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Malvika Jethmalani's opening move inside a new company is to put the CEO's stated priorities next to whatever goal setting process exists and look for the gap. She cites a Gallup finding that only 49% of employees agree with the statement "I know what is expected of me at work." That is a coin toss, and all of the execution risk is sitting in it.
Who is on this episode
Malvika Jethmalani is the founder of Atvis Group, where she works as a fractional Chief People Officer for venture backed and private equity backed high growth companies. She spent her career inside scaling startups leading people strategy, she has a finance background, and she writes and speaks frequently on performance and the people function. Running several companies at once means she sees more people problems in a quarter than most CHROs see in a year.
What they covered
The diagnostic has three parts, and a founder can run it alone. First, alignment: compare the executive team's priorities with what everyone else is actually working on. Second, the P&L and the burn rate, because a people leader who cannot explain how the company makes money cannot be a strategic partner. Third, employee experience, where she combines engagement and exit data with her own interviews across roughly 10% of the population, asking everyone the same questions.
"I think the best CEOs know that almost every finance decision is a people decision."
Malvika Jethmalani
The framework most worth stealing is her two by two: accountability on one axis, empathy on the other. Low on both is the absent leader, giving no direction and leaving gaps unaddressed. High accountability and low empathy is the enforcer, who ignores the organisational obstacles in the way and often leans on blame or fear. High empathy and low accountability is the nurturer, who supports people and avoids the hard conversation. The target quadrant is the empowering leader: clear expectations, a bar that keeps rising, and follow through delivered with the person's dignity intact. Her reason for the last part is unsentimental. Your high performers are watching how you treat the people who struggle, because one day they will need that support themselves.
She and Imran then get into why founders hire their first people leader too late, and what goes wrong when they finally do. Often they hire the wrong level, or keep the person out of decisions so the role becomes retroactive firefighting. Her least discussed failure mode is a CEO who does not hold their own leaders accountable, which turns the people function into something else entirely.
"When you don't hold your leaders accountable, your HR leader or people leader or department becomes the cleaning up the messes department."
Malvika Jethmalani
The closing stretch covers her case for evolving the Chief People Officer role into Chief People and Performance Officer, since every competitor will have access to the same models and the differentiator becomes how work actually gets done. She points to Moderna, ServiceNow and Zapier as companies that have already combined the people role with AI transformation.
Key insights
- People and culture debt compounds exactly like technical debt, and it is invisible for longer. Without a people leader at the decision making table, decisions get made on vibes.
- Run the alignment test yourself: executive priorities on one side, actual work on the other. Gallup's 49% tells you what to expect before you look.
- Accountability and empathy are not a trade off. Act quickly once it is clear someone will not make it in a role, through reassignment or exit, because dragging it out is unkind to the whole team.
- At 20 people you can run performance on proximity to the work. At 200 you have to run it through other leaders, which means training, toolkits and clarity on what the process is actually for.
- Somewhere between 150 and 200 people is where the hiring bar typically starts to slip, and where an eroding talent bench starts showing up in execution.
- Her number: 5.5%. A Section AI report found only 5.5% of US knowledge workers were actually proficient in AI, which reframes the whole efficiency versus opportunity question.
Watch the full conversation on YouTube, or listen to the audio version on Apple Podcasts.
