How to Scale: 3 Tips from VTS’s Jess Scott on How to Go from 200 to 1,000 Employees
Remember when, in movies from the late 1990s, characters who were looking for a job would leaf through a newspaper's classified section to see who was hiring?
Jess Scott has been running HR teams and talent acquisition teams since then. "You would circle in red pen the job they're going to go apply for. That's how you applied!" she says, laughing. "Sending emails, especially with attachments, was still a very new thing."
While the industry has changed a lot since then, especially with the data and technology that allows for more predictive control of the process, the fundamentals of how to build a solid team have remained the same. And Jess has been leaning on those fundamentals as she's helped scale VTS, a leasing and asset management platform for the commercial real estate market, from a couple hundred employees to more than 1,000.
We sat down with Jess, who is currently VP of Talent at VTS, to hear more on how she's done it, as well as how she got her start in the industry and what she's learned along the way.
Finding a "real career" in finding people
Jess was a theater major in college when she realized that she couldn't commit to pursuing a thespian's life.
"I dated an actor very seriously in college who was eight years my senior, and I saw his life, and I was like, 'I can't live that life.' Temping forever, not knowing where your next gig is going to come from, it just seemed too erratic for me," she says. So Jess added a sociology and education major and planned to teach, but that didn't quite work out, either.
"I student-taught and found out that I love kids, but I couldn't do that all day!" she says. She got an internship at a retained search firm and figured she'd be there for a little while—and was surprised when she found it really interesting.
"I didn't think 'finding people' was a real career," she says, smiling. "But I was learning how to build an org chart, how to interact with managing directors, how to woo people, how that whole process works."
Jess later joined a search firm, then went in-house at MTV to help build their first internet team. "I got the startup bug then, and really learned about all the moving parts of being an HR generalist," she says. She worked there while she got her master's in industrial and organizational psychology. From there, she went back and forth between agencies and startups before finding her way to VTS.
Why VTS
Jess first heard of VTS from a friend who suggested she come over and consult for the growing company. But Jess stayed because she really believes in the product and the people.
"What we're building makes so much sense. It's so intuitive," she says. "Real estate isn't going anywhere. It's actually a lot sexier than I thought it was going to be!"
The opportunity to run talent acquisition at VTS checked all of the boxes Jess was looking for in a job:
- An opportunity to make an impact
- The chance to work with founders she believes in ("our founders are really good people with really good moral compasses," she says)
- A formal commitment to DEI and ongoing learning and development
And since joining, her expectations have been met. "I've never worked somewhere where our values are truly who we are," says Jess. "We don't talk about culture fit. I think that's so subjective and kind of antiquated and has all sorts of unconscious bias and all sorts of things that creep in. We think about it as: are you a values fit? Are you going to be a good peer and member of our community? We've created a really wonderful work environment, and as we scale, we've been able to keep the things that make us special top of mind for everyone."
Embracing exponential growth: 3 tips for other managers doing the same
As the VP of Talent at VPS, Jess's days are filled managing her 14-person team, directly overseeing a few executive searches, and planning for the future of the company, from hitting next quarter's head count to building a production-driven environment that more systematically manages talent across the organization.
After seeing her team through the pandemic, says Jess, she's more focused than ever about building "true, deep, authentic relationships" and learning how to support and motivate her teammates, both at work and in their personal lives. "I really care about what I do, and I really care about my team, and I want to see us win," says Jess, who adds that her team now has even better unity and cohesion than they did pre-pandemic.
She's now able to channel that shared motivation and dedication into her biggest professional challenge to date: making sure that her team can meet the talent demands of a fast-growing company.
And she has three tips to share on how to do just that:
- Adopt new tools and techniques. Jess is an intuitive manager at heart, but she knew she'd have to step outside of her comfort zone to build something truly systematic and scalable. And now, "we use data to better predict capacity," says Jess. "We know how many jobs we're going to be able to fill based on past performance, broken down by product, engineering, and business, which take different amounts of time." She invested in cleaning up her team's data and building the infrastructure to better predict and track hiring needs. "We're very metrics-driven now. We had to totally rethink and reimagine how we were doing things, because what had worked wouldn't scale."
