Focusing on Connectivity

How do you promote mentoring within your team? And what about throughout the entire organization as a whole?

Well, we have a program at Coupa called Rising Stars where we’ve selected 100 of the 3,400 people who are this group of folks who are just either super high-performance or super high-potential. They’re really passionate about the culture in the company. And we meet with them. Now, I’ve just met with them at our conference and meeting with them monthly to talk about initiatives we should be taking on, help us identify where the blind spots are, help me and the management team see where our blind spots may be so we could address them proactively.
And that’s just one example of the kinds of things we’re doing. But we have a host of others: mentor relationships for new people coming into different departments, boot camps when people join and build bonds. So, I mean, I’m all about that. That connectivity has to exist between colleagues and employers and employees, otherwise, what’s an organization at the end of the day? What are we organizing? We’re organizing common will amongst people. And so focusing on connectivity as a primary factor, those common values, I think, is critical. All the other pieces work themselves out. And at the end of the day, if one of your values is to treat your people fairly, compensation will always figure itself out.