Talent
Superhuman CPO: To change how people work, change what you reward
Superhuman’s return-to-office mandate wasn’t working. The required days came and the desks stayed empty. So Kenny Mendes scrapped the mandate and changed what the company rewards instead.
In this episode, Kenny Mendes, Chief People Officer at Superhuman, joins host Joelle Emerson to talk about what happens when a company stops requiring behavior and starts rewarding it: the opt-in office plans that replaced the failed mandate, and the voluntary program that let employees trade guaranteed salary for equity. He also gets into why managers no longer set compensation at Superhuman, what changed when the people team got off the sidelines, and why rewriting company values doesn’t change anything on its own.
Key Takeaways
Kenny Mendes is Chief People Officer at Superhuman, the AI productivity company formed when Grammarly and Coda came together. He was the first recruiting hire at Box, where he built the recruiting function from scratch and helped scale the company from 40 people to more than 1,200 on the way to IPO, and later an early employee at Coda, helping take it from private beta to a product used by tens of thousands of teams.
Incentives have to match the phase of the company. When Coda and Grammarly combined, Kenny found an organization running on big-company frameworks, where people measured themselves by title, level, and headcount. Talented people were leaving because their path to the next level was blocked, and almost nobody was asking what would make the company win.
The equity swap turned employees into owners. Kenny and his CEO offered everyone the chance to voluntarily trade guaranteed salary for equity, over heavy internal skepticism, and had to convince the board to spend more on equity to do it. He says over 40 percent of the company participated, and for weeks the swap was all anyone talked about. One product leader told him her Monday felt different: she looked at the engineers on her initiative and thought, we have to ship this faster.
The conventional wisdom about who wants equity was wrong twice. Colleagues predicted European employees would stay cash-centric; what they actually wanted was education on how equity works, and once they got it, those offices had some of the highest participation rates. More than half the sales team, the group everyone assumes only wants cash and commissions, took the swap too.
The choice is now permanent. New hires pick from high, medium, or low cash against equity in their offer. Every annual raise comes with the option to take the cash or roll some of it into equity. Kenny says a majority of the company has now made some choice to increase its ownership, rather than treating equity as a lottery ticket to be ignored.
Mandates lead with a lack of trust. Superhuman’s inherited two-day office mandate produced frustration and empty desks at the same time, because people were angry and simply didn’t comply. The lesson Kenny took from the behavioral science: tell people you don’t trust them and they act accordingly; treat them like adults and they act like adults.
Opt-in plans filled offices a mandate couldn’t. Employees near a hub chose their own plan, two to five days, each with real incentives attached, from a dedicated desk to a larger wellness stipend. Kenny says over 75 percent of the company opted in, more than a third of them at four or five days, and the offices went from empty to so full he couldn’t find a phone booth.
Managers no longer set compensation. In most companies, the person deciding what you’re paid is the highest-paid person in the room, which quietly forces people toward management titles they don’t want. Superhuman moved comp decisions to the people team, making it normal for a top engineer to out-earn their manager, and retrained people partners to deliver comp conversations the way recruiters pitch the company.
The people team got off the sidelines. Instead of influencing through managers, Kenny’s team talks to employees directly, finds what’s blocking them, and treats a resignation as a conversation rather than paperwork. In several cases that conversation ended with the person deciding to stay.
Retire the interview scorecard obsession. Asked for a people practice most companies should drop, Kenny points at over-rotating on interview scorecards. Interviews produce false positives and false negatives; reference checks from people who worked with a candidate for years are the richer signal, and he often weighs the reference report over the interview roundup.
Chapters
[00:00] Introduction
[01:13] Meet Kenny Mendes
[02:18] Chasing titles instead of growth
[05:17] When comp pushes people out
[07:26] Trading salary for equity
[11:23] A comp choice at every offer and raise
[12:19] The people team gets in the field
[14:44] The mandate nobody followed
[15:24] Mandates signal distrust
[17:16] Opt-in office plans
[21:23] Making the case with research
[22:52] Merging three cultures
[25:49] Do new values change behavior?
[26:34] Building recruiting at Box
[28:07] Moneyball for hiring
[29:04] Running finance, ops, and legal
[30:11] The blurring lines in HR
[31:08] Managers no longer set comp
[34:21] Lightning round
[36:52] Closing thoughts
Show Links
Watch on YouTube
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Apple Podcast
Learn more about Superhuman
Follow Kenny Mendes on LinkedIn
Connect with Joelle Emerson on LinkedIn
Follow Paradigm on LinkedIn
