Corner Office: Lynn Good of Duke Energy, on Effective Leaders

Q. Were you in leadership roles early on?

A. No, I had a childhood that would be called ordinary. But my parents taught us about responsibility and instilled incredible confidence in us. My father was a World War II Marine who became a high school principal. He always had a heart for students who maybe were underprivileged or had difficulty of some sort. My mother was also a teacher; both had an incredible work ethic. They also told me that I didn’t need to pursue traditional roles.

Other lessons from them?

They demonstrated accountability to me through actions. When I was growing up, we had a widow living next door to us. So the habit was that if we went to the grocery store, we called her first. If we cut our yard, we cut her yard, no questions asked.

When you graduated from college, did you have a clear idea of what you wanted to do?

I went to work in accounting, at Arthur Andersen. At one point it was the crème de la crème. I wanted to work there because it looked like the hardest thing I could find, and I loved being on a steep learning curve. I progressed quickly, and two years out of college I was managing a small team of people.

What did you learn from that experience?

The beauty of it was that we worked together around a table. I could see when someone was frustrated or had a difficult meeting, so I could keep in touch with what was going on. I would typically stay after they left so I could get a gauge of the work they produced, so I had real-time feedback about whether an assignment was working, and I could adjust. The feedback loop was almost immediate, so I had a chance to practice.

Have you heard feedback over the years about your leadership style that caused you to make some adjustments?

I can be incredibly focused, and I can appear impatient. So I’ve learned to slow down, get to know people and provide more context. There’s nothing wrong with getting to the point pretty quickly, but it’s also helpful to give people an opportunity to talk about their work.

You faced a pretty tough task as a new C.E.O. — merging the staffs of Progress Energy and Duke Energy. How did you decide who was going to be on your leadership team, particularly since there were people you already knew from Duke?

There is a comfort level with people you’ve known for a long time — you’ve been in the foxhole with them. But when you bring an organization together, you need to be agnostic about background, and to interview on capabilities and track record. So we went through interviewing processes to pick the best person for each role.

So what questions did you ask? Let’s say you’re interviewing me.

What have been some of your specific responsibilities? What successes have you had? How do you think? I’m looking for creativity. I’m looking for an ability to lead. I’ll ask about failures. What have been some things that have changed you and developed you over time?

What are your best interview questions?

Why do you come to work in the morning? What makes you passionate about what you do? Why did you choose the career that you did? How do you want it to develop over the next five years? What makes you uniquely qualified for this role? I try to engage people around what makes them passionate about what they do, because people who love what they do get after it every day.

Other things?

With people at this level of their career, it’s no longer about whether you are the smartest subject-matter expert in the room. It’s whether you can be effective in leading a diverse team. Can you adapt? As you think about developing people through their careers, you’re looking for that transition from being the smartest person in the room — and caring so much about that — to being the most effective. It’s about how to develop a team. It’s about how to solve something where the solution isn’t obvious. Effectiveness comes from those qualitative things that give you the ability to network, communicate and lead people toward an outcome they can’t see.

What advice would you give to graduating college students?

I’ve had an interesting career in that I was with Andersen when it went out of business. So in my 40s, everything I’d worked for disappeared. That changes you. It causes you to refocus on what’s important. So I’d say: “Be passionate about what you do, but also be passionate about your relationships and family and other things in life. That’s where happiness is. It’s not all about career.”

Did the experience of seeing Arthur Andersen go out of business make you more risk-averse or more tolerant of risk?

Between March 2002 and May 2002, the firm disappeared. It was a crazy time, because I really didn’t have time to think about a career move. I was focused on getting clients and people from Point A to Point B in a way that preserved as many jobs as possible. Later, I had a chance to re-evaluate what I wanted to do.

Risk is an interesting way to think about it, but I would say it refocused me on the importance of family and where happiness comes from. The lesson was that I’m not defined by my career, so I need to be prepared at any time to go or to change careers. There’s a freedom with that. It’s not that you’re disloyal or don’t like what you do or aren’t passionate about what you do, but your asset is you. It’s not who you work for. So is that risk-taking, or just recognizing that a career changes over time and you have to be ready at any point?

Corner Office: It’s Easy to Say ‘I Need This.’ It’s Harder to Find Solutions.

A. I was, and a lot of that goes back to my upbringing. My mother started and runs a preschool, and she is also very involved in running our family farm outside of Boston. My father’s a surgeon and also started an oncology research foundation. I always grew up with the sense that it was O.K. to try new things and be out on your own.

The first real business I started was when I was 11 and bought about 60 chickens and sold organic eggs with one of my cousins. From there, I was always trying to think of things I could do that would be new and interesting. I liked the risk and the personal accountability of trying to build something.

Q. And what about your first business after college?

A. I started one with a couple of guys I had known from school. We were part of the last batch of companies that got funded before the market turned in 2000. It ended up being an interesting experience of trying to build a business in a bad market. We raised about $3.5 million. The company was a downloadable application to deliver high-quality photos — back then, that was hard to do because of bandwidth constraints. It was an interesting concept, but probably the biggest lesson from that experience was that market timing is everything. The market was too small, and we just didn’t have a way to really make enough money to make it a big business.

Q. Other lessons from that experience?

A. We didn’t have a strong sense of our senior management and how our goals were defined. And you could kind of feel that permeate the company. A lot of it was just very tactical thinking, just getting done what was in front of us. We didn’t set the context very well. Now I try to create a much broader sense of what we’re doing and why people should be doing it, and giving them more of a hand to shape how they’re going to do it.

It’s interesting. There’s such a premium, particularly in Silicon Valley, placed on youth, but there are certain things you can’t learn without years of experience. Or there’s a certain credibility you gain with people because they know you’ve been through a lot of situations.

Q. What were some other lessons?

A. I ended up joining a company in the mobile space called m-Qube, and it was the opposite experience of my first company. There was this inflection point, and we had this incredible hypergrowth. The business went from roughly $5 million in revenue to north of $80 million in a year.

Q. It can be tough to maintain a culture when you’re growing that fast.

A. There was a strong core culture at the top with the senior management team, and they were very accessible to everyone. One of the things I took away from that experience is that you can’t have senior managers who are off in their own little area. You need a team that’s very approachable, so people can see them and absorb the culture.

Q. And now with your current company, you had the chance to hit the reset button on culture. What’s been your approach?

A. A big thing I talk about at SessionM is that I don’t let the company off the hook when it comes to creating culture. Because at a small company — we have 55 people now — it’s not about a C.E.O. telling you what the culture is. It has to be about the company creating the culture and living the culture and embodying it. So I actually say at all company meetings, “Look, this is a rare opportunity in your career to create a company culture and be a core part of it, because I’m not going to sit up here and just tell you what it is.” So I’ve really tasked our company to help create the culture very overtly.

Q. So what are some examples of what you’ve done?

A. We have something I call our “SessionM PACT,” which is less about our values and more about the way we want people to work. When you join this company, you agree to this PACT, which stands for purpose, accountability, commitment and teamwork. There’s not a meeting that goes by when I don’t mention the PACT. And we have a quarterly award that we give to an employee who truly embodies that way of working.

Q. How do you hire?

A. The most important thing for me is seeing how someone connects with people. Part of that is how they connect with me as an interviewer, but more deeply it’s about whether I can get evidence of connections with people in other parts of their life. So I’ll ask people about their families. I’ll ask about their friends, past colleagues. How do they interact? Do they have strong relationships? Are they someone who can be flexible with different types of people? I typically get a sense very early on if someone’s going to be a fit. First impression for me is very important — that gut feel you have about their excitement and also their style and approach.

Q. Anything you have an unusually low tolerance for in terms of behavior?

A. The “I need” syndrome, where people say: “I need this. I need that.” And part of me thinks: “But then what? What’s your solution? What are you going to do about it?” Because it’s easy to say, “I need 10 more employees.” I think there can be this syndrome of people feeling like they should get a star for saying, “I figured out what I need.” But they’re not helping push the conversation through to what’s going to solve the problem.

Q. What’s your advice to graduating seniors who are about to start their careers?

A. I would say that it’s O.K. to not know exactly what it is you’re going to do next. Don’t get paralyzed thinking that you have to find the perfect job. Part of it is just take action, do something, get in the mix, and you’re going to learn so much more than just theorizing or speculating from the sidelines.

