We were recently delighted to host a summit of more than 50 Chief People Officers in collaboration with the MAZI CPO Collective, a community for People leaders.
As part of our work supporting the tech talent ecosystem across Europe, Chloe Dodson, our Portfolio & Talent Lead and Avalon Lee-Bacon, our Director of Talent, were proud to partner up with the collective’s founders, Ross Seychell and Sim Lamb, to look ahead to 2025.
The summit took place at the Dawn HQ in London and featured inspiring conversations and curated workshops. Avalon and Shamillah Bankiya from our investment team, took part in discussions and fireside chats with Kristen Souki, CPO at Dawn portfolio company Fonoa, Todd Latham, CEO at Attest, and Imer Cakiroglu, COO at Stride.
Conversations were framed around key themes and insights from a macro, organisational, and leadership perspective. Our panellists discussed topics including:
- How to align people strategies with broader company goals
- CPOs, CEOs and Investors learnings from 2024
- Performance management and maintaining trust within teams in uncertain times
In the piece below, we share several of the actionable insights we took away from the summit.
1. Sustainable scaling means closely marrying people strategy with strategic business objectives — so CPOs need to focus on collaboration and data-driven decision making
There has been much talk about the era of ‘growth at all costs’ being over, with most companies focused on sustainable scaling. The panellists explored how this means CPOs need to closely align their people strategies with key commercial goals for the business — and have clear data on hand to support any proposals.
The panellists advised People leaders to gather and leverage data through NPS surveys and wider feedback — along with qualitative and quantitative data on the company’s current position in the market — before presenting plans at board meetings. Taking this approach lends weight to strategies, gives greater perspective, and prevents data being siloed.
Discussions also explored how cross-company collaboration is more important than ever for CPOs. The panellists urged People leaders to actively reach out to Product leads and other C-Suite colleagues to help break down people requirements across functions, and ensure they have a complete picture of where talent is needed. Taking this approach can help deliver efficiencies (one new engineer could help two departments complete their projects, for example), and completing this process helps CPOs demonstrate that they have created a product and commercial goals-focused people strategy from the start.
The panellists also agreed that when addressing C-Suite peers or the Board, People leaders are often most successful when they present their goals in business language, and frame their strategy in terms of its impact on revenue, efficiency, and profitability.
“Find the data. Adding data and numbers to your strategy certainly helps with influence for People leaders” — Shamillah Bankiya, Dawn Capital
2. Invest in creating communication cadences, competency matrices and proper talent assessment
Our panellists looked back on what proved successful in 2024. Based on these reflections, they shared key measures they plan to implement or will continue to focus on in 2025:
→ Utilise competency matrices for hiring and talent management processes
Several panellists said they found competency matrices useful both when making hiring decisions and delivering performance assessments last year. They explained that although setting up matrices can take time, it is worth the investment because they offer a simple, bias-free way to assess skills. Management can also be trained to have coaching and development conversations with employees based on matrix outcomes, which can help create a positive cycle of talent development.
→ Establish clear communication cadences for remote and hybrid teams
The panellists said that, in their experience, remote and hybrid companies are finding most impact when they implement a structured communication cadence with teams and follow successful templates.
They explored how repeated communication of key messages to team members is essential, but can easily get lost in a remote/hybrid environment unless the CEO or CPO actively incorporates this into their schedule. They suggested repeating the same thing “more times than you might think necessary”, and establishing a clear communication cadence. To help ensure communication plans being created are targeted and effective, the panellists suggested CPOs ask themselves: What are the messages we are trying to convey? What meetings do we have where we can repeat messaging with the remote team? Where do we have templates for success?
→ Prioritise quality over speed — implement stringent interview processes and share detailed role expectations pre-hiring
The panellists advised establishing “fairly exhaustive” interview processes to get to the right hires — and to trust these processes, even if it means not making a job offer in the final stages.
They discussed how it is especially important for smaller companies to focus on creating a thorough process for new hires with clear metrics, and to create detailed role expectations for any new hires. Doing this helps avoid making the wrong hire, a situation with even greater financial and operational impact in a smaller team.
“The impact of a new hire is so important, not just in the work that they will deliver, but the cultural impact on the business” — Kristen Souki, Fonoa
3. Talent management in a changing market: evolve your offering, be transparent, and define roles clearly
The panellists explored how it is vital to keep employees engaged and motivated if growth is slower than it has been historically — especially following any headcount reductions. They suggested:
→ Clearly focus on development opportunities
The panellists said that CPOs would do well to focus on sharing clear career development opportunities with top talent, alongside transparent structures for variable elements of compensation.
→ Be transparent about operational decisions
In today’s climate, it is important to have a clear, compelling narrative that employees can buy into. To retain trust and create a sense of stability, it is crucial to be transparent about why any difficult decisions are being made, and how conclusions on people-related decisions were reached.
→ Clearly define any post-reduction roles
Panellists reported seeing better long-term engagement at companies that have conveyed clearly defined post-reduction roles and responsibilities. They said the key here is to ensure leaders are communicating a path forward for the business and how people’s day-to-day roles will change. This helps rebuild trust and morale faster, and allows employees to know where they stand.
A huge thank you again to our panellists from everyone on the Dawn team. If you have any questions, or would like to attend a Dawn summit, please contact chloe@dawncapital.com.
