The perks everyone envied at Google were never really perks.
Not long ago, the word “talent” was saved for NBA players and movie stars.
Employees were just employees, and the department that handled them was called payroll or personnel. When someone walked out the door, the plan was to find another warm body and keep the line moving.
That shift in language says a lot about how much has changed. People are now the competitive edge, and HR has moved from processing paperwork to shaping strategy.
What hasn’t caught up is how many organizations go about it. Some chase whatever the biggest companies are doing. Others write a new policy every time one person steps out of line.
Meg Crosby and Howard Cleveland have watched both mistakes play out for decades, and their fix is a lot simpler than most leaders expect.
(00:00) The HR Leader and the Labor Lawyer Who Teamed Up
Meg Crosby and Howard Cleveland are founding principals of PeopleCap Advisors, a consulting practice built on one idea. When you empower leaders, you elevate the entire organization around them.
Meg has spent roughly 30 years in HR, leading progressive, people-centered work on both coasts, including time at Google in its early years. She watched the function grow from personnel files into a true strategic partner.
Howard took a different road. He studied psychology, went to law school to become a jury consultant, and built a career in employment and labor law helping companies protect themselves. Over time he realized the real opportunity wasn’t perfect documentation. It was developing people. That move from documentation to development led him to Meg, and together they wrote Running the Gauntlet: Proven Strategies for High Growth Leaders.
(06:30) Free Snacks Were Never About the Snacks
Early Google became famous for its perks. From the outside, it looked like a company spoiling its people.
Meg was there, and every one of those perks had a job to do.
Food around the clock. Software engineers would code for hours and forget to eat, so the food came to them.
On-site massages. Carpal tunnel is a real threat to people who type all day, and keeping engineers healthy kept them working.
A monthly haircut truck. Less time leaving campus for errands meant more time on the work.
A Wi-Fi shuttle from San Francisco. Engineers wanted to live in the city and work in Mountain View. The shuttle turned a long commute into two extra hours of productivity a day.
Each one was built to attract, keep, and support the specific talent the company needed most. The lesson isn’t to copy the perks. It’s to know exactly who you’re trying to keep and what they actually need.
(11:00) Would You Rather Have 30 Hours or 60?
PeopleCap was brought in to help a company in the Northeast with a department everyone saw as a bottleneck. The team wasn’t moving fast enough, and nobody could figure out why.
So Meg and Howard started asking employees a simple question. Why do you work here?
The most common answer was that it’s close to home.
If the only thing tying someone to a job is the commute, what happens when a company down the road offers a few more dollars an hour?
They’re gone.
Now picture a $40,000-a-year employee. You pay the same whether they give you 30 hours of real effort or 60. So what earns you the extra 30?
It isn’t a policy or a pay bump. It’s a mission, values, and a culture people actually want to show up for, the kind that makes them spend their discretionary energy solving your problems.
(14:30) Google and the Army Walk Into a Culture Audit
One question Meg and Howard hear all the time is whether a company has the “right” culture. The answer usually surprises people. There isn’t one.
Look at Google. Creative and flexible, built around engineers who need room to think.
Now look at the Army. Structured and disciplined, built around a clear chain of command.
Then imagine swapping them. Both organizations are extremely effective at what they do, and both would struggle with the other’s culture.
What makes a culture work is whether it helps you reach your goals and whether it actually matches your values. Clarity about your why matters far more than keeping pace with a competitor.
Howard also warns against trying to rule your way there. “You can police and policy behavior, but you can only get the behavior that you are policing,” he explains. When people feel policed, you get the bare minimum and not much else.
(19:00) Stop Bringing a Missile to a Mosquito Fight
Small organizations have a habit of borrowing their policies from giant ones. Meg sees it constantly with CEOs running teams under 100 people, and she has a line ready for them. “You don’t need that policy. That’s a missile to kill a mosquito.”
Smaller teams have an advantage they often forget about. They can treat people as individuals. A nonprofit Meg works with shows what that looks like:
They close the office between Christmas and New Year’s. Nobody works, so nobody feels guilty traveling to see family.
They kept a strong leader who had to relocate. The team rarely hires remote, but she’d been there three years, was well loved, and was worth keeping. Now she flies in for a few days each month.
They’re comfortable with one-off decisions. People’s circumstances differ, and it’s okay for the response to differ too.
None of that requires a big budget. It requires a willingness to be flexible.
(27:00) The 10 Minutes That Look Like Wasted Time
Remote work has changed lives for the better. It’s also quietly changed how teams build trust.
In an office, trust builds in the hallway. Someone asks about your weekend, you hear about their trip to New Hampshire, and you slowly start to know each other. On a remote team, there are 30 minutes on the clock, so everyone jumps straight to the agenda.
Howard points out that this can turn leadership transactional fast. A team with no real connection is also much easier for another remote employer to pick off.
Meg’s fix sounds almost too simple. Give the first 10 minutes of a team call to nothing at all. The leader doesn’t even need to be in the room. Just let people talk.
One client’s first reaction was that they didn’t have 10 minutes to spare. The relationships those minutes built and kept say otherwise.
What Are You Willing to Tolerate?
Elevating people isn’t complicated. It isn’t easy either.
Most of any team is doing just fine. Still, a surprising amount of leadership energy goes to the handful who aren’t, and sometimes entire policies get rewritten around them while hundreds of good employees pay the price.
Meg and Howard also get into why the right HR leader for your company depends on where you are in your growth, why AI workshops keep uncovering people problems instead of process problems, and a Nick Saban analogy about a blinking Christmas light that explains how one tolerated behavior can shape an entire culture. Plus, the only three ways to elevate talent, including the one most leaders avoid.
Connect with Meg Crosby and Howard Cleveland: PeopleCap Advisors | Running the Gauntlet on Amazon | LinkedIn: Meg Crosby | Howard Cleveland
Connect with Traci here: https://linktr.ee/HRTraci