Also, stop worrying about your résumé, and trying to make your résumé something for somebody else. Your résumé is a story of your professional life, and you should be doing it for yourself, not for someone else.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Corner Office: Daniel Lubetzky: Daniel Lubetzky of Kind Snacks, on Reaching Multiple Goals

Q. Were you an entrepreneur early on?

A. I did magic shows, probably from the time I was 8 through 19. When I was a college student, I paid for my travels doing magic shows from the streets of Paris to the streets of Bulgaria.

Q. You’re the third C.E.O. I’ve interviewed who’s a former magician. What’s the correlation?

A. First of all, magicians practice a lot. It requires a lot of discipline. Second, you can’t be afraid to be a leader, to go on stage, and you learn to have presence. You need to be able to visualize and connect and create. Most important, you learn to think outside the box.

Q. What about your parents’ influence?

A. My father was larger than life to me. He was a Holocaust survivor, and when the war ended he went to Mexico to reunite with two of his uncles. He had only a third-grade education but would buy used encyclopedias and read them cover to cover. He was a natural entrepreneur. He started from nothing and built a little jewelry shop. He eventually started duty-free businesses. I learned a lot just from watching him.

Q. Tell me about your leadership style.

A. I’m very inquisitive. I love hanging around people who can teach me. I ask a lot of questions. And I’m very introspective and self-critical. I try hard to always question myself and wonder: “What could I have done better? What did I do wrong?” The culture at our company is to be self-critical, but you have to balance that as a leader with praise for your team.

Q. What else?

A. We talk a lot about “and, not but,” which is about challenging people’s compromises. It is true that sometimes you have to choose this or that, but many times those are false choices. Our brains help us take shortcuts to be efficient, but sometimes the assumptions you take as givens — to help make decisions quickly — are no longer true or have always been false. It’s important to ask: “What do I want to achieve and what’s stopping it? Is there a way to have my cake and eat it?” It’s about being creative.

Q. How do you hire?

A. I ask a lot of questions and I listen to make sure that everything is consistent, because people can be very good at interviewing. They can sound great but you really have to get to know them and understand them and connect things.

I rely heavily on references. The art of a reference check is aligning a candidate’s interest with yours and making sure the reference understands that. You don’t want the person you’re interviewing to come work for you and fail, so you really want to impress that upon the reference.

Reference checks are also an enormous opportunity to strengthen the person if you do hire them — to understand how to get the most out of that person, especially if you’re hiring somebody very senior. You learn about their strengths and weaknesses, so they’re much more likely to have a faster ramp-up and succeed.

I also have strong opinions about the concept of letting people go. There are corporate environments where a person has dedicated their life to working hard, and then they’re fired with a security person escorting them out the door. I find that so demeaning and disrespectful. There are times and places for that, like if somebody is intentionally doing something wrong. And none of what I’m saying has to do with tolerating mediocrity.

But a vast majority of people who work have the best intentions, and sometimes they don’t fit with the work. So if you took the time to hire them and to put them in that situation, and they’re doing their best but just not working out, I think the best practice is to do a few things:

No. 1: Maximum communication, because if you communicate with the person and have constructive criticism early, you might prevent a lot of issues. A lot of problems happen because the manager doesn’t address them, and then it’s too late.

No. 2: If things are not working, set a plan. You have a 30-day plan, a 60-day plan. Hopefully, they get on the right course. If they don’t, maybe it’s just that that particular job doesn’t fit them. So can you move them to another part of the organization? You should have done enough work during the hiring process to determine if the person has your values and your work ethic, but maybe the skill set is not aligned with their job. So can you find another one for them?

Try that first, and if that doesn’t work out, then at that time come up with an elegant way for them to transition out. And we have a different model for that. As long as it’s not someone who has bad intentions — they’re doing their best but you’ve just determined that they need to be doing something else — it’s much better for them to start looking for another job while they’re employed. But they’re also going to help us find the person who will replace them and help train them.

And by the way, in exchange for this culture of us never treating somebody badly, we have an expectation of our employees that they can’t just walk out because they decide to. Everyone is a stockholder, and ownership carries responsibilities. You need to give a minimum of 60 days’ notice if you’re departing. With my direct reports, I require two years. In exchange, I’m blindly loyal to them.

Q. What career advice would you give to a class of graduating seniors?

A. The most important is to make sure that you talk to yourself, that you think hard about what’s important to you and gives you meaning. When I was 19 and walking between classes, I didn’t have a phone, so my brain would take me in different directions. And it’s so healthy and important to be thinking, “Oh, I could have done that better.” Or, “What about this idea?” But nowadays, we’re on our iPhones all the time, and you don’t have time to talk with yourself, to analyze.

It’s very important for people to know what gives them meaning. But it’s hard for people to figure out if you’re not connecting with yourself and taking the time to just be introspective and daydream.

Corner Office: Francisco D’Souza of Cognizant, on Finding Company Heroes

Q. What were some early lessons for you?

A. I was very fortunate in my upbringing. My father was a diplomat, and so, until I was 18, we traveled to a new country every three years. After finishing high school in the Caribbean, I wound up in Hong Kong when I was 18. We realized that there were few universities that taught in English, and so I went to one in Macau that focused on working professionals. I went to school at night and on weekends.

My days were free, and I got a job as a bank teller. It was a small bank, and they still used a punch-card system. I had taught myself as a teenager how to program. I went to the branch manager and told him he ought to consider new technology. He said: “Fine. Help me figure it out.” We bought a computer. We wrote the software, and I wound up supervising a couple of people when I was 19.

Q. I can imagine that some kids would resent moving to a new country every three years.

A. I was somewhat indifferent to it because I expected it, and I knew nothing else. In hindsight, I wouldn’t do it any other way. It really did shape who I am today.

Q. In what sense?

A. We learned how to love the world. There’s this great richness of diversity, yet people are far more similar than they are different. You’re not as likely to learn that when you grow up in one town, in one environment, in one culture or in one country.

The second thing is that it was an environment of scarcity in many ways, because my parents weren’t particularly affluent. You learn how to find opportunities where they don’t exist and capitalize on them. You have to find ways to make the most of everything, from the littlest things to the biggest.

Q. What are some leadership lessons you’ve learned during your career?

A. We started Cognizant in 1994, and there was a period early on when I personally knew everyone in the company. Now we have 160,000 employees, and there were several personal and rapid transitions over that time.

The lesson I learned is that when you have to evolve that quickly as a person, you need to be aware of two things. One is personal blind spots and the other is personal comfort zones. Those two things can be real gotchas.

It’s very hard to see your blind spots, by definition, and it’s very easy to fall into comfort zones, because people like patterns and a sense of familiarity. I’ve tried consciously to say, “What are the tools I can use to identify these blind spots and push through comfort zones?” And I always tell myself that if I wake up in the morning and feel comfortable, I’m probably not pushing myself hard enough.

Q. And what are the tools to help you see your blind spots?

A. One is just talking to other leaders. The conversations with them help me because they are, in a sense, a mirror — I can assess what I think they’re doing well, and where I think their blind spots are. It’s easier to see someone else’s blind spots than it is to see your own, of course, and you can use that to reflect on what your own blind spots are.

I also learned a lot from the people who work for me. Before I took over as C.E.O. in 2007, the board gave me the benefit of some time. I worked with a coach for a while, and he talked to about 20 people who worked for me, above me and around me, and to my board. It was difficult feedback, but very enlightening. That helped me identify a couple of my blind spots.

Q. Can you share one?

A. There was a lot of feedback from my team that people had confidence in my ability, but they also said that when I criticize something they’ve done, the weight of that is very pronounced and significant. It made me understand that the weight of my words was a lot heavier than I gave myself credit for, and it led me to be much more thoughtful and measured in how I give feedback.

Q. What’s unusual about your culture?

A. We’ve organized the company in a way to make sure that we continuously delegate and empower people on the front lines. As we got bigger, we would take larger units and break them down into smaller units and give individuals a sense of ownership, creating very clear success metrics around those individuals.

But when you decentralize and empower, you have to make sure you don’t wind up with lots of microcultures, because every leader, every manager, puts his or her stamp on the culture. Culture gets passed along not by writing it down, but through the rituals you have in the organization, the legends you refer to, and the heroes of the organization. So we institutionalized a set of things to create rituals, heroes and legends.

For example, we have a tradition of naming the associate of the year — we use a process in each region to find the single associate who contributed well above and beyond and, through his or her actions, exhibited the traits of the culture that we thought were important. We similarly institutionalized a ritual that we called the project of the year. And we rent stadiums around the world and bring all the employees and their families for a celebration, with entertainment and awards.

Q. How do you hire?

A. I’m looking for passion. The person I’m hiring needs to have passion for what they’re doing, and they need to understand where that passion comes from. They need to be in touch with that. You need to know what drives you.