- Be vulnerable with your team. "Scaling is hard!" says Jess. "You're flying the plane and building the next version of it at the same time. As a leader, it's important to be vulnerable with your team, as it allows them to ask questions. It's about creating that space to make mistakes or to not know."
- Ask for the help you need. "If you don't know how to do it, it's okay to say, 'I don't know how to do it!' and get resources to help you," she says. "There are things that I just didn't don't know how to do, like how to assess whether assessment tests are going to make our top of funnel better." In that example, Jess got around that by partnering with an outside firm to come in and help lead a six-month process to restructure her team's processes and set them up with the metrics-based approach that's currently driving a 33% increase in capacity.
Looking to join Jess's fast-growing team? Check out VTS's open roles.
How to Deal with Conflict at Work as a Manager
When we talk about fostering a diverse workplace, that means recognizing and celebrating all kinds of diversity: of backgrounds, of experiences, of ideas. A diverse team should include racial and gender diversity, of course, but welcoming diversity means also creating a positive workplace for team members who come from different socioeconomic backgrounds, have different levels of education, have lived in different countries, speak different languages, and have different political views.
All of those differences, when thoughtfully considered and managed, can lead to teams that perform better, have more creative ideas, and learn with and from each other.
But those differences, if not so thoughtfully managed, can lead to conflict, whether seemingly innocuous (like teasing or passive-aggressive comments) or quite serious (like harassment or discriminatory behavior).
As a manager, conflict on your team might look like:
- Team members having a hard time working together because they have different views about the upcoming election
- Employees from different generations struggling to communicate
- A new hire facing retaliation by a peer for identifying toxic team behaviors
- Or any number of other issues
If you're looking for how to resolve conflict at work as a manager, you'll want to focus on these three things:
- Actively creating an environment where your employees feel listened to, understood, and respected
- Identifying what is a difference of opinion and what is unacceptable work behavior and who should solve a given conflict
- Understanding a process for how to mediate conflict at work in coordination with the impacted parties
This guide will walk through each of the above, enabling you to deal with conflict at work as a manager.
Conflict resolution starts with creating an open-minded environment
As a manager, the way you approach conflict will become the way your team approaches conflict. Is it something that you understand to be normal and welcome? Or something you shy away from and pretend doesn't exist?
Here are some managerial decisions that can help encourage an open-minded environment:
- Holding group meetings. Make sure that you bring your team together on a regular basis and encourage honesty in these meetings. Consider asking regular poll questions, like what's been going well each week and what's been going poorly, to facilitate sharing.
- Having an open-door policy. Encourage your employees to bring problems your way by yes, literally having an open door, but also sharing "office hours" on your public calendar so your team knows there is dedicated time they can reach out without bothering you. (That's especially important for all-remote teams.)
- Holding regular 1:1s. There will be things your employees don't feel comfortable sharing in a group setting and won't be proactive enough to bring to you on their own, so setting aside 10 minutes in your regular 1:1 meetings with employees to ask them about any issues is a good idea.
- Investing in training. To give your team the vocabulary needed to better understand and engage in some forms of workplace conflict, consider investing in anti-bias, anti-racism, and conflict resolution training for all employees, not just managers.
- Coming up with rules of engagement for your team. Your company probably has formal policies for communication and conflict resolution, but it's unlikely that your team feels very much ownership of them. Encourage them to take an active role in the kind of environment they'd like to work in by setting aside a team meeting to focus on coming up with principles of how they'd like to be with each other, like "We will seek to understand before we seek to be understood" or "We will discuss political topics, but will not accept viewpoints that call into question anyone's humanity."
You want your employees to be able to show up as their full selves at work and be celebrated for it. That means creating space for employees to learn about their differences and explore them without judgment or hostility, which isn't something that happens automatically. But by investing in the ideas above, you can create a true sense of inclusion where everyone feels comfortable sharing their perspective and working to understand the perspectives of others.
Difference of opinion or unacceptable work behavior? Conflict identification and categorization
It may sound counterintuitive, but some conflict at work is good. For instance, two employees disagreeing about the direction for a new marketing campaign and working through their different points of view might end up creating a much stronger campaign in the end.
