Leadership at Plume: How Trust Gets Built Across a Distributed Team
Ask most people what “good leadership” looks like at a technology company and they’ll describe the CEO — the keynote, the all-hands, the LinkedIn post. But for the employees actually doing the work, leadership is rarely that abstract. It’s the manager who removes a blocker before a deadline. It’s the person one level up who tells you the truth about a decision instead of managing your feelings about it.
That distinction shows up clearly in Plume’s Most Loved Workplace® certification data. This second profile in BPI’s Plume series, following our first look at the company’s culture overall goes deeper into a single question: what does leadership actually feel like inside a distributed, fast-growing technology company, and where is the gap between how employees experience their managers versus how they experience the executives further up the chain
What the Data Shows
Plume’s 2026 LOWI (Love of Workplace Index) survey collected responses from 147 employees, roughly 15% of the company’s workforce, split across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. Two numbers stand out.
Respect scored 84.7, one of the highest SPARK dimensions Plume measured, and a signal that employees feel genuinely valued day to day, not just tolerated.
Manager love scored 85.0, nearly identical to co-worker love (88.4), the single highest signal in the entire survey. Employees at Plume like the people they report to almost as much as they like the people they sit next to.
But there’s a third number worth sitting with: love-my-CEO scored 70.7. Seventeen points behind co-worker love. Real, but noticeably lower than everything else in the leadership category.
That gap isn’t a red flag. It’s a familiar pattern at companies where the relationship between employees and their direct manager is strong, but visibility into the executive layer hasn’t caught up, often because the executive layer itself is newer than the teams it leads.
That gap isn’t a red flag. It’s a familiar pattern at companies where the relationship between employees and their direct manager is strong, but visibility into the executive layer hasn’t caught up, often because the executive layer itself is newer than the teams it leads.
A Leadership Team Still Being Built
Context matters here. Plume’s CEO seat changed hands twice in less than two years. Founder Fahri Diner stepped down in late 2024; co-founder Adam Hotchkiss served as interim CEO; and in April 2025, Plume named Dan Herscovici, a former Comcast Xfinity Home executive and Edison Partners investor, as President and CEO, with Hotchkiss moving into the Chief Product Officer role. Alongside Herscovici, Lorie Boyd leads the company’s people function as Chief People Officer, overseeing global talent strategy, culture, and organizational development.
By the time Plume’s 2026 employee survey ran, Herscovici had been in the CEO seat for well over a year: long enough to set direction, not necessarily long enough for every distributed team member across three continents to have direct exposure to him. That’s the honest explanation behind the CEO-visibility gap, and it’s a solvable one. Herscovici has been public about narrowing Plume’s focus, telling industry press the company is “streamlining and reinforcing” its core value proposition around ISP experience and operations rather than chasing every adjacent opportunity. Clarity of direction from the top is exactly the kind of signal that, over time, tends to close visibility gaps like the one in Plume’s survey data.
Where Leadership Actually Shows Up: The Manager Layer
If the CEO-visibility gap is the thing to watch, the manager-trust score is the thing that’s already working, and it’s worth understanding why.
Employees consistently describe Plume’s leadership culture as accessible rather than hierarchical. In a distributed company, where a significant share of the workforce is in Spain, Slovenia, or Hyderabad rather than the Palo Alto headquarters, that accessibility can’t rely on hallway conversations or drop-by visits. It has to be built into how managers operate: response times, transparency about decisions, and a willingness to explain the “why” behind direction rather than just issuing it.
BPI’s broader research on the role of leadership in driving a culture of excellence consistently finds that manager-level trust predicts retention and engagement more reliably than executive-level admiration does. Plume’s data is a clean example: respect (84.7) and manager love (85.0) are both comfortably above the CEO-visibility number, and both track closely with the company’s strongest overall signal, co-worker love at 88.4.
Put plainly: the people Plume employees work with every day, their managers and their peers, are where the trust already lives.
What "Leveling With You" Looks Like in Practice
A few specific behaviors surface repeatedly in employee feedback collected through the certification process:
Direct answers over diplomatic ones. Employees describe managers who will tell them a project is deprioritized, a deadline is unrealistic, or a decision didn’t go their way, rather than softening it into ambiguity. In a company where roughly a third of survey respondents had joined within the past year, that kind of directness shortens the learning curve considerably.
Visible decision-making. Distributed teams can’t lean on ambient office context to understand why a call was made. Plume’s stronger-performing managers close that gap by explaining reasoning, not just relaying outcomes.
Follow-through on flexibility. Plume’s telecommuting benefit rated 74.4% positive, the highest-rated benefit after PTO, but the number that matters more is what employees say alongside it: that remote work doesn’t cost them a sense of belonging. That’s a leadership behavior as much as a policy. Managers who check in without micromanaging, and who make remote team members feel included in decisions, are the reason flexibility translates into loyalty rather than isolation.
The Opportunity Ahead
Plume’s certification data points to a specific, addressable opportunity rather than a systemic problem: increase the visibility of executive leadership without diluting the manager-level trust that’s already Plume’s strongest asset.
That’s a narrower task than “fix the culture.” It looks like more direct executive communication reaching distributed teams, more context from the top about where the company is headed (echoing Herscovici’s own public comments about sharpening Plume’s focus), and continued investment in the manager training that’s clearly already producing results.
Companies that get this right don’t do it by manufacturing false intimacy with the CEO. They do it by making the reasoning behind executive decisions travel as far as the decisions themselves already do.
Frequently Asked Questions About Leadership at Plume
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Louis Carter is the founder and CEO of Best Practice Institute, Most Loved Workplace, and Results-Based Culture. Author of In Great Company, Change Champions Field Guide, and Best Practices in Talent Management, as well as a series of Leadership Development books. He is a trusted strategic advisor and coach to CEOs, CHROs, and leaders of mid-sized to F500 companies – enabling change and steering employer brand development together with highly effective teams, leaders, and organizations as a whole.
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