And you need somebody who’s got just raw smarts and talent and an innate ability to learn. Because the thing about functional expertise is that unless you’re in some very specific area, almost everything that we need to do our job becomes obsolete quickly, and the half-life of knowledge is becoming shorter and shorter. So do you have the personal agility to continuously renew those skills, to reinvent yourself?

Corner Office: Be Yourself, Redfin’s Glenn Kelman Says, Even if You’re a Little Goofy

Q. What were some important early lessons for you?

A. Two things influenced me the most. I’m an identical twin, and I felt that with my twin brother, we sort of formed this unassailable force and it gave me the confidence to be different. Even if I was a goofball, my twin brother was a goofball with me, so I didn’t have to worry about fitting in as much. I was able to march to my own drummer.

My parents were a big influence, too. My mother was a nurse, and my father was an engineer, but I just think they didn’t know how to fit in. Here’s just one example: We moved into this ritzy neighborhood in suburban Seattle for a little while. We were the only renters, and somebody came by to tell us that we had to mow the lawn, that there were these rules about how short the grass had to be. My dad decided that he wasn’t ever going to mow the lawn. I just felt like we really didn’t fit in in a lot of different ways, and I was constantly in embarrassing situations because of things they did. At one point, my dad used a machete to mow or really just hack back our lawn.

Eventually, I just decided that you couldn’t die of shame and that I could do whatever I wanted to. It made me less risk-averse, and gave me this confidence that I could be myself. I think the corporate world is pretty starved for personality. The reason you have comic strips like “Dilbert” and sitcoms like “The Office” is that people just can’t be genuine human beings in a corporate environment. So if you can really be your own self, even if it’s a little bit different, I think people are really drawn to that.

Q. Did you always want to go into business?

A. I was sort of lost, because I wanted to study everything. At different points, I applied to graduate school. I got into medical school. I thought about being a writer. I thought about being an investment banker. I just didn’t know what I wanted to do with myself. I think the thing that best suits me about being a C.E.O. is that you get to exercise many different talents and wear many different hats.

Q. So how did you get into the world of tech?

A. When I was trying to write a novel, I ran out of money, and I was delivering packages on a bicycle. And I finally connected with these guys who started a software company, and almost serendipitously fell into that. I felt like they were goofy guys and that I was a goofy guy. It was just a really interesting, harrowing environment.

Q. How so?

A. I could hear them arguing in the conference room about whether I should be fired, and the C.E.O. would come out and tell me that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and God help you if you’re that link. I went home every night just convinced that I was the worst employee they had ever seen. It was a weird place, but it taught me to be tough, it taught me to be resourceful. I loved that job.

Q. You were one of the founders of Plumtree Software before you joined Redfin. How did that happen?

A. I met these V.C.’s and connected with Redfin, an early-stage company that had hit hard times. It was three guys in an apartment who put listings on a Web site. I was just the fourth guy in the apartment. I loved it.

Q. You now have 800 employees. Tell me about your approach to leadership today.

A. The main anxiety I have as an executive is making the shift as a start-up person to becoming an executive at a larger company. You worry that you need to change your behavior to match the new scale at the company, but you also worry that you don’t know what’s really going on, and that people are muttering, “Does Kelman have any idea how messed up this is?”

The way you find out is to have lunch with people, or go on a long car ride with them or join the running club with them. But the most important thing you can do as an executive is to just ask the most basic question, which is, “What should Redfin be doing better?” People will say, “I think it’s great.” But if you say to them, “Think about it,” and then follow up with them, you’ll hear, “Well, actually, this is really screwed up, and I think you need to fix it.”

Q. What else about your culture?

A. The main project I have at Redfin is to unite two separate cultures — real estate agents and software engineers. One of the ways we do it is by having people do “A Day in the Life” talks during our all-hands meetings, and they talk for 10 minutes about a typical day. Then you hear other people saying things like, “I had no idea how hard it is to be a real estate agent.”

Q. How do you hire? What are you looking for? What questions do you ask?

A. Mostly what I’ve learned about it is, you can’t judge a book by its cover. It’s very hard in an interview when someone talks about their work to judge them. What you want is to have them do the work. So when I interview engineers, I give them a coding problem and I ask them to work through it. When I interview a marketing person, I say, “Write a press release,” or, if you’re in P.R., “Write a pitch.” I want to see the actual quality of their work.

The other thing that I look for is people who are beasts. I was a dishwasher once and I kept falling behind with all the dishes, and this guy in the kitchen yelled at me to get me going — “You’re an animal. You’re a beast.” And I was just a very intellectual, effete kid — I was probably reading Proust at that point in my life — and that experience made me a lot grittier and tougher.

If I haven’t found evidence that someone’s ever done anything hard in their lives, then I just don’t believe they’re suddenly going to be able to jump into a phone booth, come out wearing a cape and learn how to be tough on this job. I want to know about anything you’ve done that’s hard, really hard. So I tend to focus on that.

Corner Office: Clara Lippert Glenn, on Balancing Intensity and ‘Kumbaya’

Q. When you were a kid, were you in leadership roles?

A. Not at all. The complete opposite. I was shy, introverted. You could make me blush just by saying my name. I just was not comfortable in my skin. I was the one who would sit in the middle of the classroom — never in the front, never in the back. I would rarely raise my hand. I didn’t like to draw attention to myself. In college, I probably really started to come out of my shell.

Q. How and why?

A. I’m not really sure. I became more aware that there were things I should be proud that I could do. You start to become familiar with what you’re good at, and decide to take more charge of your life.

Q. What did you study?

A. I was a language major. I studied three languages, but my major was Russian. My plan was to go work for the United Nations and single-handedly help solve the cold war. And when I graduated, the U.N. wanted no part of me. In fact, who wants a Russian major? Nobody did, except for the C.I.A., which was convinced that I could sit in a little cubicle and translate articles all day long, which I had no desire to do.

The life lesson was that it’s not what you think it’s going to be. So what’s your Plan B, and how quickly can you shift to Plan B? I had to shift really quickly. I did not have a Plan B. I was graduating, and I needed one. I had student loans to pay off. Then a great professor said to me: “You’re good at languages. You seem to like business. Why don’t you go get a business degree, but one that’s international?” I thought, “Well, there’s an idea.”

Q. What was it about business that interested you?

A. There was always a puzzle to put together. If you could envision the endgame, there was always a way to put together the pieces to get there. I loved that aspect of it. I loved being given case studies and problems, and trying to figure out how I was going to make this work.

Q. And after business school?

A. I was very lucky to get into the energy industry as a trader. I loved it. I’m a little competitive. Actually, I’m very competitive, and it was an environment where people were measured day by day on how well they’re doing. I really like that.

Q. You eventually started a company that trains people on the energy markets. So let’s say you’re on version 5.0 of how you lead now. How did you evolve from version 1.0 to today?

A. Version 1.0 was scared to death. I’d been given money by the venture capitalists to do this, and I had to make it work. I was probably too rough. I was too strict and very intense.

Version 2.0 then became too soft. Too “kumbaya.” So Version 3.0 tried to marry the two and be tough but fair, and set expectations. I would tell people: “Here’s what works for me. I don’t like surprises. I cannot stand an e-mail that is more than a page long. If you can’t say it in a page, then you shouldn’t be e-mailing me; you should be coming and talking to me.” I set out the guidelines for working with me.

Version 4.0 became far more cognizant of the need to not be afraid to admit that a certain employee isn’t happy. Can we make them happy? Is there another role? Or is this not the right organization for them? And that’s a tough thing, because you’d like to think: “Well, this is the best place in the world to work. How could anybody not want to work here?”

And now 5.0 has come to realize the importance of culture, environment and work-life balance. I’ve seen employees overwork. But a well-adjusted, well-rounded employee, in the end, is going to stay with you longer and produce better work. It’s not worth it to push people to where they’re putting in 12-hour days. And I’m going to force you to take your vacation, and I don’t want to get e-mails from you while you’re on vacation.

Q. What triggered that shift in thinking?

A. My husband passed away. I was 48 years old and I was a widow. He died when he was only 56, and he was working like crazy right up until he died.

Q. You talked earlier about some things you make sure your employees know about you. What else?

A. I understand everyone’s need to vent. If you tell me that’s what you need to do, I’m happy to sit there and listen. But don’t whine. I like to be around positive people.

Q. Anything else that people know not to do at your company?

A. I’ve banned the use of the “blind copy” function in e-mail. It can be a little infantile. Why would you use it? If you want to say something, and you want people to know you’re saying it to me or someone else, everybody should be addressed in the e-mail. You want to work in a place where you feel you have value, and that people aren’t talking about you behind your back.

