331 - Scaling Success: The Role of Delegation and Psychological Safety in Leadership with Atlas'Jim McCoy

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show, and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started. Jim McCoy, welcome to Listening with Leaders. You are the CEO of a company called Atlas, which is founded Atlas hxm.com. So let's start off with your backstory. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Howdy.

Great.

Thanks.

Yeah. Thanks so much, Doug. I'm thrilled to be here. I'll tell you a little bit about me. I'll try and encapsulate it in just a short brief, but I started my career in financial services right out of college. Somehow found myself in the world of HR services by way of EDS. I led sales for some of our clients in the New England area. And then that, that transformed into a really fun career in HR services is global recruitment outsourcing. So I built global businesses for ManpowerGroup, for instance, and ultimately was found by Atlas that was in the process of some transformation and ready for scale. And they were looking for someone like me who had a similar industry background, but was ready to take a company on the next phase of its growth journey. Really exciting opportunity for me to take this role. And that was back in December '23, and we've just been on a tear ever since.

Oh, wow. So it's been just a couple of years.

That's right.

So tell us a little bit about the company. What's it do?

Yeah, Atlas is what's called an employer of record. And so we basically employ people in jurisdictions where our clients don't have legal entities to do so themselves. Oh, so Atlas is the largest player in this space by total number of entities. So we have active entities that we manage in 160 countries and territories. Um, currently have people employed in most of them. We support visas for individuals and families that need to move for their work. So we host visas in 85 countries. And basically we are, we're like the outsourced HR for your employee diaspora. Uh, so it's a really fun business.

Give me an example, a use example of what a client would do with you.

Yeah. So historically a lot of the industry grew up around professional services and NGOs that were looking to deploy people in countries for grant-funded projects. That's obviously changed quite a bit in the last few months.

Yes.

But a lot of our clients are— the balance of our clients really have two critical use cases. One is I can't find the technology talent or the leadership talent or the management talent that I need in my home country. And therefore I need to look for other countries. So I'm recruiting all around the world for the very best people to do the jobs I have. So it's a talent scarcity need on the one hand. We also have a lot of consumer products companies that like to have advanced teams. So where they might sell through distributors, they often want their own marketers and product people sitting in regions so that they can customize their for, say, the European market or the Asian market. And so that's another big use case that we have. And then the last kind of really interesting use case we have is I want to grow, I want to expand into a new market, I want to send out an advanced team, maybe a general manager, a group of— hire a group of salespeople locally. But before I set up an entity, I want to get the operation going first. And then maybe eventually I will set up my own entity, or in often cases what we're finding is our clients don't want to manage the complexity of having a lot of legal entities, and they're just as happy to keep their employees working for Atlas because we just feel like an extension of themselves.

That's really interesting. Now, I'm curious. So, Atlas, what Atlas does is you've got a presence in all these different jurisdictions. You're a legal entity there. And so, you're basically the technical employer of these people, but basically, it's a pass-through to the client, say, here in North America or the United States. That do that and you just, you're just providing the legal mechanism for them to hire. But I presume the payroll comes through you and all that stuff.

That's right.

So it's all, all, everything goes through you, but if they really have problems, you just forward them on to HR people at the headquarters client.

And it's Doug, you said it beautifully. And for your US listeners, they would probably most liken us to a PEO if they've used a PEO firm. So we would be like a global PEO. It's a legal concept, really unique to the United States. And so we've basically been able to mimic that in the rest of the world.

Wow. And you've been doing this since— you've been with Atlas since 2023, but obviously bring a ton of experience to the table. I'm curious, what is it that gets you excited and gets you up in the morning to go to work? You seem like really, really passionate about what you do.

