Hi {{first_name|there}},
Priyanka Peeramsetty has held nearly every role a generalist can hold — growth, partnerships, product, community, Chief of Staff — and she's distilled it all into one conviction: the best operators aren't the ones who know the most. They're the ones who ask the right questions at the right time.
There's a question Priyanka Peeramsetty says she returns to every few months if not every few weeks now: "Why this, and why now?"
It sounds almost too simple. But for Priyanka — Engineering Operations Director at Crunchyroll and a veteran Chief of Staff across multiple B2B SaaS companies — that question is the difference between fighting the right fires and getting consumed by the wrong ones.
In this week's episode, Exec Coach and Chief of Staff Network Fellow, Tristan Lim, sits down with Priyanka to unpack how she actually operates. And early in the conversation, she offers a metaphor that I really like. The maestro of an orchestra. You're not playing the violin. But you know exactly when to bring in the strings, when to let the brass carry it, and when to pull everything back. The music only works if someone holds the whole picture in their head while everyone else focuses on their part.
What makes that possible, she argues, isn't brilliance or an MBA. It's integrity. She defines it more rigorously than most people do. Picture a pyramid. The base: no gossip, own your tasks, keep sensitive information locked. The middle level: knowing what to share, with whom, and when. The top is the hardest layer: having no vested interest. Asking the difficult questions not because you have an agenda, but because someone has to.
"If you're known to be someone with integrity," she says, "even when you ask the difficult questions, people won't take it personally."
That's what makes everything else possible. But here's the question their conversation leaves open: how do you build that kind of trust when you're the newest person in the room with access to everything?
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Founder, Chief of Staff Network & BizOps Network