot was stressful for me because I felt like I wasn't progressing fast enough and I wasn't learning. In another situation I felt physically tired as I’d worked an unsustainably large amount of hours and couldn’t continue doing so. The third instance was a bit of a combination of both.

Once, I needed a change of scenery to fix it. A completely new role, a new challenge a different timetable.

The other times, I did make changes but internally on my mindset. I was lucky enough to get a coach and create the mental space to understand that it didn’t have to be that way and that you can make a choice to change perspective. You always have more options than you think.

The other thing that helped me manage stress before it got to creating exhaustion was thinking of the difference between stress and strain as strain being the weight of the stuff and stress your own reaction to that strain. One person will find the same things differently stressful to someone else. It's not the environment necessarily, it's the combination of you and the environment.

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Thinking of the difference between stress and strain as strain being the weight of the stuff and stress your own reaction to that strain. One person will find the same things differently stressful to someone else. It's not the environment necessarily, it's the combination of you and the environment.

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Sarah: In the next 12 months, what manager or leadership-related goals do you want to achieve?

Helen: I don't manage people directly anymore but I work with people on their management & leadership approaches. I would love to hear a broader dialogue around different types of leadership. Leaders are everywhere. You don't have to be in a senior position to demonstrate leadership.

I’d also love to see less command and control and more varied modes of leadership, for example embodied leadership. I’ve observed, in business in particular, financial performance a key target and often the primary focus so performance-based and pace-setting leadership to attain that goal is often prioritised. A broader discussion of what success looks like across the ecosystem, and what leadership looks like to support that would put the world in a much better place. So I'm trying to think about how I can help broaden that conversation.

Sarah: This is an inspirational goal, I’m on board. Okay, final question. What animal would you compare your management style to?

Helen: I feel like I'm some kind of cartoon character. I think I might be like Piglet from Winnie the Pooh. In my head he’s got some ideas, he’ll help you do achieve your goals, knows that you’ve got your own thing going on, he’s sort of a voice of reason even if he sometimes worries too much!

Sarah: That’s a great answer, thanks very much for sharing so openly with me!