Q. How do you hire? How would you interview me, for example?

A. I want to know about you. I want to know what you do, what your habits are at work, what your habits are outside of work. I want to get to know you as a person. I also want to know the best boss you ever worked for and the worst boss you ever worked for, and what made them that. Because that will tell me a lot about what you expect when you walk into an office, and what you’re hoping to get.

I also learned a question that I only ask people I’m interviewing for a sales position: “If you woke up tomorrow morning, and there were no humans left on the earth — just animals — what kind of animal are you?”

A good salesperson is going to be a predator. They’re going to be a lion. Somebody once said velociraptor. I said, “Oh, I like that.”

Q. And what kind of animal would you be?

A. Great white shark. I’m scared to death of them, so why not be one? You’re the top of the food chain.

Corner Office: Dane Atkinson of SumAll, on Making Pay an Open Book

Q. Were you an entrepreneur early on?

A. My parents made me work for money at a very young age. I had a dog-walking business when I was about 6 or 7 years old. I wrote my first piece of software when I was about 11. At around 13, I started working in advertising, because a lot of people didn’t know how to use computers. They paid me $25 an hour. By the time I was 18, I was C.O.O. of a subsidiary of one of the Grey advertising companies. We had about 20 or 30 employees.

Q. That’s a big management role at a young age.

A. I tried to ignore the fact that I was younger, and I would lead from the front. So I worked longer hours, just to make sure people knew that I wasn’t taking advantage of them. I looked after them, and that really helped protect me from other mistakes.

Q. How many companies have you started?

A. Well over a dozen, if you count the act of starting. Fewer if you just count the ones that were successful.

One reason entrepreneurship is so amazing — and one of the reasons I recommend it to everybody — is that unlike most other career paths, it is the purest lens for looking at yourself. If you’re in a big operation, you can blame the surrounding environment. When you’re starting your own company, it’s just you. There really is nothing else. So you have to take that medicine at its purest form, which I think matures you as a person faster.

Q. What were some early lessons running your first company, SenseNet?

A. I made every mistake possible. One of the biggest mistakes I made was that, in your first company, you can really get attached to the idea of equity and ownership, and so it becomes much more of a baby to you. You lose that after you do it a couple of times, but I was overly greedy early on with the ownership. It was a huge learning curve.

Q. Tell me about the culture of your current company.

A. We have a wildly different environment. For example, everybody knows everybody’s salary. It’s pure transparency, which manifests itself with a much greater level of trust. Everybody knows each other’s ownership stake, too.

Q. What was your thinking behind that?

A. The first few months of the company, all we did was talk about culture. We didn’t even know what we were going to do first. We really overthought how to build an environment.

The usual corporate doctrine can be configured poorly for employees. It’s almost designed to enable evil to happen. You can tell an employee they have 10,000 shares, but it doesn’t mean much if I just give myself 100 million shares or whatever. Their stake is going to be worthless. Most of the engineers out there have no idea what their ownership stake really is. They’re just told, here’s how much you own. It’s worth this now, and it could be worth that later.

Q. What happens if you want to pay somebody above-market wages? How do people react?

A. I can’t hire them. So far I’ve not been able to go “out of bounds” to hire people. I try to get the consensus of the team, but if they say it doesn’t make sense, then I don’t hire them.

Q. But you’re the C.E.O.

A. I’m good at arguing. I’m good at getting people to believe in things. But if I can’t get them to believe that we should hire this person for a certain amount, then I might actually be wrong.

When we first started with this, we’d send out the package details of every new hire to the entire team. That caused a lot of stress. So we’ve switched that and now just their peer group will know the new hire’s compensation and be forced to a vote. The information is shared on a drive that everybody can see, but we don’t broadcast it out to everybody. Very few people look at them, though. But they know the information is there if they want to see it, and that creates more trust in a deeper way.

Q. What else about your culture?

A. We have a trial on-boarding process. Anyone we hire goes into a 45-day test period. But we have a really high bar, and only about 65 percent make it through. At the end we have a fresh, clean start and we decide if we want to get married. It turns out to be much healthier for on-boarding when you make sure everybody likes who we’re bringing on.

Q. And with the 35 percent who don’t work out, what’s the pattern?

A. Sometimes people don’t fit into our environment. We’re still at a stage where culture makes an extreme difference. Sometimes we’re not an organization that’s as supportive for them as we’d hope to be. A couple of people who didn’t make it through required an additional level of mentoring. And we believe in mentoring. But if they need an excessive amount, they won’t develop. They won’t grow fast enough, and it’s not the right place for them, or for us. So we save each other the hassle.

Q. A lot of companies struggle to create an environment where people have frank discussions about employees’ performance. How do you do it?

A. You’re expected to have hard conversations as often as you can. That’s how you get better. You’re expected to sit down with your peers and say: “You know what? You really didn’t do that well.” And those conversations are amazing because they de-stress the frustration that people can feel. So you’re unhappy with the way somebody managed the project. You sit down and you talk with them. Maybe you didn’t understand the full picture. We’re all human beings. You have a basic belief that everyone’s here for the same goal and is competent. Then, once you understand their pain points to work through, you can better eliminate where they really failed.

Q. How do you hire?

A. We want ambition. We want people who are hungry. We want people who love what they do. A big screen for us is seeing what people’s personal hobbies are. We look for the playgrounds people play in. We want people who are writing books or building an app or doing other things that show that it’s not just a job — they have an actual native passion for it. So we usually ask a lot about people’s hobbies.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Corner Office: A Great Manager Should Expect a Peaceful Vacation

Q. You started out as an architect. Tell me about that experience.

A. I worked in an architectural firm in New Haven for about two and a half years. The lessons I learned working there far exceeded anything I could have learned in business school from an entrepreneurship perspective.

The owners not only focused on the current projects, but also constantly looked ahead for other opportunities. I learned about the relentless pursuit of business from them. They were very focused. When we got a little too rambunctious on the floor where all the draftsmen were, they’d say, calm down, let’s keep going.

Q. What were some other early management lessons for you?

A. Like many people who move from doing to managing, I probably stayed more involved at a granular level than what’s optimal. When you do that, you spend less time managing. Whenever you don’t know what to do, you revert back to what you know, which is, “Let me do it because I can get this done.” The challenge that created was that I wouldn’t necessarily develop people as quickly as I probably should have, because I would often say it’s easier for me to do it, and then they’d watch. But that’s not the same as giving someone the guidelines and saying, “You do it,” and though it may not be exactly the way I would have done it, I can give guidance.

I probably did not do that as well as I could have early on. If you develop people, it means fewer phone calls and fewer interruptions when you’re on vacation. If you haven’t developed them, then you’re tethered to the organization. Some people love to know they’re needed constantly, and that people have to call them. Unfortunately it’s common, but it’s not the best for the organization. I found that when I’m on vacation and getting calls and constant e-mails, then I must not be doing as good a job as I should to make sure that the group can perform without me.

Q. What kind of culture did you want when you started your own firm?

A. I wanted this company to be operated in a way that doesn’t have the faults or shortcomings that people might have seen at their prior employer. Any large organization has certain issues. I wanted to make sure that we’d do whatever we could to mitigate those. The biggest issues are people not necessarily being valued for their performance and instead being caught up in the bureaucratic hierarchy, where they were either going to survive or thrive or do poorly because of the area they worked in, or their careers could be enhanced or held back by their relationships or lack of relationships.

I want this to be a complete meritocracy. That’s something you have to make sure you constantly let people know. You’ve got to judge people on their merits. You have a variety of personalities, and it never fails that anyone, including me, might prefer to spend time with one person instead of another. But if people are professional, productive and an asset to the firm, my personal preferences shouldn’t have anything to do with it. I try to make sure I emphasize that regularly.

Q. One big challenge for C.E.O.’s is to make sure they get out of the bubble that naturally gets created around them, because people only want to bring them good news. How do you counter that?

A. Probably the most honest and direct and frequent feedback I get is from my wife, who is a senior fixed-income salesperson here and a partner in the firm. Sometimes my colleagues may not want to come directly to me to find out what I think, or they’ll want to get a message to me, and they will go to her. I don’t always agree with her assessment of me or a situation, but it’s good to hear the input in an unfiltered way from someone else, rather than people just telling me everything I want to hear.