I do. I love what I do. So I'll tell you, it's finding economic opportunity for people in places where they might not have otherwise had access to. That is really what drives me personally. So Doug, up until this point in my career, I was largely in the recruiting space. And I, for a presentation I did just last week, I added up of all of the years of the 20+ years that I worked in the HR services space, how many people have my team put to work? It's over 2 million people at this point, my teams. And, and so Atlas is just a very natural extension of that. While we don't do the recruiting ourselves, our clients do that. We create the structure so that they can employ people all over the world. So nothing makes me happier than say an IT developer who's sitting in a market, they never would've had access to jobs at some of our clients without access, without Atlas being in the middle. And that's what really excites me. And the other thing about it too is that it's our job is global problem solving all the time. So we have to be aware of what's happening in the macro environment as the last 5 days or so, 6 days or so has been quite interesting and active. The, so you have to have a really good lens on that. You have to have a good understanding of what's happening at a local level from a regulatory perspective and a risk management perspective. Perspective. And then you also have to have that human angle of like, how do you make sure that person who is several layers of abstraction from their home company— so they're an employee of Atlas, but they're working for another company, they're in a country that's outside the home market of their country, so you've got two levels of abstraction there, right? And then sometimes they're on a visa, so they're not even a— they're not even a national or a citizen of the country that they're working in. And what are the things that we can do to make them feel as connected and as supported as possible. So that's the third aspect of our job that's super fun.

Wow. I'm just sitting here as a lawyer and my head's buzzing thinking about the complexity that you have to deal with. When I think about all the jurisdictions around the world, not only national jurisdictions, but regional jurisdictions, and I just think about the, all the employment considerations here in the United States. And like I live here in Central California and California just has incredible complexity in employer-employee relations. And you're dealing with that all over the world.

We are. And you'll totally appreciate this, Doug. So I came in, when I came into the organization, I thought generally the makeup of the team would be a lot of people who are specialists in payroll and benefits. And in fact, almost between 15% and 20% of our staff are attorneys.

I believe it.

In their home countries. And there, I like to say that our compliance and risk team is like the beating heart of our organization, because if we don't— our clients come to us for compliance. They want to make sure that they're paying someone appropriately, that they're withholding the right taxes, that they're not creating any downstream problems for that employee or for their organizations. And so it's really important for us to have that depth of legal knowledge globally resident within our organization so that we can take a look at all the factors that could contribute to risk for an employer or an employer, but it's a lot, it's a lot of fun. And fortunately, we just have this amazing team. They sit, our compliance team sits in 15 different countries. Many of them are great regional specialists. And, but you're even the United States, like state by state, we have to have experts in the different states. California being an outlier and often having a different regulatory position than some other states is a special case too, even within the US.

That's right. And you can't ignore California because it's 40% of the US GDP. So it's a big economic driver. So as CEO, describe for me a little bit about the day-to-day things that you do. Sure.

So I try to divide up my day between looking at, of course, I have the responsibility of very exquisite communications with our investors. So we have a couple of PE firms that are our primary investors and we have a terrific relationship and I've been very fortunate in that particular— with the investors that we have involved. So that's one layer of my role. The second thing is I've been going through a pretty large transformation of the organization. So a lot of what I'm doing right now is trying to figure out with the team, what does our ongoing culture look like? Because I believe that you don't declare a culture, a culture kind of evolves around how you behave. And so for me, it's been really important that we have— we're bringing on people who appreciate and are as enthusiastic about the things I described, like understanding what's happening globally in workforce and how do we support our clients best and our worksite employees best and also each other best? Because oftentimes there's not one single person who knows every answer to or has access to every single answer for a particular client challenge or opportunity, but rather you need 3 or 4 people to weigh in with legal opinion, a risk opinion, maybe a health and safety opinion around what is the best way to support a client opportunity. So that's really— so that's an element of my day. I love to be with customers. So I love to spend time with my sales team, with our marketing team, understanding what is the— what are they talking about now? This has been quite dynamic in the past few months for us. So that's been very important to me. And then the other thing is I spend quite a bit of my day thinking about the talent that we have in place. Are they the right people? Do we have them assigned to the right roles? What are the things that we're holding them accountable? But I view accountability as going both ways. What are we holding you accountable to, but what are the things where we're accountable to you to make sure that you have all the tools you need to deliver.

Exactly.

So that's another big piece of my day.

Which sounds like it's a pretty long day.

It's a lot. It's, this is the thing with our business. We work 24 hours because we support all the time zones and all the weekends. Our clients in the Middle East, they start on Sundays. And so there's really Saturday is the only kind of communal day that we have off, but depending where you sit in the world, that could be a very short window. On the other hand, because we have such a competent team, it's not like I have to be on call 24 hours, but, but we have a great round-the-clock view of how we've support people.

