By Craig Dowden, Ph.D., SPB Organizational Psychology
An interview with New York Times columnist and best-selling author Adam Bryant.
Canadian-born Adam Bryant started the Corner Office column in 2009 for the New York Times’ Sunday Business section, and the series has attracted a tremendous audience and was converted into a best-selling book of the same name. Recently, I interviewed Adam to gain his insight into the pathway to senior leadership excellence as well as learn more about the role of HR within this framework.
Q: What motivated you to start writing the Corner Office column?
Adam Bryant: I was a business reporter here at the Times for many years and covered a lot of industries and, over that time, interviewed many CEOs. What I realized is that the business press pretty much always interviews CEOs as strategists and only interested in getting at two main questions: 1) What is your growth plan? and 2) What is the competitive landscape?
Although these are valuable questions to answer – and they attract a big audience – I found that the more time I spent with CEOs, the more I became intrigued with them as people and wanted to ask them very simple questions like “How do you do what you do?” and “How did you learn to do what you do?”
Q: So how did the book come about?
AB: Actually, I did not set out to write a book initially. There are plenty of leadership books out there, but after about 75 interviews, I started noticing some patterns, hearing some themes echoing throughout the interviews and it got me wondering, what is it about these people – what are the qualities they have in common – that help explain how they got to the Corner Office?
What I find fascinating is that with those CEOs who have two or three values, even I remember some of them, sometimes over a year or two later.
And, in my opinion, people ask the wrong question when trying to understand the pathway to success because they ask, “What led you to your success?”
The problem with this question is that it generally leads to answers that are neither surprising nor particularly insightful. If you ask anybody this question, you are probably going to get some variation of hard work, perseverance, passion, etc. Those answers are right, but, to me, they are not insightful.
So what I did with the book was to frame the question far more narrowly, which was “Why were these people promoted over everyone else all the way to the corner office?”
Q: Can you talk about the five core themes that came from your interviews?
AB: 1) Passionate curiosity – I define this as a deep sense of engagement with the world. It is a relentlessly questioning mind where you are curious about people and how things work, and how they can be made to work better. I really like that phrase because it is bigger than the sum of its parts. We have all met people who are really passionate about something, but not that curious in the broad sense, and we have also met people who are curious, but not necessarily passionate. So, there is something about those two words together that capture that relentlessly curious mind.
I also think that it points to a misconception that a lot of people have about CEOs. To the outside world, the CEO has to look like he or she has all the answers. What I came to appreciate is that the role of the CEO inside their companies is not to have all the answers – because that is simply impossible – but to have the right questions. To have what I like to call the good, dumb questions that will lead to new insights by the company and maybe move them into new markets or smart innovation.
Essentially, it is that ability to ask these types of powerful questions that separates really effective leaders from the rest.
2) Battle-hardened confidence – This is about developing a track record of overcoming adversity so you know what you are capable of. Effective leaders go into difficult situations, and although there is some humility, they say, “I don’t know how I will get through this, but I know that I will because I have done it before.” This is the quiet confidence that emerges from coming through many difficult experiences.
3) Simple mindset – This is the ability to take a lot of complicated information and really boil it down to the one, two or three things that really matter. It is not helpful to a company for a leader to stand up at the beginning of the year and say that these are the 15 priorities we are going to be focusing on for the rest of the year. It takes a really smart leader to say these are the three things we will focus on and these are the three metrics we will use to measure our performance. It also really builds a sense of teamwork because when you have three clear metrics for performance, everyone can say that they know how their job contributes to these objectives.
Some CEOs have also told me that their in-house rule for emails is that if I cannot read your message on my iPhone screen without having to scroll down, then don’t send it.
I am often struck by CEOs when they are discussing the eight values of their company and when I ask them what they are, many of them cannot recall them all themselves. It is a powerful message that if a CEO cannot remember the company values, how can they expect everyone else to remember them?
What I find fascinating is that with those CEOs who have two or three values, even I remember some of them, sometimes over a year or two later. One person I interviewed, Brad Garlinghouse, who took over YouSendIt (which they renamed Hightail), said that the company’s values are “Be In,” “Be Real” and “Be Bold,” but for a company with eight values, I cannot remember any of them.
When CEOs do this effectively, they really earn their pay.
4) Team smarts – This is the organizational equivalent of ‘street smarts.’ It is an understanding of where the soft levers of power are. Although there may be an official org chart, there is also an unofficial one. Essentially, it is about knowing where and/or who to go to get things done. I think this skill is increasingly important in today’s world where a lot of work is done through ad hoc projects and teams. One CEO really crystallized this point for me when she said, “The real test of leadership is to mobilize a team of people that does not report to you.” Team smarts also plays out in the context of meetings, such as having a really good antenna for body language, how to get people to contribute and reading the room.
5) Fearlessness – The final piece represents a bias towards action. I have heard from so many CEOs almost a reverence in their voice for employees who look at a situation and say, “Yes, this is working fine right now, but it can be made to work better so let’s disrupt things to improve it.” Fearlessness does not mean recklessness; it just means a bias towards action. I have also heard a lot of CEOs who, as they were moving up the ranks, would take lateral moves and take new jobs that might even be seen as demotions, but they did this for a very deliberate reason because they wanted to broaden their experience base, and that requires a certain level of fearlessness.
Q: I liked the chapter “Lock yourself out of your office.” Can you talk about that concept?
AB: This theme came from so many CEOs who said it was invaluable to be visible and to spend time with employees. It may seem inefficient to walk around the building and stop into people’s offices since there is not an immediate ROI on your time, but the CEOs I spoke with learned so much in terms of what employees are working on, what the roadblocks are, etc. They obtained great insights by doing this.
Another benefit is an interesting phenomenon related to us as human beings in that when the boss is locked in his or her office all day long, we start to imagine things about what’s going on and there is a void of communication. Voids are dangerous because people fill voids with stuff like rumours and gossip. It is tough to imagine what the leadership is doing if you have no context or understanding of who they are.
In this day and age, it can be very tempting and a bad habit we can all fall into, where we see all of these emails piling up and we feel like we need to plow through them, but there is a cost to doing that, because the longer the time you spend in your office, the less human interaction you have.
Q: You spend some time talking about identifying and hiring top talent, which is an important topic for HR professionals. Can you share some of the insights you gained through your interviews?
AB: Sure. We could probably talk about this through dinner, but let me focus on just one aspect and that is the quality of self-awareness, which everyone is looking for.
I heard this brilliant approach by this young CEO who asks people during a job interview, “Do you think you are going to be different five years from now than you are today?”
And the person normally responds with, “Of course I am.”
The CEO then replies, “How do you think you will be different?” and “What will you be better at in five years?”
I think it is a great question because there is some indirection to it. It also puts a more positive and realistic spin on it, as it opens a more candid conversation with the candidate.
Q: HR Professional is the largest magazine for HR professionals in Canada. Can you share with our audience some of the key ways that these leading CEOs see HR contributing to the success of their organizations?
AB: One clear point is that the CEOs often tell me how essential the HR department is to creating an effective culture. When I interviewed Howard Schultz (CEO of Starbucks), he said when he is asked what the most important function when starting an organization or setting up enduring culture and values is, his answer is HR, even though it is often the last place to get funded. His view is that if the head of HR does not have a seat at the strategic table, this is a big mistake.
Many other CEOs also have said that the values of the organization that they work so hard to codify must be reinforced at every turn with the help of the HR department, which can incorporate the values into the criteria they use to hire people.
Adam’s next book, Quick and Nimble: Lessons from leading CEOs on how to create a culture of innovation, is scheduled to be released in January 2014.