Leading the Leaders: How Organizational Leadership Impacts Digital Asset Management Success

My name is Casey Templeton. In 2018, I founded Stacks with the goal of making digital asset management (DAM) easier for organizations without dedicated resources to build and grow their programs. 

After more than 25 years as a photographer for all sorts of brands and experiences, I understood the modern challenge associated with the production of valuable digital assets and had taken steps in my photography career to support clients with this challenge. 

I partnered with some colleagues and friends amid some health challenges that threw my future as a photographer into question to create a company that could focus on just that: supporting clients with what was quickly becoming the biggest challenge for creatives and marketing professionals alike. If you want to learn more about the story of Stacks, check out the blog below. It was one of the very first on our site!

Since 2018, my role within Stacks has taken many forms, from the founder and visionary who brought the team together around our core mission to facilitate growth to a sales-focused executive to an advisory role that supported the amazing staff we had promoted internally over the years. The entire time, my goal remained the same: grow our people into human assets for the company who could take the proverbial ball and run with it without micromanaging and with confidence. 

In November, I stepped back into the role of CEO at Stacks, bringing my time with the brand full circle and allowing me to reflect on how my different experiences since founding the company have allowed me to bring something new to the table this time around. In this article, I hope to provide some context to the changes our company has undergone in the last 5+ years, reflect on our journey to where we are today, and provide some tips to any aspiring or current business leaders who need a shot of inspiration.

Your First Job is to Capture Hearts

This most recent change in my role at Stacks was unexpected for much of our team. While the show must go on in terms of the day-to-day operations of the business, our staff are human beings. One of the things we have prided ourselves on as a company has been our ability to treat our employees, partners, and clients as people, not obstacles or tools or cogs in the machine.

With this in mind, my focus as I stepped back into the role of CEO wasn’t to make sweeping process improvements or reconfigure the organizational structure, it was to ensure that the people we had invested years into growing and developing knew that their job, their responsibilities, and the vision of the company was not changing. We are still who we have been and will continue to deliver excellence and a stable work environment, even as people come and go, processes are tuned, and priorities are adjusted. 

DAM Application:

This wasn’t an unfamiliar concept to the team and me, as we preach this to our clients each and every day. For an organization just getting started on its DAM journey, developing buy-in around what DAM will be for the brand is the key to a successful launch. Without champions for DAM and people who are excited about the new way of doing things and the benefits it will bring them, the organization, and their customers and clients, the DAM program is doomed to fail, regardless of the sophistication of technology or smoothness of workflows. 

“Elevate and Delegate”

From the start, one of our key advantages at Stacks has been our ability to identify young leaders whom we could empower and lift up into leadership roles. Many of our organization's most important positions are filled by people who were fresh out of school, applied via Craigslist, or had never heard of digital asset management before. 

This group of people has formed what I like to call the “2nd tier of leadership,” who keep me from falling into the trap of being what’s called an “idiot founder.” This term is based on the thought that the founder thinks they are the only person capable of doing the important work; if left unchecked, an idiot founder can hold back the growth of the business. Upon stepping back into the day-to-day leadership of the company, I was overwhelmed by a mountain of tasks to complete and several plates that were spinning that I couldn’t let crash.

Because we had put the time, effort, attention, and, yes, money towards building up and retaining people who were good at their jobs, had ambition, and knew the business inside and out, I was able to avoid trying to do it all myself. It also bought me precious time to get back up to speed and create a game plan for the next 30, 60, and 90 days of transition and minimize the impact on the rest of the team.

DAM Application:

Once again, this concept is reflected in our work with clients. Over and over again, our team stresses the importance of a dedicated resource that owns the strategy, governance, tactical operation, and growth of the DAM program. Your digital marketing or creative team simply can’t do it all, just like I couldn’t do it all in my first week back as CEO. If you need a 2nd tier of leadership that serves your DAM program and its users, contact Stacks. We’d love to help.

You Can’t Make Everyone Happy

Being a people-pleaser, this one is hard for me. When I stepped back into a daily leadership role at Stacks, I was hyper-aware of expectations and feelings and the shoes I had to fill in the eyes of the rest of our team. Ultimately, I had to fall back on the knowledge that everyone has their own style of leadership, priorities, and ways of relating and communicating. 

The worst thing I could’ve done on my first day back in the saddle was to pretend to be someone else. A benefit and challenge of elevating and investing in a team of young professionals is their innate ability to sniff out a lack of authenticity. Their generation has been marketed to their entire lives, so they’ve had to learn what’s real and what isn’t from their childhoods. 

With that in mind, I had to trust my gut and remember that when something feels right or wrong, it probably is, leaning into what I felt was best for the business and understanding and addressing any feelings of disappointment or fear from my team the only way I knew how.

DAM Application:

At the risk of making it seem like I’m writing off of an outline (spoiler: I am), this concept once again has its roots in our work at Stacks. We like to tell brands that are just getting started with DAM applications that a key requirement of their DAM team is neutrality. You have to understand your biases for or against certain issues and challenges as you build a DAM vision, establish a roadmap, and evaluate vendors. At the same time, you have to recognize that not all issues are created equal, and you can’t boil the ocean. A phased approach to DAM implementation is sure to make some people angry. If you’ve done your homework, however, you can confidently navigate these feelings while also holding your ground and doing what you feel is best.