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Elaine Mak

Chief People and Performance Officer at Valimail
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Elaine is an accomplished serial C-suite change maker with a 20-year track record in modernizing organizations for sustainable growth. She is the creator of The Mak Effect™, a proven people-first and ethics-driven organizational change methodology that creates high-performance cultures while reducing waste and multiplying workforce productivity. Her transformative work has elevated mission-driven organizations globally across technology, hospitality, education, and healthcare and created best-in-class operations from $1M to $150MM revenue.

Elaine’s thought leadership has earned her accolades including the distinction of being named one of the Top 25 HR innovators by Business Insiders, 2023 Female Thought Leader of the Year by the Stevie Awards, and her organizational change initiative, From Perks to Performance™, won Valimail 37th place on the coveted list of the 2023 Fast Company Best Workplaces for Innovators.

She is a trusted Strategic Partner to CEOs, Executive Teams, and Boards of Directors, and her expertise spans across multiple critical domains, including Organization Design, Executive Leadership Effectiveness, Strategy and Business Operations, Performance, Knowledge and Learning, Brand/Positioning, Communications, HR/Talent, IT, and Compliance.

Achievements:
- Organization Growth Target of $150M
- Scaled Organizations Globally
- Doubled Global Workforce Productivity with Cost Per Employee Decrease by 50%
- Optimized YOY Revenue Growth
- Increased Executive Leadership Effectiveness (i.e. 98% overall satisfaction in Leadership trust/communications)
- Balanced Gender Representation on Executive Leadership Team (i.e. up to 55% Female Identifying)
- Increased Employee Engagement (i.e. Increase in eNPS by 64+ points)
- Improved Brand Experience (i.e. Glassdoor rating up 4.8+, Best Place To Work Awards)

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  • Valimail
    Chief People and Performance Officer
Recent Quotes
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  • Fast Company:
    BY ELAINE MAK4 MINUTE READ
    If you are an executive planning for 2024, your scenario planning likely still includes the dreaded “R” word (recession), or at least predictions of slower growth. Add to that the continued emphasis on profitable growth, now the gold standard for business outcomes, and there is no shortage of proposed change initiatives on the table. Effectively the equivalent of New Year’s resolutions for companies, the real challenge is how to get your company to commit to the change that will yield break-through performance.

    Change is hard. Even companies that “check all of the boxes”—strong product-market fit, solid balance sheet, cash flow positive, and a reliable roadmap—can still struggle to reach their performance potential. In these cases, change is most likely needed at the complicated intersection of people and performance.

    While identifying the need for change is an important moment, far more challenging is delivering on the promise. Before we dismiss change as the “soft stuff,” research has found that “companies that solve the soft stuff are more than twice as likely (from 30% to 79%) to execute a strategy successfully.”

    True movement along the path to lasting change starts with organization-wide commitment to both the process and infrastructure necessary for change to take root and flourish. Challenging? Yes. But I’m here to report that it can be done and that the rewards are worth the discipline.

    A TWO-YEAR TURNAROUND THAT CONTINUES TO PAY DIVIDENDS
    Having worked on many large-scale organizational turnarounds, I am inspired by the transformational change that has taken hold at Valimail. We have seen huge swings in the indicators that matter, all during a period of macroeconomic volatility, including doubling revenue per employee while cutting costs by 20%, stabilizing our retention rate (from 30% to 90%), and increasing our Employee Net Promoter Scores by 63 points (a measure of employee satisfaction). We’ve been able to deliver on the promised change, because we identified and rectified the building blocks for long-term, sustainable performance.

    Here are the fundamental steps we took that can help any organization elevate business performance through systematic change.

    Engineer the motivation
    The precursor to any lasting change is motivation—an often unspoken element that is both uniquely individual and largely emotional. You may have a clear change strategy, but how well is the team aligned behind that strategy? A recent report found that just since last year, emotional commitment to change dropped by 19%. It is important to go into a change initiative with your eyes wide open to the possible roadblocks to execution, including the very real challenge of low motivation.

    For example, one executive may need you to cast the work in their preferred language of finance. A second executive, highly motivated by generating new ideas, may need to be tapped as a co-creator to be motivated. And for a third, a newly promoted executive, inspiration may be rooted in knowing there will be a commitment to leadership development coaching as part of the initiative. It may take unique paths to get to the same starting line, but all executives must be motivated to take on the change in earnest.

    Build and teach the ‘how to‘
    Change is not an announcement, but a difference in the way people conduct business every step of the way. Change happens only when it is built into the organization’s systems and infrastructure in a way that ties back to company purpose (how we behave) and company strategy (our shared outcomes).

    Don’t assume your leaders are prepared to meet the challenge of implementing the needed change. Many leaders may be asked to perform in a new way and shift their mindsets around getting things done. It is important to also take a look at your performance management processes, to ensure you are rewarding your teams on both what they achieve and how they achieve it. While this type of rigor takes effort to maintain, it is worth it to ensure that teams are performing effectively for the long term.

    Communicate for commitment
    The importance of communication is generally well understood. But in the world of transformative change, a special kind of communication is needed. It is not enough to have a quarterly, all-hands meeting that shows financial results, which are historical by definition.

    To keep people committed to change, identify all of the activity metrics that give rise to your target outcomes along the way—the activities that individual employees can see themselves contributing to as part of the larger initiative. At Valimail, we revamped our employee communications program to mirror a “mini MBA.” Here we provide transparency on a range of metrics that show the health of our business on our way to our ultimate goals, from sales pipeline to expense ratios to employee turnover, keeping us committed to a continuous cycle of putting change into practice.

