How to make sure everyone’s aligned with your company’s north star featuring Renee Psenka

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Episode Summary

There are many processes and structures in a business, and they’re the backbone that holds the organization together.

But alignment is the secret sauce of success, so you need to ensure that everyone is aligned with the north star of your business.

In this episode of the Taking the Lead podcast, our host Christina Brady welcomes Renee Psenka, Head of Revenue Operations at RudderStack. They chat about the key qualities of good leaders, why there’s no such thing as bad ambition, and how to align your teams.

Guest Profile

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Key Insights

Episode Highlights

There’s no such thing as bad ambition

“I don’t think that there’s such a thing as bad ambition. But when I think about even just being critical of myself, if I think about the times when it was good ambition versus bad ambition — from my perspective, the bad ambition is when I’m naturally a confident and decisive person. I like to do the research and gather all the information and connect the people and connect the dots and look at the data.”

Being a leader is about getting stuff done

“When you’re an individual contributor, I think it’s a lot about optimizing things, solving problems, streamlining processes, and getting stuff done. When you are leading, it becomes less about the deliverables, although those are always important. And the way I was able to get a seat at the table in some of these conversations is by being a dependable person to whom you can give a tough problem, and they can figure it out because they have a unique perspective, they know how things work, they work very hard, and they get it done.”

The importance of having a good relationship with your leadership team

“You have to have a good relationship with your leadership team to figure out, ‘Okay, we want to stay lean,’ but you need leverage. And it’s a point where you have that trust — they trust your decisions and your approach — and then you get those resources. It’s not always possible, but then you prioritize. And there are only so many hours in a day.”

Figure out the best way to communicate

“It’s all about figuring out the way you need to communicate it and have an impact because you could be right and it would not mean anything. I hear this from office people that I work with all the time. It’s like, ‘I was right about that. I was right about that after the fact,’ and no one likes, ‘I told you so.'”