Issue #28: Building the right culture in the freight industry

I had the opportunity to take our two new hires, Julie Castelbaum and Caroline Celis (CC), to the FreightWaves Future of Supply Chain conference in Atlanta last week. Multiple people gave me props for making two female hires, as if that was a weird thing at a tech company. And then I realized that we’re still in the logistics industry, where there are unfortunately far fewer women in leadership positions than there should be.

I gave an honest answer, which is that I did that intentionally. It wasn’t the first time I made a conscious decision to try and build a diverse leadership team. Obviously much has been written about diversity, and I’m not going to attempt to add to that discourse here. Instead, I can only speak about my philosophy around building teams. For me, it’s essential to foster a culture of psychological safety. This means an environment where each team member can bring their full selves to work, stand for their views, and feel challenged and excited every day. My perspective on how to get there is by hiring people that think uniquely from me, come from different backgrounds and schools of thought, and that add something new to the Cargado team. 

In our first 6 months of Cargado, we were a team of six dudes and are now slightly more balanced with our two latest hires. Will we ever get to a perfectly balanced team? Unlikely. There’s too many unique roles needed to build a business, and too many arguments to be made about what balanced means to try and say anything is balanced.

But, we’re going to work hard to build a diverse team and we’re committed to consistent intentionality about it.  We know the value of seeking out talent that brings different perspectives and backgrounds to the table, resulting in new ideas that challenge our own ways of thinking. This isn’t something that gets solved through a few hires but instead will consistently be top of mind in our hiring and company culture decisions.

And I don’t just think of diversity in background or identity. The same applies to hiring too many people from one company, something we didn’t do a great job of at Forager. We hired a lot of people who had similar freight backgrounds which meant we were all too informed by our past freight experience and didn’t build something truly novel. 

As a company of 8 (and soon to be 10), it’s something I think about every single day when building a lasting, successful culture at Cargado. If every person who works at Cargado feels like their ideas are heard, they can challenge any hive mind thinking, and that we are consistently introspective about hiring, I’ll feel proud of what we’re creating at Cargado.