Building Work Relationships With Rapid7 Chief People Officer Christina Luconi

In this episode of Redefining HR, I spoke with Rapid7 Chief People Officer Christina Luconi. Christina and I discuss her career with high-growth startups and tech companies in the Boston ecosystem and her role in navigating hyper-growth at Rapid7. We also discuss the value of building work relationships and why the CEO and CPO need to trust in each other.

Christina has spent most of her career in HR, although that wasn’t her original plan. She majored in psychology but realized halfway through her degree course that being a therapist wasn’t what she wanted. After learning about HR, Christina took an internship at a high-tech startup that almost immediately went public.

That experience helped her realize she wanted to align with HR and startups. Since then, Christina has helped build six high-growth startups and still considers herself “as a startup junkie.”

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Having In-Person Conversations for Better Relationships

Christina is all about building and maintaining relationships in the workplace and life. Christina has learned from experience that connections at work are the difference between having a job and building a career. “If you wanna build a career and have exposure and have work be a truly meaningful part of your life, you can't get away from some amount of, in person connection,” she says.

Like many people, 2020 changed how Christina viewed work. She thought about her role as a CPO differently. Having been used to the old school of everyday, face-to-face connections, she had to reimagine how people could build relationships remotely.

“I don't think that anyone will ever go nine to five, back to work five days a week, ever in an office, which is nice. I like that people can live a more flexible lifestyle. But I do think that the wave towards work from anywhere, all day, every day, is makes me really nervous for the future of work,” she says.

While remote and hybrid work have their merits, Christina looks at the other side of things, especially for young people looking to build their careers.

“If you just have a little bit of aptitude and a great attitude and say, ‘I'll help out with that. Who needs help?’ I got exposure to so many things,” Christina says. “If I had just been behind a Zoom camera, I would've worked with four people on a daily basis and my world would've been incredibly transactional. I never would've had the exposure.”

Leading Through Difficult Situations

Christina shared that she and Rapid7 have had to walk the line of protecting employees and standing up for beliefs that matter to the company without recklessly taking political stances.

After George Floyd’s murder, for example, the company continued to lean into its diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. However, there was still some internal reaction, which taught Christina a lesson.

“We had folks that were like, ‘I come from a police family and … this makes me really uncomfortable.’ And we're like, we're not saying anything about the police,” Christina says. “We're just saying we stand with this group of people. So we have to be really thoughtful and measured about what we say and how we say it.”

After the overturn of Roe v. Wade, the company’s communications were “about health and wellness, as opposed to taking a political stance. You could probably read it and understood where we stood. But we find that if we focus on sort of the bigger-picture issue, that we're staying true to who we are. But it's a very, very difficult role to navigate,” Christina says.

Building Trust Between CEO and CPO

In today’s C-suite, the relationship between the CPO and CEO can be the most important in an organization.

For Christina and Rapid7 CEO Corey Thomas, their relationship has been successful for 12 years because they complement each other and have built trust. Before the pandemic, Christina and Corey shared an office. Today, they still sit near each other in an open workplace with employees.

Their relationship works because they both have the organization’s goals in mind, not individual glory, Christina says. They’re also willing to challenge each other and hold each other accountable.

“I don't think that he has ever thought that I would … raise a difficult flag without anything but the best intentions for the company. I'm not in this for me. I think there's an element of ‘I'm not trying to go anywhere. I'm not trying to take his job.’” Christina says.

People in This Episode

• Christina Luconi: LinkedIn, Twitter, Rapid7 website