So it sounds like you have this vast dispersed organization around the world. Do you ever get everybody together in the same room to talk about stuff and just meet each other?

We, we have not, and we're coming fairly close to that, at least folks that are client-facing, so our client services and our sales teams together in one place. Our headquarters is in Chicago, and so we'll get everyone to Chicago and hopefully they'll get a Cubs game in for those who haven't been there. I have a story about the Cubs later, personal story, but, but we'll do that, but it is quite difficult and it's not even an issue of cost because it could be quite costly to fly people in from 30 different countries to one particular location. Often it's an issue of visas. It's even hard to get visas, business visas for some of the team members. So that's just based on the country that they're working in. So that is one of our challenges of getting people. What I would say though, is our team does a really nice job of managing virtually, and I'm a fan of that. So as I watch companies go into back to office, mode. I question that because for at least 15, 16 years prior to my experience here at Atlas, I've managed totally virtual organizations with 3,000 individuals working all over the world, but still a single cohesive culture. So I think there are plenty of tools that would enable you to have that. We find that when we have town halls, our participation is exceptional. We'll get 80% of our team on a town hall, no problem. And so I think there are ways to do it. But to your point, it's, it's to the question of how How do we get everybody in the same room? Sadly, no. But we try and do it from a virtual perspective as much as possible.

I, I agree with you. I think that all these CEOs that are talking about the big high-level people that are in the headlines all the time that think it's important to return to work, I see that as total CEO ego. Has nothing, has nothing to do with productivity, worker productivity, or anything else. You can, if you got the right people, they'll do their job. And if they're happier being in Bozeman, Montana, why the heck do you force them to go? To save Chicago. It makes no sense. Exactly.

And the other thing is just even from a labor cost perspective, if you ask any virtual employee, they're willing to sacrifice salary for the convenience because it's not only convenience of working from home, it's physically cheaper. It's— I don't have to—

Absolutely.

My wardrobe expenses are completely different. And the reality is in our case, most of our clients are operating virtually too. They're either, they've either, they don't have the facilities to go into, or they've lived around the world. For a company that enables remote work, it would be really hard for me to espouse a back-to-office policy. We did have a good April Fool's joke for our team in Chicago and told them they were welcome to bring their pets and dependent adults. But, but that, that was short, short-lived, but we did have a few people that took it seriously. I think everyone's on edge looking at other companies going back to work and what would that mean for me? So we had to retract that, what we thought was a harmless joke, really quickly.

Wow. So I'm curious, Tim or Jim, what is it about you specifically that you bring to the table that has made you and all the businesses you touch successful?

I think it is the core of your podcast and your work, Doug. It's that I love to listen. I am a lifelong learner in our business. The, we have to be abreast all the time of what is changing around the world. And I love that. I find that interesting and fun. And I'm a student of languages, so I speak 4 other languages. So from a global perspective, that has been exceptionally helpful. And it— from the way I view it, among other things that I bring to the equation, I think the key thing is that I've always had a curiosity about figuring out how people work. And if you sit in different countries and maybe speak a different language, how that might impact your view of the world and how you interact with people. And I view myself as a bridge builder, so I can teach my clients in— or I'm sorry, teach my colleagues in Asia how an American client might want to buy but need services delivered in Asia and help them understand the nuances of working in different markets. And That started really early in my career. I started traveling into Latin America and I asked questions and I talked to everyone. So my very first conversation in every country was with a taxi driver and I would ask them, "¿Qué está pasando?" What's happening? And "¿Qué está pasando?" What's going on? And "¿Cómo es la ciudad?" How's the city? And "¿Ha cambiado la ciudad?" Has the city changed? And figuring out ways to turn that into some sort of learning to help me either be a better provider of service to a client or have a better understanding that I could bring back to the home base to talk about how we can adapt to a market.

Where did this come from?

I don't know.

It's pretty unusual. I have to say, I've interviewed over 330 CEOs in this podcast and I rarely hear what you're talking about. I'm just curious, where did this come from?

