13 Tips for Leadership Success

1. Start Fresh

• Really talk with your team: I spend time visiting our stores and conducting roundtables with our teams, so I can learn from them. Many great ideas have come from our store specialists and designers.
• Pick up the phone: Make a point to talk to other executives and vendors about the challenges they’re facing and how they’re overcoming them. We’re all trying to make our companies successful.
• Be your own customer: I regularly buy products from our website and stores. I recently designed and installed more than a dozen custom spaces in my home. This lets me experience firsthand what’s working and what’s not from a customer’s perspective.

2. Make Work Fun

Don’t take yourself too seriously — try to have fun in the context of the work. Things happen and challenges arise, but I find it easier to work with folks who take our mission and our tasks seriously, but don’t take ourselves too seriously.

3. Go Against the Grain

Culture will shape the behaviors of your team and the quality of the outcomes your company is able to deliver. As you scale, there will be many forces that push you to be less deliberate on this. Resist those forces.

4. Retain Your Troops

• Hire right: Most companies look for experience, and as I learned the hard way, it’s equally or more important to find out whether your values and styles are aligned. We are looking for people who make their bed and then walk around it to be certain it’s done properly.”
• Check in regularly: Every quarter, the leadership has a conversation with every person on their team. The first question: On a scale of 1 to 10, how happy are you at Sprinklr? If you get even a 9 or an 8, there’s a second question: What are the top three things that the manager could do to get you closer to a 10?”
• Agree on what’s expected: “We have self-declared learning goals for every person. They have to ask: What are the three things I want to learn this quarter? By ruthlessly prioritizing and keeping it simple, we have a core framework that allows us to uniquely scale.

5. Stay Open to Feedback

Create as many channels as possible to hear insights and feedback from your customers, ensuring that everyone in the company has the chance to hear it and engage directly with this community. Many of our most successful product features have come from feedback provided directly by hosts.

6. Define Your Mission

Find a purpose that’s larger than you. When you can figure that out and articulate it, constantly keep it as your North Star. It’s amazing what happens to the caliber of people you recruit, the nature of investors and board members you will attract, the kind of partners and customers who will want to align with you. The impossible becomes possible.

7. Stage a Turnaround

• Let people do their jobs: We want to grow market share, and everyone is saying, ‘OK, within my realm of responsibility, here’s what I think I can do to grow market share.’ And they work on it, frankly, without being told what to do. When you’re able to control what you do, I think you’re a lot happier at work.
• Don’t sugarcoat bad news: When I did my first companywide standup as a CEO, someone asked me: ‘Are we going to get bonuses at the end of the year?’ I said, ‘I know the answer you would like to hear is yes, but the truthful answer is no — we’re not per­forming in a place where we get bonuses.’ And while people didn’t necessarily like that answer, they knew it was a true answer. Then, in 2020, our business doubled, and we paid a larger bonus than the company’s ever paid.
• Get comfortable with criticism: The risk is that CEOs get too many of what I call paid friends, who tell them all their bad ideas are good ideas because they want to stay on the payroll.”

8. Lead at Scale

• Submit to performance reviews: Every year, solicit a 360-degree evaluation of your efforts as CEO from the board of directors, your direct reports, and key other stake­holders in the company: work for the team and for the business.
• Congratulate your team’s wins: In an effort to programmatically do something that used to happen naturally, collect weekly nominations from your executive team of people you should personally reach out and deliver encouragement to.
• Never stop learning: You have to rewrite your own role every six months as your own skill gaps or experience gaps become apparent. You have to be OK saying, ‘This is something new for me. Whom am I going to talk to, or what do I need to read, or what role do I need to fill on my team?’

9. Define Your Purpose in All Things

Be incredibly clear on the jobs to be done for each role, with a healthy bias for outcomes versus effort.

10. Never Stop to Innovate

Complacency will kill you. You have to figure out how to move and continue to do what you’ve got to do to grow.

11. Know When to Act

Take calculated risks. The times when you’re most challenged often turn into the opportunities

12. Hire Leaders

• Look for resilience: Look not necessarily for experience in a specific industry, but for someone with experience handling tough situations. A good leader should always want to understand and hear how they can develop.”
• Don’t underestimate a sense of humor: I want leaders who take their roles seriously, but I also want people who can bring a positive attitude to any situation, especially when things get bumpy. Being able to laugh at yourself helps everyone get through challenges, especially in today’s uncertain world.”
• Filter for constant students: Everyone wants the opportunity to continue to learn and grow. I expect leaders to cultivate skills in employees, and that’s a trait I look for when hiring.”

13. Stay on the Course

• Don’t be ruled by fear: Try to battle that and allow optimism to dictate my decision making.
• Delegate: If you’ve hired good people, then I trust that they’ll make good decisions.
• Keep it real: Try to have at least a little bit of a connection with everybody so we can feel like we’re building this Lovesac family.