Q. How do you hire?

A. The first thing I look for are the nonverbal components of one’s overall presence and presentation. Would I buy from this person? Would I want to do business with that individual? Do they look me in the eye? Do they have a certain energy level? Do they seem confident? Those are the kinds of things that really matter most.

I care less about your résumé in terms of the places you worked or where you went to school. What I do care about is how your résumé can give me insights into why you went from one position to another. I’m listening for how someone weaves together the changes in their career, and why they left one job for another. We all make mistakes. We all have setbacks. I’m listening to why someone left.

If I see multiple positions where there wasn’t necessarily progression, that’s always a point of concern for me. I listen closely if someone had a position that is a major change from the rest of their career — if there’s an outlier role. It’s not the worst thing to say, “I was laid off, and I needed a job and so I pursued this position, I gave it a shot, but I eventually went back to my area of specialization.” That’s perfectly fine.

But when people try to present the story of their career so that every move was a step up, everything was perfect and everything is wonderful, then I have to question whether they are realists. Are they going to be someone I’d feel comfortable working with? Or are they going to be constantly putting a spin on everything that happens?

I also don’t want anyone who’s constantly going to tell me what I want to hear, or what they think I want to hear. I find there are times when, if I make my view known too early, then I’ve just shaped the whole direction of the conversation. So when I’m interviewing someone, I will ask them how they feel about certain issues and points, and how they feel about certain organizations.

Before I describe how Williams Capital operates, I want to hear about their ideal environment. I want to hear how they interact with their colleagues rather than me saying, well, here’s the way Williams Capital is, because then I’ll just hear something similar back from them.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Corner Office: Fred Hassan of Bausch & Lomb, on Managers as Ambassadors

Q. What were some early leadership lessons for you?

A. My parents sent me off to learn engineering in Britain. One company I worked for had a tiered system. I would get my paycheck out of one window, and the guys who were in lower middle management would get their paycheck at another window. We would sit in separate cafeterias. I never forgot that, and wherever I’ve been in a position to make changes, the first thing I’ve always done is to get rid of any barriers that separate people.

Q. Other early lessons?

A. A very important thing I learned from my parents was to get your hands dirty. Just go in there and do a good job, always focus on the next mile, and things are usually going to break your way.

Q. What did your parents do for a living?

A. My dad was a civil servant. He was proud of what he did, and he worked very hard. Seeing people around him do well was the big thing he was proud of, and that’s something that’s very deep in my DNA. My mother was a politician for a while. She also sponsored an organization for women’s rights. She was a person who didn’t want to play a traditional role, and yet she did it in a very careful, calm and peaceful manner.

Q. Early on, you rose up quickly through the ranks at Sandoz. How did you do that?

A. I had the reputation of being somebody you could ask to show up and do something different with a difficult situation. I would get it done, and then I would get the next job. I was head of Sandoz Pakistan, and they were so shocked at the dramatic turnaround there that they put me in charge of Sandoz U.S., which was in bad shape.

Q. So what was your playbook?

A. Roll up your sleeves, build credibility, and be very authentic with everybody so people start to believe you and trust you, and then get them to move together in the same direction. Then, when the green shoots occur, celebrate those wins, because people want to be on a winning team. That gets the flywheel turning. You have to gain a mandate for change. You can’t just say, “I’m the new change agent.”

You have to behave in a very consistent manner. If you appoint people two and three levels down who are credible, the organization starts to say, hey, maybe this change effort is for real. The other group I try to get to very quickly are the front-line managers, because if they start to see themselves as ambassadors as opposed to shop stewards, it totally changes the productivity of the whole organization.

Q. What steps do you take with the people two and three levels down?

A. When I went to Schering-Plough, I talked to them as a group, and I asked everyone to identify their main issues, their main problems, and we went around the room. Then I went around the room again and I said, “Now tell me how you’re going to solve it, and how everybody else can help you.” By asking them in that manner, I wanted them to take ownership and accountability.

Initially, there’s a tendency to just focus on the problems and almost act a little helpless. But by asking them to talk about the solutions, and encouraging them to speak in front of their peers, that creates a certain positive tension. It forces people to say, “What am I going to do to make a contribution to the effort here?”

Q. Are there things you have a particularly low tolerance for in these turnaround situations?

A. If I go into a change situation as C.E.O., there are the boosters who are with you, and there are the naysayers who you have to either convince or move out. But then you’ve got these passive-aggressives who are very difficult to deal with, and you’ve got the fence-sitters who mean well but are not totally convinced about the new program.

The passive-aggressives are the ones who on the surface appear to be nodding their heads, but they’re actually not with you, and they undermine culture change in a big way. They make it so much harder. You’ve got to get these passive-aggressives out of the system as early as possible. They hold you back.

Q. What are some of their behaviors?

A. They’ll nod their head in a meeting, and then say something else to 100 people. They know who the other passive-aggressives are, and they signal to each other just with their body language, tone and demeanor. It is very toxic, and I see it in the body language first. Their arms are folded, or a smile comes out at the wrong moment. And when I see it, and I’ve learned to spot it over the years, I do not let them get away with it for too long. It just doesn’t work.

Q. Six executives who’ve worked with you have gone on to become C.E.O.’s on their own. How did you mentor them?

A. Every one of them has a different story, but two things were always in common: No. 1 was expanding their role at the right time so that they got to stretch themselves. No. 2, I did a lot of reverse mentoring. So I listened to what they had to tell me, and that helped me be a better mentor. I don’t think mentors are at their best if it’s only one way. Mentoring is also most effective when the person who’s being mentored really wants to soak it up. I don’t think it’s an easy “push” system. It’s a much better “pull” system.

Q. How do you hire?

A. To some extent, it depends on the level you’re hiring at, and the development stage of the company. Let’s say it’s a turnaround situation and I’m a board member, and I’m hiring a C.E.O. I look for a few things, and the kinds of questions I ask are: Why do you want this job? Why do you believe you’re good for this job? Why do you believe you can win? What would early wins look like, and when can we expect them? And what would you do in the first 200 days, and in the next 200 days? Based on the answers, I would see a lot. Then I might go into the “whys” — they tell you a lot about a person.

Off the Charts: Hints of a Corner Finally Turned in Ireland

That news hardly indicates that Ireland has come out of its long downturn, one that was brought on by a property boom backed by irresponsible lending. But the upturn in real estate prices nonetheless provided a note of cheer this week in a country whose consumers were already more optimistic — or at least less pessimistic — than they had been in years.

The Central Statistics Office reported that prices of residences in Ireland — homes and apartments — were 1.2 percent higher in June than they had been a year earlier. As can be seen from the accompanying charts, it was the first time since January 2008 that home prices rose over a 12-month period.

The recovery, such as it is, is concentrated in the Dublin region, where it appears that the huge backlog of overbuilding has finally been worked off. That is not true in some other parts of the country, where prices continue to decline.

And even with the latest increase, the index of residential prices is 50 percent below the peak level, and mortgage delinquencies continue to rise. Prices of apartments have fallen further than house prices, declining 60 percent from the peak, compared with a 48 percent decline for houses.

Before the real estate prices were reported, the KBC Ireland/ESRI Consumer Sentiment Index rose in June to the highest level since late 2007. As can be seen from the charts, which trace the two components of that index, that is largely because of an increase in the index of economic expectations, which is higher than at any time since July 2007. The index of current conditions remains in the range it has languished in for several years.

The latest increase in consumer confidence came as something of a surprise, and Austin Hughes, an analyst at KBC Bank, said it might be partly because of exceptionally good weather while the survey was being conducted. “It remains the case that Irish consumers are cautious and the improvement in sentiment is still fragile,” he said, “but the June sentiment reading is consistent with the view that the Irish economy is edging forward rather than slipping backward.” He added, “Signs of an improvement in both the jobs market and the property market of late appear to have eased consumer fears.”

The government also reported this week that 2,009 new homes were completed in the second quarter of this year, 11 more than in the same period of 2012. It was the first time since December 2006 that three-month figures showed a year-over-year gain.

But the figures still remain extremely low. For the last 12 months, 8,259 homes were finished. That is fewer than were finished in the single month of December 2006, while the property boom was at its strongest.

Floyd Norris comments on finance and the economy at nytimes.com/economix.

Corner Office: Joyce Brown of F.I.T., on Using Your ‘Third Ear’

Q. What was your plan for your career when you were younger?

A. I always knew I wanted to go into psychology. I’m a psychologist by training, which I think is a tremendous help in everything I do.

Q. How so?

A. Among the more important things I learned in pursuing the degree in psychology was an appreciation of an organization’s interrelationships. I think you have to follow process even if you’re not being a bureaucrat. I don’t want to be bound by the process, but I think respecting the process is important — respecting what everybody’s role is — then figuring out how to make everybody work together.