And some conflict at work is neutral. For instance, a few teammates having an open-minded discussion about the latest news on Trump's tax returns over lunch might not have any great consequences, positive or negative, on their work.
But if you're here, reading this article and wondering how to mediate conflict at work, you're probably thinking of bad conflict. Conflict that causes divisions in your team, destroys morale, and might have legal ramifications.
Not every disagreement is something you need to get involved in. In fact, you should set the expectation that your employees will solve low-level conflicts on their own; it helps hold them accountable and empowers them. But there are certain conflicts that you must be involved in.
There are three categories of conflict at work from a manager's point of view:
- Issues employees can handle on their own
- Issues where you should intervene to help resolve or meditate
- Issues where you need HR to help resolve or mediate
When a non-trivial issue crops up, ask yourself the following questions to determine whether you can work through it on your own or whether your first stop should be HR:
- Does the issue fall into a protected category (via Title VII of the Civil Rights Act): race, color, national origin, gender, religion, or sexual harassment? (An example would be an employee saying something like, "I feel like [coworker's name] is making me look bad in front of clients because I am a woman.") If so, you'll need to engage your company's HR team to help resolve the conflict, since there are specific legal obligations for how companies need to investigate alleged discriminatory practices.
- Is the issue retaliatory in nature? For example, is an employee concerned that their team lead is giving her worse assignments because she flagged that the team lead was engaging in problematic behavior previously? If so, this is another case for HR.
- Does the issue involve aspects of your employee policies or handbook? For instance, is the problem about one employee repeatedly wearing clothes with political messaging on them to work despite that being against company policy? Again, you'll need to involve HR and make sure that you follow any company-wide disciplinary processes as you investigate.
If the conflict at hand doesn't have to do with a protected category, a retaliatory complaint, or a specific violation of company policy, you're probably in the clear to handle without HR intervention (but do go ahead and consult with them if you'd like).
Understanding the nature of the complaint will help you determine what the right conflict-resolution process to address it might be. Is it an issue around different communication styles? Is it stemming from a gossip problem? Are divergent cultural values at play?
Applying a conflict-resolution process
For a work conflict that can't be worked out by the involved parties themselves and doesn't need to go through a formal HR investigation, consider the following conflict resolution process when determining how to mediate conflict at work:
- Hear from both sides. Ideally, you can hear from both parties together, in the same room, to encourage each to be as honest as possible in conveying what's happening. You want to understand the facts of what's happened. Give each person a chance to speak. Ask them to use statements like "I feel" versus "You made me" to avoid defensiveness. Allow them to share their emotions, but make sure it doesn't veer into personal attacks.
- Have the involved employees define the real issue. Ask each employee to restate the other party's point of view. Have them summarize what's really causing the conflict by asking "what need of [the other person] is not being fulfilled?" For instance, if one team member is frustrated that their coworker took credit for a project they both worked on, perhaps the unfilled need is one of recognition and appreciation. Find areas of agreement by getting both parties to acknowledge the issue at hand and the needs unfulfilled.
- Explore solutions. Once you've defined the problem, ask each employee how they think they could resolve it. Encourage them to provide several alternatives and to open-mindedly explore each one. Try not to offer your own advice and instead encourage your employees to come up with their own solutions. Explore the merits of their ideas and come up with a solution that everyone involved can agree on. Make sure each party knows what they will have to change going forward.
- Agree on next steps. After your working group has decided on a solution, make sure to communicate the takeaways to the rest of the team, if appropriate. Agree to meet with the parties at hand in a few weeks to determine how the solution is working, and get in sync on what you'll do if it's not, including taking disciplinary action.
- Document. Write up a summary of the conflict, the cause, the proposed solution, and the go-forward plan. This will allow you to have a clear record of the issue if it does bloom into a bigger problem.
Conflict will always be a part of work
With a diverse group of people working together, you're bound to run into differences of opinion. That's especially true in a broader political environment that's as emotionally charged as ours is right now.
But as a manager, you have the ability to create a work environment that centers tolerance and encourages open-minded exploration of differences. Knowing when to allow employees to work things out themselves, when to get HR involved, and when (and how) to mediate a conflict on your own is a big part of that. The most important thing to keep in mind, though, is that conflict will happen, and only by exploring it can you grow from it.
