“Founders are promoting their very best people into the hardest roles,” says Michelle Cheng, Talent Director at London-based, early-stage VC, Notion Capital. “So people are stepping into challenging situations. One hundred percent of the time it’s not a job they’ve done before.”
And here’s the problem. There’s a big difference between a young company with a few dozen employees and a rapidly scaling business with $100 million plus in revenues and hundreds of people on the payroll. As the company expands, more people come on board and new levels of management are created. In some cases, management talent is brought in from the outside but typically there will also be internal promotions. Almost overnight, someone with relatively little experience or support might be in charge of an expanded department with a newly established hierarchy of management and staff.
It can feel like being thrown in at the deep end. “Founders are not investing in talent and skills development,” Cheng adds. “There is no reason to invest in L&D when you’re not at scale.”
The danger is, however, that when long-standing members of staff assume complex and often difficult leadership roles, they won’t be equipped to deal with the pressures. The result – even in the case,as Cheng stresses, of exceptional people – can be poor performance and burnout.
So what can be done? Well, Notion Capital has launched its own training and development program aimed at managers working for its portfolio companies. Dubbed Upstarts, the aim is to provide key people with the personal, managerial and technical business skills required to play a pivotal role in the growth stories of their companies. But what does that mean in practice? What skills are actually required and how are they taught? I spoke to Cheng and Notion Operating Partner, Stephen Pollard to find out more.
The Talent Development problem
There is a bigger context here. According to a report published in 2024 by HMRC (His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs), U.K. scaleups face similar difficulties to large corporations in terms of recruiting and retaining key staff, including managers. However, fast-growing companies aren’t always in a position to competitive rewards and incentive packages. Filling vacancies is an ongoing challenge.
It makes sense, therefore, to nurture and retain valued staff. “It’s important to get people to stay.Giving people a positive work experience is a good way to do that,” says Cheng.
That’s why staff development is potentially crucial in enabling fast-growth companies to remain competitive.. Stephen Pollard recalls his pre-VC life working for startup MessageLabs. “At MessageLabs, we grew from zero to 150 million in eight years,” he says. “I was in the middle of that. The pace of change is profound. I didn’t have the support.”
In that respect, the Upstarts program is at least partly about providing up-and-coming individuals with the backup they need and that their employers aren’t necessarily in a position to provide.
It works like this. Notion asks the founders of its portfolio companies to nominate team members – typically, they’re best people – to take part in the program. They will then find themselves in a cohort with individuals from other portfolio companies, all of them experiencing the challenges of working in a rapidly growing environment.
But does this approach take too broad a brush to the problem? Is it possible to address the needs of a disparate group of people in a meaningful way?
Common Challenges
Cheng says that while every startup faces its own challenges, there is a commonality of experience. “There are certain breakpoints and pivot points that are common. If, say, you go from a team of 30 to 50, you put in a fresh management layer and some of those experiences are consistent,” she says.
However, there is a lot of ground to cover. To work successfully, individuals need a combination of personal abilities – applied through the prism of their own personalities – and also the life and technical skills required to navigate unfamiliar situations.
“We collected information on what people wanted to cover. It did overarch across leadership, management , personal efficacy and into operating and technical issues,” says Cheng.
For instance, participants may be grappling for the first time with questions about being both an effective manager and a leader. “Management and leadership are two different things,” says Pollard. “The are also challenges of managing managers.”
The technical operational aspects of the program include elements such as preparing for exits and the challenges of scaling. All this is brought together by a combination of peer coaching, supplied by VC Talent Lab and talks by experienced business people. The coaches include Steven Cakebread of Salesforce and Fiona Tee of Currency Cloud.
This is just one program by one VC but there is a wider point. Scaling a company is difficult and complex, not just for founders but also management teams. Experienced managers can be bought in but the competition for talent is huge. It makes sense therefore, so provide as much support as possible for team members when they take on new roles or when their work becomes more complex. That’s a challenge for all startups.
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