40 Minute Mentor Alan Cairns on hiring in hyper-growth & a guide to culture and performance
What does it really take to build an inclusive, high-performance culture in a fast-growing scaleup?
Today’s 40 Minute Minute Mentor is Alan Cairns, serial Chief People Officer and most recently CPO at GoCardless, the FinTech helping over 100,000 businesses get paid on time through bank payments and open banking.
With 30+ years across operations, people and talent, Alan has led some of the UK’s most recognisable brands through intense growth and change, from Chapter 11 restructuring and mass redundancies to category creation and hyper-growth.
In today’s episode, he shares candid lessons from his journey from mechanical engineering to CPO and COO, and unpacks what high performance actually looks like in practice.
📚Episode Chapters:
➡️ From mechanical engineering to People & Talent [01:20]
➡️ The power of delegating and letting go [05:00]
➡️ What great Founders have in common [10:40]
➡️ CPO skills & building trust in the C-Suite [14:00]
➡️ Moving from CPO to COO [20:00]
➡️ What high performance really means [32:00]
➡️ What makes or breaks culture in hypergrowth [39:00]
🔍 Find out more:
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