Some years ago, Michel van den Berg, Former Vice President & General Manager EMEIA at Jamf, would have said “if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it”. However, when you grow from 1300 to 2300 employees in 2 years, if you acquire different companies, and if you continue to operate in hypergrowth mode – you have no alternative than to be continuously changing your structure.

So what has Michel learnt about leadership during this rapid period of growth? 

When I started at Jamf a little over eight years ago, we had half a dozen salespeople in Europe. Over the years, we grew our teams and where we had people that did ‘everything’, we now needed to go in a more focused model. The Sales Reps were allocated to regions/countries, we split the team into hunters (new logos) and farmers (existing accounts), added SDRs to find new business, etc. etc. It was obvious. Whenever you grow into a next phase, you must change!

Change isn’t easy for everyone though. Whenever there’s change, people get upset and resist. We all go through a change cycle, some faster than others.

The best lesson I’ve learnt from our CEO is never to push decisions down, but to get buy-in from all stakeholders. This will take a lot longer but will make the process smoother and will give people the feeling they have a voice.

So, whenever we add new roles, change territories, move people around, we discuss it with their leaders and with the individuals. By doing so, we are shortening the time people go through the ‘change cycle’ and have less resistance.

As Winston Churchill once said – “To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often”.

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