    If you want to build your 2024 plans on a model for lasting change, this is the moment to revise your thinking. It is time to embrace the reality that the “soft stuff” is the hard stuff. Because of this, you must demand the same level of rigor and discipline on the people side of the business as you do on the operational side. There is no substitute for making the case for change, living it, and tracking the results on your way to a new level of performance.

    Elaine Mak is chief people and performance officer at Valimail.

  • Business Insider:
    What their company does: Valimail is a cloud-native platform for validating and authenticating sender identity to avoid phishing, spoofing, and brand hijacking.

    How they've supported their employees during the coronavirus pandemic: As the pandemic unfolded, it was an opportunity to lay a strategic foundation on Valimail's organizational design to serve a dual purpose: Drive talent acquisition and retention and seat people at the table to become an integral voice in making decisions that affect them.

    In 18 months, my team has refreshed Valimail's company mission, values, and strategy to explicitly prioritize and resource people and DEI efforts. My team has also pivoted the leadership model to a cross-functional structure that distributes power, agency, and autonomy of decision-makers across levels.

    I've also led the people team to expand and diversify the leadership team at Valimail to ensure appropriate voices and perspectives have a seat at the table to inform strategic decisions.

    How they've supported their company's diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts during the pandemic: We empowered a DEI committee resourced with an executive sponsor and budget focused on wellness initially to address burnout. Along with other company efforts, we have the foundation to execute a strategic road map on DEI education and development and further cement DEI at the heart of our business and people strategy.

    Lastly, our efforts in people and DEI culminated in an employer-brand makeover that authentically reflects a day-to-day reality where people-first is core to our culture.

  • Fast Company: BY ELAINE MAK3 MINUTE READ
    In a high-growth company, every executive is focused on performance. When companies achieve their financial goals, there is often a well-deserved and collective victory lap to celebrate hard work and a job well done. But more often than not, these victories were made up of something far more chaotic—luck, all-nighters, and even a toxic culture likely played a larger part that we’d like to admit.

    What organizations really need to ask is if their winning performance is repeatable—next quarter, next year, in a strong economy—but also in a weaker one. And for struggling organizations, how well have they addressed what’s dragging their performance down or have they invested in proven strengths?

    I have led transformational change at multiple high-growth companies and set strategies that have impacted thousands of workers. While this was not an easy task, I learned something important through the process. To make the leap from “performance-by-chance” to a true high-performing organization, the focus on performance must be built into organization’s entire DNA. This is non-negotiable. And it’s never too early to start.

    Here are the four steps to build a lasting performance infrastructure.

    1: MAKE PERFORMANCE AN INITIATIVE, NOT JUST AN OUTCOME
    Building a performance organization requires more than the sum of each executive’s efforts. It requires an explicit and cross-functional initiative. Leaders need to look across their entire way of working—from mindset to process to communication to metrics—and determine all of the places where a performance focus can be built into the company infrastructure. Like any other company initiative, a strategy, work plan with milestones, clear roles and responsibilities, and accountability are needed. Without this level of granularity, your organization will have a performance goal, but not a performance culture.

    2: PAVE THE WAY FOR A PERFORMANCE OWNER
    Building company-wide infrastructure for any initiative requires an owner. Companies must tap one executive to build a comprehensive performance culture, one that is fully ingrained in operating principles to achieve performance objectives. In many companies, this responsibility may live in a silo with a CFO or a CHRO, limiting the full impact of a strong performance culture to just one part of the company. The key is to ensure that people and performance are seen through an integrated lens across the entire company. While not every organization has a formal chief performance officer, this person will effectively serve that function. Equally important is taking a hard look at who in your organization may be impeding your performance. For example, as your company matures, be sure your leaders’ strengths are aligned with the current phase of growth. Be prepared to make intentional and bold moves when they are not.

    3: ALIGN THE EXECUTIVE TEAM BEHIND IT
    The entire executive team must be clear on the organization’s core philosophy and values and be committed to doing their part to build a performance organization. More than an informal show of support, I recommend using what I call executive partnership agreements. At a macro level, these agreements define how we make decisions and how we treat people as a company. Tactically speaking, executives enter explicit agreements with each other, covering preferred operating and communication styles, boundaries to respect, how they like to receive feedback, and what kinds of things shut them down. This helps build trust among partners but also provides a framework to efficiently and respectfully handle the inevitable moments of disagreement.

    4. BUILD A CROSS-FUNCTIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE PLAN
    Operationalizing performance cannot simply be announced but must be built into every part of an organization. Examine the entire product, marketing, and employee lifecycles, and enforce how you are treating and engaging people across every stage, from recruiting to exit. Get tactical and identify the clear changes that need to take place. For example, Valimail’s recent transformation included a new company dashboard with early warning signs of performance problems, a performance management system that equally rewards outcomes and how work is done, and the redesign of project teams from hierarchical to strength-based.

    With performance as a program, not just a promise, it is possible to unlock the trapped and hidden financial gains that live across your organization. Your company can even reclaim some of the total addressable market (TAM) you are losing to competitors, enabling a new level of sustainable growth. Most importantly, with the clarity and focus that comes from executive ownership, you can stop leaving performance up to chance.

    Elaine Mak is chief people and performance officer at Valimail.