I grew up in Iowa. I had an amazing— I have an amazing family and I'm the oldest of 5 kids. And I grew up in a time where actually, let me back up. Even before Iowa, we lived in Detroit. And so I grew up at a time where any, at any given point in, in Michigan, 25% of our neighbors would be laid off because they were in the auto industry. And then moving to Iowa was the same thing, was the farm implements industry. Now my father worked in consumer products, so he was always gainfully employed, but he really taught us the value of kind of understanding what's happening to people around you and being very sensitive to that. And I remember this story that he told me where it was like a Cub Scout cake auction. And he was like, it was a fundraiser and he was trying to bid up the value of this cake because it was a fundraiser for the Cub Scout troop. And then he realized, he said, I had to pull back because I realized that 25% of the people, the parents out in the group were unemployed. And here I was so careless about the fact that their economic situation was not in a place where they should be paying $50 for a cake in the '70s. And I, that always stuck with me. It was like, if you have a sensitivity to what's happening to the people around you, you are going to give them a different impression of you, number one. And number two, you're much, you'll be in a much better position to understand their need and how you might be able to help them.

That is the best summary I've heard in a long time. People, it's so hard for people to understand. I call, I teach a skill book called Affect Labeling, which is emotional validation. And it— you literally learn how to listen to other people into existence. What you were just describing is a situation where people want to feel heard and they want to feel validated. They don't want you to fix their problems. They don't need, they don't need their problem solved. They just need to be heard. And if you can take the time to learn how to do that, you build instant trust, instant loyalty, And on your teams, you've got collaboration and you end conflict forever. It's amazing. And sounds to me like you stumbled onto the massive secret, maybe not emotional validation, but the whole idea. It's more important for me to listen to you and find out where you're at than it is for me to project my ego into the room and show everybody how great I am. Yeah. Where a lot of people are.

It's interesting that you say that because I, my approach with my team is I will give you a window of time if you want to come into a conversation. If you want to gripe, that's okay. I'm okay to listen. I'm not going to try and solve the problem unless you don't solve the problem, or if you ask me specifically to solve the problem. But if you ask me specifically to solve the problem, then you can't complain about what I decide. And so that's my rule. I would rather have a team have a healthy debate about what the outcome of something should be. And it goes back to that example, which is my dad didn't need to solve the problem for this guy. He was never, he wasn't going to be able to get him a job, but on the other hand, he could be sensitive to the needs of the individual. And, and that was his teaching to me was just understand where people are coming from and what you might do as a good human to just try and be sensitive to what they have. And so I do listen for that. But you also, as a leader, I think you do have to just put in some parameters, which is if you can't solve it, then, you know, then you've, you've given it over to me and whatever I decide, you can't complain.

And well, I, and that's right. And that gets down to making a conscious choice about your, what mode of decision-making you're gonna be in. And there are 5, 5 modes of leadership decision-making. And you're right. I teach leaders, I say, look, if somebody has a problem, you tell them, never bring a problem to me without a solution. I may not agree with your solution, but I want you to think this through and figure out what you think needs to be done. And if it's not something that you can implement or you're not sure about it, we'll talk.

Yeah.

We'll bring it to the group, but don't bring me a problem unless you've thought about how it could be solved. Or maybe you recognize that you can't solve it and let— pull together the group of people who can solve it, or at least give you input on it.

I think as you said that, I might not agree with your solution. I think that sometimes you have to give people the leeway to try something that you might not be totally in agreement with. Absolutely. And then you can not rub their nose in it if it doesn't work.

That's right. You got to let them make mistakes.

If you want people to be on your team, be with you, feel like they're a part of moving an organization, you have to give them some psychological safety to make a mistake once in a while.

That's right.

And it doesn't mean you don't study it and say, okay, what could we have done differently? All right. Good to know. But, but I like cultures where they actually celebrate mistakes or sometimes they become happy accidents and wow, I never thought, we didn't think that was going to work, but it did. So let's try it. Or here's how we might be able to apply that particular fail to something else that we think could work.

Absolutely. And, and that, and that goes to the idea of delegating decision-making as far down the organization as you possibly can and letting people make their own decisions and learn from their errors and celebrate their successes instead of micromanaging, which is—

and that's how you scale a company too.

That's right.

That's how you scale a company. So you— I've seen leadership teams where the leaders had not been able to make decisions and that muscle starts to atrophy. And so, if you— the more you can push decision-making down the organization, the less you as a leader become a bottleneck for the group.

