Today in CEO Rapidfire, I’m sharing quick insights from Jennifer Tejada, CEO and Chairperson of PagerDuty, a leading digital operations management platform for business.

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Jennifer’s tenacity and hunger for learning are evident in her career and life. She’s the kind of person who would decide over a holiday break to learn how to sail yachts, immediately book a ticket to Australia, and return home a certified skipper. Which is something she’s actually done.

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I first met Jennifer nearly a decade ago when she was CEO of Keynote Systems and I was building AppDynamics. I immediately recognized her as a gifted, exceptionally smart leader and have admired her since then. Jennifer pivoted from early experience as a director at Procter & Gamble to leadership at several tech-sector companies, including Mincom and Keynote. She’s brought both public and private enterprise technology companies to scale, but she says her proudest moment in leadership was the day her daughter said she thought that being a CEO was "cool."

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At PagerDuty, Jennifer has led exponential growth — doubling the company’s headcount twice in her initial two years as CEO and taking the company public in 2019. Today, it’s a multibillion-dollar company that thousands of customers rely on for automated incident management response.

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Still, Jennifer — who studied liberal arts and business management in college — humbly calls herself a very “average” University of Michigan grad. She credits her career and life success to her passion for embracing different perspectives, gritty perseverance, and empathy. In fact, when asked what she’d bring to battle a giant, Jennifer chose empathy as her weapon of choice.

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And she walks the talk in leadership — PagerDuty’s leadership team and employee base has exceptional gender representation, and engineering teams are more diverse than you’ll find at many tech companies. Tejada clearly sees strength in diversity broadly defined — including gender, age, ethnic background, location, upbringing, lifestyle, and expertise.

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I’m excited to share her thoughts.

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Your one secret to succeeding as a leader, in five words or less. Choose your partners wisely.

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What was the most exciting “minute” of your leadership journey? The day my daughter said she thought being a CEO was cool.

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One truth you wish you knew about leadership before starting? You are never done. Leadership is a dynamic, unpredictable, infinite journey, and with every milestone met, you raise the bar for the next one.

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If you had to do battle with a giant, what weapon would you use? Empathy, we’d be friends by the end.

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Your worst mistake as a leader (and what you learned from it): Dragging my feet on exiting someone who was a good person but a bad fit. Every day that went by with the issue unchecked was bad for the team, disruptive, and growing in negative impact. I was reminded of advice someone gave me in my early days as a leader — “You never fire anyone too early.” I learned that by the time you as a CEO notice something isn’t right, the people closest to the issue have known or been impacted for a long time. By the time bad news gets to you, it's been bad for a while.

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Top three websites, blogs, or podcasts you can’t imagine your day without: Spotify is an app, but I'm not sure how’d I’d get through the day without music. I played the violin growing up as a kid, and I love classical music for deep work, pop and anthem rock for workouts and skiing, and yacht rock with a cocktail.

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I'm more of a book reader than a blog reader. I'm currently reading The Power of Showing Up by Daniel J. Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson. It’s oriented toward parenting but applicable to leadership in many ways.

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PagerDuty is indispensable if you are responsible for anything digital that’s mission-critical.

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‍One life hack you can’t live without: Turn off all notifications except for the very few that actually matter. These are less than 10.

One soft skill that you’ve realized is supremely important: Active listening. You have two ears and one mouth for a reason.

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The one thing that makes a good leader great is: The ability to see potential in others and empower, stretch, and support them in realizing it.

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Your secret to building a great team is: Acquire talent ahead of your needs.

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The key to navigating hyper growth is: Knowing, at any given moment, what you are optimizing for.

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Every leader must read … The Power of Fun by Catherine Price, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni

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What are you most excited about at work right now? My team — they are hitting their stride, and I admire and learn from every single one of them.

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Your one “non-negotiable” in business (or life) is … Share the big decisions.

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To learn more, follow Jennifer on LinkedIn or check out the PagerDuty website.  

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Thank you for reading! For more insights from my experience as a serial entrepreneur and how we can harness the power of software to change the world, subscribe to Entrepreneurship and Leadership.

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This article was published originally on Jyoti Bansal's LinkedIn.‍