Megan H. 

Employer Brand Co-op

In 2018, Mike Gutner joined Toast, first spearheading the Restaurant Success team before moving over to the People & Places team in 2019 as VP of People & Organizational Success, where he led the PSP team, Learning & Development, Employee Relations, Internal Communications, Employee Engagement, People Analytics, and more. In 2024, Mike stepped into the Chief People Officer role, where he now looks across the entirety of Toast to ensure we’re a destination for amazing talent, connecting our people strategies to our business objectives and figuring out how to ensure everyone has the opportunity to thrive. Learn more about Mike’s career path, strategies within the workplace, and advice. 

Can you share how your upbringing influenced your career choices and eventually led you to Toast? 

I grew up in a small town north of Boston where to me, family was everything. I spent afternoons playing outside with my brother and sister, biking to the local small candy shop, playing baseball in the town league, and sledding down the town hill. When I was 14, things changed when my mom, then a single mother, was diagnosed with breast cancer, and I focused my energies on helping her navigate that tough journey. She lost her battle with cancer when I was 20. I have some core memories from her funeral, but one stands out. As guests were leaving, someone who I didn’t know came up to me and said, “You can never realize who you’ll fully be until your parents are gone.”

That comment stuck with me. It was an acknowledgment that I had to grow up pretty fast, and I was now in a position where I had to chart my own course and lean into my future in a way that I hadn’t envisioned before that, much less understood.

Admittedly I was a bit lost, so I searched for a bit. I graduated from college with a degree in Geophysics, fascinated by the geology of other planets, but as I wrote my thesis I was largely alone in a lab, and I missed the people connection. I ski bummed for a season after college, where I happened to win the Customer Service award for my efforts teaching kids how to ski, and found that I really liked helping people become better at what they were doing. Shortly thereafter, I interviewed at Google for a job in Customer Support, which began a 9-year run at Google where I learned so much about the technology industry, how teams can move fast and accomplish great things, what makes great leadership, and how people can change the world with technology at their fingertips.

I left Google wanting to spread my wings a bit and join a company in its infancy. I jumped into a five-person start-up where I served as COO, leading sales, customer support, supply chain, business development, HR, and many other things. I then met Chris Comparato, Toast’s first CEO, and we started talking about how Toast was shaping the future of the restaurant industry. I fell in love with Toast’s mission and purpose, and saw a high degree of integrity in its leadership team, so joined to lead the Restaurant Success team. The rest is history.

I often think back to the comment made at my mom’s funeral. I now look for in others what I think that person was getting at: we all have the potential to be something amazing. We just have to put the work and the time in to find it, invest in it, learn a ton from others, and explore. I really think that’s what the brunt of my career has been about. I started as a scientist, found a love of customer support and helping people with technology, taught myself how to sell to retail big-box stores, learned how to market a product to different customer segments, built supply chain rails, fell in love with people strategy and how that impacts a business, and now have found what I believe is my calling as a People leader.

I’d love to hear more about what you have learned in your role here at Toast and how those insights have shaped your perspective on people and organizational culture. 

In my role I have many constituents: Aman and the Senior Team, the broader company and Toasters globally, the Board, Toast customers, and our communities all over the world. On any given day, I work with all of them in different ways. So balancing all of that is both awesomely fun and a huge challenge, especially as we continue to evolve our priorities as a company and where we can and should invest in Toasters everywhere.

A few things come to mind on how all of this shapes my perspective on people and culture:

• Focus on what makes the most impact. We across the People team are doing a thousand little things every day to work to make Toast a better place. I need to spend my time really thoughtfully. What are the really important moments that matter? When a candidate interviews, when a new hire starts, when managers sit down to have compensation and performance conversations, when a team goes through a significant change, are just a few of the examples of things that we need to get right, and are just a few examples of where I try to spend a good brunt of my time.
• Time spent listening is always time spent well. I try to spend time each week with Toasters in all parts of the business. Whether it’s time in Omaha shadowing our Care reps, in Denver shadowing a demo, in Chennai with our Toasters there, or with managers prepping for performance conversations. My leadership team and their teams spend time every day with our employees, and we have our own process to bubble up key themes, but I’ve always believed in being close to the work and in this case, that’s our Toasters and how they’re feeling about things. Data can tell you only so much; listening to what’s going on all across the business and the world and the “anecdata” are super important.
• Communicate more than you think is humanly possible. We move fast at Toast, we have a matrixed organization where teams have lots of dependencies, and change management is so important to help teams manage through all of that. Which means communicating what’s going on, why it’s happening, where we’re going, and doing that authentically and genuinely is super important. I try to spend a TON of time communicating. I obviously don’t always get it right. But I’m working at it.

How does Toast prioritize belonging and inclusion, and what strategies have been most effective?

Broadly, in the context of our efforts to advance the success of Toast through the success of its people and culture, we’ve grounded ourselves in the following principles:

• We Want Great Talent
  To attract and retain top talent, we must broaden our reach to include individuals with diverse backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences.
• We Must Be Innovative
  Innovation requires challenging the status quo, and diversity fuels creativity. By fostering difference, we gain the fresh ideas needed to stay competitive.
• We Aim to Meet the Needs of Our Customers
  We serve one of the most diverse industries in the world. To remain relevant, we must represent and understand the communities we serve.
• We Want to Be the Best Place to Work for Our Toasters
  Our success depends on our people. By removing barriers and fostering an inclusive environment, we enable all Toasters to thrive.

These principles are not only core to our business, they are tied to our values. Our approach to diversity, equity, and inclusion isn’t about creating advantages for some; it’s about removing barriers so all Toasters can thrive and do their best work. We invest a lot of time, energy, and thought into ensuring that our people practices and processes are fair and equitable.

We’ll always have a lot of work to do and we’re on our own journey. But I’m proud that we continue to stay focused on this work and doing what’s right for our teams and our industry as a whole.

What is your advice for Toast managers? 

Everyone has a story. Understand that story. Understand what makes them who they are and what matters to them most. In an upcoming 1:1, ask your employee about what they love at work and what’s bogging them down. What’s keeping them up at night? Why is that keeping you up at night? What brings you the most joy at work? When was the last time you felt proud of something you did at work, and why? And if your employee’s open to it, ask them about their family, what they love to do outside of work, where they’ve traveled, and more. It’s amazing what you can learn about someone from a few questions, and how much trust that can build between you and your team.