But that suggests one other role for somebody higher up in the— like a CEO. And that is you've got to be a coach. There are a lot of people that don't know how to make decisions. And they don't know how to— they really don't know how to make decisions. And that's why they micromanage. It's because they don't know how to do, they don't know how to make decisions and delegate. And so part of the job I think is coaching and teaching people how to do it because it's not a skill.

Doug, you're, for me, I could share, that was something that I had to learn over time. And I suspect that a lot of your listeners, they probably have been told and through the course of their life, you get to the decision, you get to the right answer a lot faster than everybody else. But you sometimes need to sit back and let everybody else get to their, that same conclusion in their time. And so learning, especially for your immediate direct reports, learning like how they intake information, how they think about things. So are they more classic extrovert? So act, think, act, or they're an introvert, think, act, think. You have to figure out a way to, to balance it so that you are you're letting people get to the similar conclusions, but in a timeframe that works for them.

That's right. And I think the other thing that this all plays into, which is what you said a moment ago, is the only way you can scale a business is by developing people who can make fundamentally good decisions most of the time.

Yeah.

And not be in there and having to control everything. And I, that's hard for a lot of people.

So, because you have to have a lot of self-restraint.

That's it. There you go.

And you have to turn it, go into listening mode. Now that's something that I learned in my, in the sales parts of my career is there is a direct correlation between how much you talk and how likely you are to lose a deal. So you're on sales calls, the less you talk and the more you get the client to talk, the higher your probability of success is.

Exactly. I work for a sales training organization just as a, for fun. And we, we never talk about sales conversation. We talk, this is a buyer's conversation. And, and so you're having a buyer's conversation and your job is not to talk. Your job is to listen and find out what are their pain points? What do they want? What's their outcome? What are their needs? What's their desire and urgency? And if you just follow the, where they're going and help them clarify what they need, they will make the right decision. And it may be yes or no. It doesn't matter. In the buyer's conversation, we're agnostic to what the decision is. As long as they make a decision. What we don't want is something like, tell you what, I'll call you back next week. That, that is not making a decision. And, but it's exactly the same thing. Listening is key to everything. I got one more question for you, Jim, and then I'll let you go. What is one thing about yourself that we would never know about unless you revealed it to us?

Oh God. Well, I think I revealed my languages.

Uh, your languages.

I like to, I, I love the two truths and a lie game. So my, Two truths and a lie were that I was a congressional intern, I was a professional clown, and I am a salsa dancer officially. And the lie is the congressional intern because I, and I will tell you that some of the best lessons I learned in leadership were being a clown. So I worked in a clown in a children's theater in my hometown of Davenport, Iowa. Wow. With Showtime Pal. And I even use this in when I do training for my sales and account teams around if you can keep the attention of a 6-year-old, you can probably keep the attention or keep a 6-year-old engaged. You can probably keep a client engaged in most types of conversations. And it was be entertaining, give them some knowledge and engage them in the discussion. And so for me, like I learned all sorts of tricks, like how do you make eye contact with people to make sure that they're engaged and they're paying attention to you? And probably don't have to go into singing the children's songs. I don't think your viewership would necessarily appreciate that, but they're happy to— I'm happy if they want to reach out, I'll teach them a couple of songs. But that certainly helped with a 6-year-old. But every once in a while you have to have that sense of like self-humor and levity, and that will help keep you engaged in other conversations. Be willing to be vulnerable with people, and they're much more likely to be vulnerable with you. So I just love that aspect of what I did, being able to be a professional clown and, or being able to be a clown and getting paid for it, hence being being professional and figuring out a way to engage different kinds of people in an audience has just been invaluable for me as my career has gone on. So that's turned into learn a little bit of the language so you can say please and thank you and courtesy words. I mean, when you're working globally, that helps. Like all of those things go into how do you keep people engaged and interested in wanting to talk to you.

Amazing. Thank you so much. This has been an amazing conversation. I could keep talking to you for hours, but Your time is short, as is mine. Thank you so much, Jim, for joining me today.

Really appreciate it. Thank you, Doug. It was great, a great conversation. I really enjoyed getting this time with you.

Absolutely. Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast. Doug Noll, D-O-U-G-N-O-L-L.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts questions and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up, ratings, and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team. Want to know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com, or follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. That's @DouglasEnoll. Thanks for and we'll see you on the next show.