One thing that emerged from the training, and what I do day to day, is to understand who’s responsible for what and to make sure I don’t then ask someone else to do that person’s job. It’s very easy to slip and do that. You can involve others, of course. They may have a suggestion that’s easy enough to incorporate, and then everybody owns a little piece of it. But you have to be clear about who’s responsible. Otherwise, people will cross wires, and that will create a ripple effect that’s totally unnecessary.

Q. Other ways that you draw on your training in psychology?

A. I am convinced that I have a third ear. I listen, and I really pay attention and try very hard to understand the nuances. I tell people that I will listen to what they say, and will try to incorporate what I can from their suggestions if I think they fit the objective we’re trying to achieve. If we’re not going to do what they’re suggesting, I’ll tell them why. I think people deserve that. I will tell you why, and then we will proceed. I think it works, because people feel that they were listened to, and were given the respect of an answer about why I might disagree. You gain a lot by being respectful of people’s ideas.

Q. Talk about some other leadership lessons you’ve learned over the years.

A. It’s important not to choose alliances too early. There are always issues and camps that develop in any organization. You may think you understand them, but you don’t.

I don’t really think there are people who wake up every morning wanting to tear things down in an organization. But there are people with strongly held beliefs who are driven by various things — maybe their own need to be in the limelight, or maybe some deep philosophical belief.

Q. What have you learned from other leaders you’ve observed?

A. I had people who were very helpful to me, who saw something they thought was worth developing, and they created opportunities for me. Their ability to analyze and to be thorough and to think about the impact of one decision versus another was interesting and helpful to watch.

I also saw a lot of things I knew I didn’t want to do. Some people were emotional, histrionic, intolerant and wanted to humiliate people. I also saw people who didn’t pay attention to detail, which I think will sink you every time. My staff calls me Dr. Detail — lovingly, I’m sure. That doesn’t mean I micromanage, but I need to know the details. Things can come around and bite when you don’t pay attention to the real substance.

I’ve also seen people who didn’t respect process. They reached down into the ranks and had other people doing things that marginalized the people they needed to rely on to really get the job done and move the organization forward.

Q. How do you hire? What qualities do you look for? What questions do you ask?

A. I’m really interested in who you are and if you fit in with the culture, with the team — how committed you are to the objectives and goals we’ve set, the vision we have. I like to know how they got here, so I always ask what they thought they were going to do when they were younger, when they went to college.

Why did you choose your major? What did you think you were going to do? What was your vision for your career? How did you get where you are? What were the various things that happened along the way, because invariably it wasn’t a straight line. Then I like to know a little bit about where people grew up. Are they living in the same place they grew up, or did they leave their hometown to come to New York? Are they adventurous? Are they a risk-taker? What’s their passion about? What’s driving them?

Q. What are you listening for?

A. I’m listening for passion. I’m listening for a commitment to being the best, to being successful, and a commitment to something larger than themselves, not just their personal success. That kind of drive really does blossom into one’s work ethic and attitude and approach.

Q. Anything you have a particularly low tolerance for?

A. It’s kind of subtle, but I don’t like when people tear other people down because they’re not owning what might have been their mistake. If you don’t take any risks, you certainly won’t make any mistakes, but you’re not going to get that far, either. So it’s O.K. to make a mistake. You just need to own your mistake. That’s a bad sign for me if somebody doesn’t.

The other thing I don’t like is people who waste other people’s time. They’ll have meetings with no point — everybody has to come together just because you can call them all together. Then, at the end of the day, everybody’s just wasted an hour and a half, and there’s no point to the agenda. Maybe they’re just trying to show they’re in charge of something that they really don’t fully understand. So they might ask 25 questions, or even 10, when they didn’t need to ask any. Ultimately when people can’t answer all their questions, it does sort of make them seem much more smart and more important.

But it doesn’t really work when what you’re trying to do is build a well-oiled machine. All they had to say was: “How can I help you? Let’s figure this out.” They need to be committed to something beyond themselves.

Corner Office: Joyce Brown of F.I.T., on Using Your ‘Third Ear’

Q. What was your plan for your career when you were younger?

A. I always knew I wanted to go into psychology. I’m a psychologist by training, which I think is a tremendous help in everything I do.

Q. How so?

A. Among the more important things I learned in pursuing the degree in psychology was an appreciation of an organization’s interrelationships. I think you have to follow process even if you’re not being a bureaucrat. I don’t want to be bound by the process, but I think respecting the process is important — respecting what everybody’s role is — then figuring out how to make everybody work together.

One thing that emerged from the training, and what I do day to day, is to understand who’s responsible for what and to make sure I don’t then ask someone else to do that person’s job. It’s very easy to slip and do that. You can involve others, of course. They may have a suggestion that’s easy enough to incorporate, and then everybody owns a little piece of it. But you have to be clear about who’s responsible. Otherwise, people will cross wires, and that will create a ripple effect that’s totally unnecessary.

Q. Other ways that you draw on your training in psychology?

A. I am convinced that I have a third ear. I listen, and I really pay attention and try very hard to understand the nuances. I tell people that I will listen to what they say, and will try to incorporate what I can from their suggestions if I think they fit the objective we’re trying to achieve. If we’re not going to do what they’re suggesting, I’ll tell them why. I think people deserve that. I will tell you why, and then we will proceed. I think it works, because people feel that they were listened to, and were given the respect of an answer about why I might disagree. You gain a lot by being respectful of people’s ideas.

Q. Talk about some other leadership lessons you’ve learned over the years.

A. It’s important not to choose alliances too early. There are always issues and camps that develop in any organization. You may think you understand them, but you don’t.

I don’t really think there are people who wake up every morning wanting to tear things down in an organization. But there are people with strongly held beliefs who are driven by various things — maybe their own need to be in the limelight, or maybe some deep philosophical belief.

Q. What have you learned from other leaders you’ve observed?

A. I had people who were very helpful to me, who saw something they thought was worth developing, and they created opportunities for me. Their ability to analyze and to be thorough and to think about the impact of one decision versus another was interesting and helpful to watch.

I also saw a lot of things I knew I didn’t want to do. Some people were emotional, histrionic, intolerant and wanted to humiliate people. I also saw people who didn’t pay attention to detail, which I think will sink you every time. My staff calls me Dr. Detail — lovingly, I’m sure. That doesn’t mean I micromanage, but I need to know the details. Things can come around and bite when you don’t pay attention to the real substance.

I’ve also seen people who didn’t respect process. They reached down into the ranks and had other people doing things that marginalized the people they needed to rely on to really get the job done and move the organization forward.

Q. How do you hire? What qualities do you look for? What questions do you ask?

A. I’m really interested in who you are and if you fit in with the culture, with the team — how committed you are to the objectives and goals we’ve set, the vision we have. I like to know how they got here, so I always ask what they thought they were going to do when they were younger, when they went to college.

Why did you choose your major? What did you think you were going to do? What was your vision for your career? How did you get where you are? What were the various things that happened along the way, because invariably it wasn’t a straight line. Then I like to know a little bit about where people grew up. Are they living in the same place they grew up, or did they leave their hometown to come to New York? Are they adventurous? Are they a risk-taker? What’s their passion about? What’s driving them?

Q. What are you listening for?

A. I’m listening for passion. I’m listening for a commitment to being the best, to being successful, and a commitment to something larger than themselves, not just their personal success. That kind of drive really does blossom into one’s work ethic and attitude and approach.

Q. Anything you have a particularly low tolerance for?

A. It’s kind of subtle, but I don’t like when people tear other people down because they’re not owning what might have been their mistake. If you don’t take any risks, you certainly won’t make any mistakes, but you’re not going to get that far, either. So it’s O.K. to make a mistake. You just need to own your mistake. That’s a bad sign for me if somebody doesn’t.

The other thing I don’t like is people who waste other people’s time. They’ll have meetings with no point — everybody has to come together just because you can call them all together. Then, at the end of the day, everybody’s just wasted an hour and a half, and there’s no point to the agenda. Maybe they’re just trying to show they’re in charge of something that they really don’t fully understand. So they might ask 25 questions, or even 10, when they didn’t need to ask any. Ultimately when people can’t answer all their questions, it does sort of make them seem much more smart and more important.

But it doesn’t really work when what you’re trying to do is build a well-oiled machine. All they had to say was: “How can I help you? Let’s figure this out.” They need to be committed to something beyond themselves.

