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
- Name: Renee Psenka
- What she does: She's the head of revenue operations at RudderStack
- Company: RudderStack
- Noteworthy: Renee worked in sales operations at Bolt and as a business architect at Cisco before joining RudderStack.
Key Insights
- A good leader should be able to make decisions confidently. What's the difference between being in a contributor role and in a leadership role? Renee explains, "When you're in a leadership position, you need to make decisions, and you need to make sure that those are the right decisions and that you bring people along. You develop a unique perspective in a role like revenue operations, where you touch all these different teams, and you work with all these different teams so then you are at a point where you can confidently, for yourself as well as for others, make those decisions."
- Understand the way it works so you can make it the way it should be. Understanding your customers' points of view will help you craft the best solution for their problems. Renee says, "Develop that understanding. I think you need to use your ops skills to look at the systems, the data, and all that stuff and say, 'Okay, this is the way it is here.' And then you also have to figure out the way the world works and the way things are now from the perspective of the people who are having customer conversations and are trying to launch a new demand gen initiative, and figure out their pain points and what they are trying to do. What are they trying to accomplish, and why can't they do it?"
- Make sure everyone is aligned to the same north star. Teams that work together, win together. And Renee thinks that alignment is key to success in a business. She says, "I love sales. I think it's really fun. Maybe in a different life, I would've been in sales. But I think it's all about that partnership and making sure everyone is aligned to the same north star. That's the other thing; sometimes, they're not right. You could have very different strategic priorities, particularly if you're in a very large organization. The RevOps team wants to save money or something. And the sales team wants everyone to smash their quota and get paid a million dollars a year."
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.'”