An ActiveCampaign executive with just under 800 employees discusses how to rebuild trust with internal candidates who didn't get promoted and now report to new managers. The conversation covers concrete tactics for managing disappointment and restructuring reporting lines during leadership transitions.
How many employees are at ActiveCampaign now?
Just shy of 800.
Okay. Smaller than I thought it would've been. I would've thought you were in the thousands. So that's a nice size actually.
Beauty of being a product-led growth company. It's, you know, the people equation can be dialed into exactly what that PLG motion needs.
That's a really nice size. But with, you know, 800 people there, I'm sure there's at least one person that kind of wanted the job or was there, I mean, again, it wasn't like there was a job posting on Craigslist, president wanted. When you were coming into the organization, how do you build the relationships with some of those people that were either disappointed they didn't get the job or maybe disappointed they don't get to report to Jason now and, you know, they get to report to Samir, right? Or they have to report to this new guy. How did you manage through that? Can you walk us through that?
In the early days of being here, one of the things that Jason said to me was, Here's the reporting lines, but I'm also going to continue to do one-on-ones with these individuals, sort of trying to test to see what my demeanor about that would be. And I was like, great. I said, there is no reason to shake things up in a manner that would make people uncomfortable or draw hard lines. Like, we just have to be thoughtful about the change management process. And as part of that, if it's more comfortable for you and more comfortable for them, for you guys to continue to be in more structured conversation. I have no issues with that. As a matter of fact, what I would say is what my job generally is to create lots of bandwidth for you, Jason, mentally, so you can focus on the things that are also important to the company. I think what'll naturally happen is over a period of time, assuming that all of this clicks in, again, it was early days, that you can make a decision whether you want to continue to do that in such a structured manner or not. And I think that's worked really well for us. To hit the first part of your question more directly, I'd say there's really 2 parts of that. The first one is just conversations matter. The individual connection matters. I enjoy people. I enjoy their backstory. I like to learn about their families and their kids and their hobbies and what motivates them. And because we spend so much time together, I like the banter and I like the personal connection. A lot. I think that's really important for building and sustaining culture in a business. COVID's been detrimental to that for many, many companies in a big way. We were creating lots of flexibility for folks at the company to say, if you want to be a remote employee, there are a set of benefits for you. If you want to work in one of our hubs, there are other benefits for you that you could rely on. And so we encourage people to come in. Much of the ELT and the folks that reported to me, would come in with some frequency. And so we had a chance to connect and get to know each other. The second part of that is in the spirit of sleeves rolled up and sweating the details, it's also important for me not to take any operational topics at the surface level. I've spent so much of my time in the last 6 months just going deep in so many parts of our business to understand the fundamental mechanics of how that works. I think that lends itself to people understanding that this is not some role that's throne-driven where somebody's overseeing part of the business. I'm in it with them to help improve the business. And I think that part of it matters as well.