Corner Office: Pedro Baranda of Otis Elevator, on the Push for Innovation

Q. What was your first management role?

A. I studied a lot in my 20s — a six-year program in Spain, and then a Ph.D. here in the United States. So my first management role was when I was about 30. I was a research engineer and I had to hire two people.

Q. And was it an easy transition for you?

A. I probably made quite a few mistakes and learned from them. The main mistake I tended to make — and probably still do sometimes — is that because I’m an engineer, I like to get into the details of things. So I got some feedback about it early on, such as, “Let me do my job.”

That was an important lesson, because if you want to develop leaders and not followers, one of the key things you have to learn to do is delegate. One of my bosses once told me: “You’ve got to delegate because there are only three possible outcomes. You tell them what your expectations are, and if their solution is better than yours, that’s fantastic. If the solution is the same as yours would be, then it’s fantastic, too, because at least you didn’t have to do it. And if it’s not as good as you expected, you can always take the time to teach them why and what to do differently. That way, you will have learned about the person and the person will have learned from you.”

That lesson about delegation is fundamental if you want to develop leaders and not followers. I heard an expression from one of my business professors — that talent flow is the best predictor of future cash flows — and that has stayed with me.

Q. What is some other feedback you’ve heard over the years about your management style?

A. When you do 360’s with your team, you learn that the perception people have about your skills might be different from yours. When I took over a role in Portugal, my big concern was whether I knew the business well enough. When I had the 360, the feedback was just the opposite. They said: “You understand the business pretty well. What you’ve got to do is not intimidate people at meetings, to be more open to things that may not be right, and listen.” That was a big lesson — you have to learn to be tolerant of failure, because if you are intolerant of failure, your company will retrench and not be innovative. You have to encourage people to take calculated risks. If you punish people who take risks and don’t succeed, they will never take a risk again.

Q. How do you foster innovation?

A. The spark of innovation can be difficult to manage. We have a more structured process, even though some people might think processes are kind of a straitjacket for innovation. But in our case, they’re for guiding the thought process. We decide where to focus on innovation, and we call them our innovation thrusts, which are based on what we’re hearing from customers, architects, consultants, general contractors — everyone in our industry.

We want to know what is going to be important for their business five to 10 years out. Sometimes they don’t know, but you can sense what’s going to be important for them. At any given time we have five or six innovation thrusts. Once you have those, then you structure the process around those themes, and you guide the sparks in areas where they would have a big impact.

Then we do two things. We bring together teams of people from around the world, because I believe that diversity is fundamental in the thought process. I really appreciate the importance of diversity as a catalyst for creation and innovation. It matters not just in product development and technology — I think it happens in many other aspects of the enterprise. But for innovation, it’s fundamental.

We also have an internal Web page where people can post their ideas about innovations. We have 62,000 employees, and they can vote on the ideas — thumb up or thumb down — or build on them. It also helps you to see people who have this innovative spirit. Those are the people we want to invite to meetings to develop ideas.

Q. How do you hire? What qualities are you looking for?

A. First, does the person smile? Is there a positive feeling when you talk to somebody, or are they an energy drain? That’s important. Then you try to find out the raw material and the competencies. There are techniques to try to find out their competencies, but I think it’s become like an arms race, with interviewees knowing the tools you use to learn their competencies, and they prepare for them. So I think you have to just let the conversation flow.

Q. And what if you had only enough time to ask someone a few questions?

A. I would probably ask them what they like about what they do, just to get a general sense of whether they are capable of loving what they do. And then the difficult question I ask when people are looking to change jobs is, “Why do you want to change if you like it so much?” We want people who want to have a longer-term career with us, and we want people who like what they do. And so if they like what they do, then why are they looking to move somewhere else?

Q. What advice would you give a graduating class of college students?

A. I think you have to try to follow your passion with some flexibility to adapt to reality and enjoy every bit. Life is short. So the one thing I always insist on is making sure that you like what you do.

And I always recommend that you focus on what you have in hand today. If you’re thinking too much about what your next job is going to be, you will not do your current job well, and then the next job will never come because companies tend to be meritocratic.

So I always tell people, first, focus on what you do today. Make sure you like what you do, because if you don’t, you’re not going to succeed. You cannot always do what you like, but you can get to like what you do. So it’s good to follow your passion, but then you have to make an effort to adapt yourself, to make sure that you love what you do.

Corner Office: Paulett Eberhart: Paulett Eberhart of CDI, on Gaining the Boss’s Attention

Q. Were you in leadership roles early on?

A. After I graduated from college, I was hired as a billing office supervisor of about 30 people.

Q. That’s a big step for a first management role.

A. It’s one of those moments where you show up at the right time and they needed someone, and I think my college education was important to them. I had the good fortune of working for a woman who taught me a lot. Most of the people who worked there were older than me and they certainly had a lot more experience.

So how do you deal with that? You have to learn to become very humble, and you have to recognize that they know a lot more than you do. I spent a lot of time walking around getting to know them, spending time sitting with them, learning what they were doing, how they were doing it. I think they appreciated that.

Q. You said your boss at the time was a good mentor. How so?

A. She knew that I really wanted to learn, I was dedicated, and I was working really hard. I have found that if people think you’re working really hard and trying, then they’ll spend extra time with you. I learned very early that you’ve got to ask for help, you’ve got to go in and say: “Look, I’ve got this situation and I’m not sure what to do. I want to run it by you.” If people think you’re really trying, they’ll go the extra mile to help you.

Q. Tell me about some aspects of your leadership style today.

A. I tell my team that I expect them to be very honest, brutally honest with me, but in a respectful way. I like to have strong people around me, and they have to be very open and very honest and very candid. So you can’t just tell me once and assume that I grasp it.

If it’s critical and important, you’ve got to come back, you’ve got to tell me, you’ve got to come into my office and shut the door. I don’t care if you have to pound your fists on the table and say, “Paulett, I don’t think you’re comprehending it, I want your full attention, listen to me, this is what I am telling you.” We, at a minimum, need to discuss it or whatever the situation is.

And so I encourage them to be very aggressive with me because I work and I run at a fast pace, and sometimes you have to stop and take five minutes. You’ve got to invite them in and sit down and say: “O.K., what are the issues? You’ve got my full attention. Let’s talk about it.”

Q. You were brought into your current company to turn it around.

A. The board decided it needed someone from the outside who could bring more of a growth culture, which is a lot of what I like to do. I like transforming businesses and then figuring out how do we get a new strategy and start really growing. A lot of that goes back to my early days at E.D.S. because we grew so quickly there.

Q. What have you done to change the culture?

A. I was surprised to learn how many people in the company really didn’t know the company’s history. So I had some people re-create the history and we put together a video, because I think it’s good to know the past that leads you into the future.

I also saw a company that had really talented people, but they didn’t really talk to each other a lot. They were in different silos, and there were actually a lot of silos, given the size of the company. One of the things I heard from talking to our clients is that people from CDI don’t even know who each other are. That told me we weren’t maximizing our opportunities with the client.

So we tore down a lot of the barriers and really got people to think that if it’s good for the client, and good for CDI, then we’ve got to figure out a way to make it happen.

The other thing that I really focused on was accountability. You have to be accountable for your actions. And if you sign up to hit an objective, whatever that objective may be, then the rest of the organization and your client, or whoever else it may be, are counting on you to hit that goal. I felt we needed to push that more. Culture is a hard thing to change. It takes a long time, but you’ve just got to keep repeating things and practicing what you preach.

Q.  I’ve heard a lot of leaders talk about the importance of repetition.

A. People don’t spend enough time communicating. People love to know what’s going on, and you’ve got to keep communicating day in and day out. Sometimes I’ll think, I’ve said this so many times — surely people would get it. But then you’ll go into a meeting and you’ll think, wow, O.K., they don’t get it yet, so we’ve got to continue reinforcing it.

Q. How do you hire?

A. I try to get them to talk about what’s not on their résumé. Part of it is just getting a sense of the person. I’ll say that we’ve all had a lot of successes in our life, but we’ve had some things that we’ve learned from as well, so what are some of those?

And I’ll ask them, “If I were to talk to a group of people who’ve worked for you in different roles, what would they say that’s good about you, and then, what are the two things they would change about you?” And so it’s not so much about the answer — it’s just how thoughtful were they about it and were they really honest?

Q. What career advice do you give people?

A. I think accountability is important. People have to be able to count on you to deliver on what you committed to deliver, whatever that is.

I also talk to people about what I have learned in my career, and what I would do differently in some areas. One of the things I should have done earlier in my career is network more. I thought, just keep your head down and keep working and everything will work out. And I’ve done well, so I have no complaints.

