Finding the leadership style that helps staff and customers thrive can be a journey, but the right tools are important and how businesses use them can change outcomes.
Revathi Venkatraman, Head of Customer Success APAC at collaboration platform Slack, graduated as a chemical engineer, but moved into advertising to support herself and her family.
“I’ve taken a lot of risks in my career, and risks can convert into rewards,” says Venkatraman. “I graduated as a chemical engineer and grew up in a town in India where there was not a lot of exposure for the field I had chosen.
“I realised I had to do something to support myself and my family and lead by example for the upcoming generation in my family. I stepped into the advertising field and enjoyed it so much.
“I was in Mumbai and I worked with some big-name brands and I learned a lot. Then I had an arranged marriage and I followed my husband to New Zealand. That was the biggest risk I took as I had to reset my career.”
Venkatraman says one of her roles at New Zealand Post “was when magic happened”.
“It was my true experience of tech, adoption and maturity and seeing tangible return on investment.”
She worked for various big technology firms around the world and says she was lucky to have leaders who were supportive and creative, and great support from her family.
“If you have the right tool, right leadership, and the right culture, then this uncertainty can start creating opportunity for customers.”
– Revathi Venkatraman, Head of Customer Success APAC, Slack.
“I can share this back to my team now. There are three really important things for me: humility, gratitude and approachability as a leader.
“I have a great team at Slack … that did not happen overnight. Our team’s culture of success is to be an ambassador for yourself, for your team and for Slack and Salesforce as an organisation. When the team comes together and we are all aligned it is very natural for them to be successful, you feed off their energy, and you rise together. That’s been my leadership in the last few years.”
She says the way we are working and the ways we are thinking about working have changed.
“Customers are looking at digital first connection with their people, their customers, their partners, so they are looking at thought leadership as to what works for them for the next few years. It’s continuously being evolved.
“Slack brings people and workflow altogether in one platform. This is what we call Digital HQ. It brings a connectiveness of people. It brings flexibility, inclusivity, connectiveness of people so they are given an environment to thrive in this new era of work.”
With the current macro-economic conditions and climate conditions going on in the world Venkatraman says customers are asking the question: ‘How do I do more with less?’
“Revenue may be shrinking, conserving cash becomes very important, and as they are going through that process, what is top of their mind is efficiency.
“Slack is supporting customers to build that efficiency. If you have the right tool, right leadership, and the right culture, then this uncertainty can start creating opportunity for customers.”
Slack is beyond a chat platform, beyond a collaboration platform, she says, adding that while users might start by leveraging the platform for communication, the maturity of the platform is how you harness its strengths. By brining integrations, work flows and apps into one place, it becomes a digital headquarters.
“It is so important for Slack as an organisation and for our customers to work as a team. Slack can create that alignment within a team, it creates a tool to create channels to make working together easier and give transparency. People can be connected to a purpose in a business.”