But the advice I give people is to really keep those networks alive and truly stay in touch with people.

Corner Office: Tequila Avión’s President, on Letting Workers Find a Path

Q. What were some early lessons for you?

A. When I was younger, we lived for many years in a little Eskimo village in Alaska. My father was a rural doctor for the Indian Health Service. He would fly from village to village, and my mother, brother and me would sometimes go with him. We would land in a village, and all the little kids would gather around. While he was treating people, the kids would take us and we’d go play. I learned to connect with people early on.

Q. How did your parents influence you?

A. My father really trusted people and believed in humankind. That’s something that’s stuck with me, and it’s also the way I try to manage people. My mother was always a teacher, wherever in the world we were living — in Oregon or Alaska or Africa. We had this whale vertebra in our house, and if I had something to present at school the next day, my mother would make me stand on top of this big bone and recite it. She would say, “Just speak your piece, and make me feel some emotion.” It really helped in life because you learn how to connect with your audience and be more articulate speaking in public.

Q. Any managers you’ve had who influenced you?

A. One of them had this belief in people — that you can do more than you think you can. To me, that’s so powerful. If you believe in someone, even more than they believe in themselves, they will do anything to succeed. They will do everything they can not to let you down.

Q. How would you describe your leadership style today?

A. My approach is to give people a lot of autonomy. You have to know your vision, share your vision with people and make sure they’re crystal clear about it and buy into it. But even more important than that is to make sure they know what it is they specifically have to do make that vision happen. I think managers too often talk about their vision but everyone else in the business doesn’t know what it means for them individually. What should they be getting up and doing every day? And how important is what you do to that overall vision?

As a younger manager, I was too prescriptive. I told people exactly what I wanted them to do. That really just doesn’t work. People may not do things the way I want them to, but you have to step back and realize that people achieve things in different ways. So I try to take a step back and say: “Here’s what we’re going for. Just go and do it.” If I do that, more times than not the person will do much more than I expected, or they’ll figure out a much better way to get it done.

Q. Other mentors who had a big impact?

A. The boss who hired me at LVMH was a great mentor. You could go into his office early in the morning and just have a conversation. I had no idea what I was doing, but I would show up early and sit down and say, “O.K., here’s the challenge I’m having.” He would always ask, “So what do you think you should do?” And that’s something I always try to remind myself to do with others, to always ask that question before I say, “Here’s what I think you should do.”

He’s also the one who taught me the importance of not only having a vision, but also making sure that every single employee knows what they should be doing. We would all sit down, every single employee, and write that on paper once a year — here my boss’s vision, here’s my vision; here’s my boss’s goal, and here’s my goal, and here are all the things I need to achieve this year to make that happen.

Q. How do you hire?

A. It’s a huge challenge, especially for a start-up. You try to understand if the person has the passion and the energy. And if they’re coming from corporate America, can they really make that jump to a start-up? It’s a large jump, and not everyone can make it. One of the things I look for is, do they love what they do now? I believe in hiring people who just really enjoy what they’re doing.

That may sound sort of counterintuitive, because they have to want to leave for a reason. But I think it’s so much about attitude. If they love what they’re doing, then they can really spread it to everyone around them, inside and outside the company.

One good question I ask is, “What did you do the summer of your sophomore college year?” I find the answers really interesting. Did they travel? Maybe they rolled up their sleeves and worked. You learn what their value systems were early on.

Q. And what were you doing that summer?

A. I organized a tennis tournament called World Team Tennis with all these famous athletes. I learned a lot. And in the evenings, I was managing a restaurant.

Q. Other questions you ask?

A. What do you do when you fail? People who are successful fail a lot. So I will ask, “Tell me an example of something that you thought was a great idea and why it didn’t work.” The idea doesn’t make a difference. But what did they learn about why they failed? If you have someone who’s failed and thought about why they failed, then that’s going to be a really strong employee for you.

Q. Are there certain behaviors you have a particularly low tolerance for?

A. It’s a huge pet peeve for me when people start speaking and it takes them a while to get to the point. So now I draw a triangle for my team and point to the top, and I’ll say, “Give me the main point up here, and if I want the rest, I’ll ask.” I just can’t sit there and listen without knowing what you’re trying to tell me.

Q. What advice would you give to graduating business-school students?

A. I would tell them to take a job not based on the title or even what they’re going to do. Take it because of the people you’re going to work for. It was great advice for me, and has helped guide my career. I learned so much more just because of the people.

Corner Office: Getting Ahead by Having Answers Instead of Questions

Q. What were some of your first moves when you joined Bausch & Lomb a few years ago?

A. I was hired by our board of directors to turn the company around. It had been a market leader in eye health for many of its 159 years, but the last 30 years were not the company’s best 30 years. The first thing I needed to do was understand what made the company tick. I flew to Rochester, and did a town-hall meeting that was webcast globally, but I never went to my office.

I then went on a global tour. For about three weeks, I met with hundreds and hundreds of front-line managers and colleagues and customers before I actually spent the first day in my office. I learned what was wrong, and I felt pretty confident that I could create my turnaround plan from that.

Q. What steps did you take from there?

A. I think changing a culture requires multiple actions, and actions speak louder than words. You can talk about culture all you want, but it takes a while to seep in because it’s really about what you do. We owned a skyscraper in Rochester, but a few miles away we had a manufacturing plant, R.& D., customer service, sales and marketing, all under one roof. Yet all the executives were sitting in this fancy tower and everybody who really did the work was sitting in this other facility.

So I walked in after four weeks on the road and saw my huge office with this skyline view, and I said, “This isn’t going to work. If we’re really going to create one company, one culture, one team mentality, then we should all sit together.” And so we moved all the executives out of there to the building with everybody else. It was a great symbol that we’re all in this together, so let’s all sit together.

Q. What else?

A. I learned early on that we hadn’t brought a lot of meaningful innovation to market in four decades. I looked at our R.& D. organization and I saw that the talent level in that group was really high. It dawned on me that they were really focused on getting patents and publishing papers and creating process, but not really getting product out the door. When I talked to them, I learned that they really wanted to create something in their labs that helps people and the company.

Q. Why wasn’t that happening?

A. I think the disconnect was from a lack of focus on what success was. Success wasn’t around the number of patents you had or how many papers you published. Success needed to be defined as creating products that mattered. One of the ways we did it was by a semantics shift from “R.& D.” to “D.& R.” to show people that while we invest in research, let’s prioritize the development side.

Q. What other changes did you make?

A. We also made sure we were not spending our money wastefully. R.& D. sometimes can be the black hole of spending in health care companies, and so we wanted to also create incentives for scientists not to chase dreams that had low probability of success. So we made sure we celebrated and rewarded scientists for killing things early, too. Because a lot of times, these projects become like a child to the scientist. It’s what they work on. They fear that if they get rid of it, there won’t be a need for them in the organization and so they continue to spend and figure out ways to keep their project alive against very low odds.

The way you crack that is by saying that you should celebrate your successes and that you should equally celebrate your fast kills. We all fail at things. It’s about failing intelligently and failing fast so that you don’t waste money chasing something that’s never going to make it out the door and into customers’ hands.

Q. What are some leadership lessons you’ve learned over the course of your life?

A. The best advice I ever got was from Fred Hassan, who’s one of my mentors: “Never chase the next job.” Just do the job that you’re doing today the best you can, and be selfless and do the right thing for the people you’re managing and leading and let them take the credit. Let them shine and you’ll be successful.

I’ve never asked for a promotion or a raise in my career. That’s another piece of advice I give to students: “Let your work stand on its own. If you’re in there fighting for a raise and a promotion, it means that your work’s not doing it on its own. There’s some disconnect. Go back and reflect on why.”

Q. Other lessons?

A. You should always try to make the people around you as good and strong and talented as you can, because they make you shine. I think that’s probably the biggest key to success, and it probably comes from my days as a consultant. The most successful partners all had something in common — they had developed a lot of people to become partners, and so that’s what I started to emulate when I was there.

Q. A lot of managers are uncomfortable giving candid feedback. Your thoughts on that?

A. When I first started managing people, you wanted to always just pat them on the back and say, “Great job,” and when they did something wrong, you wanted to pretend it never happened. But I learned that if you didn’t deal with those things right away, they could turn into a bigger problem. So I figured out very quickly that you had to deal with those things right up front.

Q. Other career advice?

A. I think most people don’t realize that everybody comes to the C.E.O. with problems. Most people don’t come to tell me good news. The people I rely on or view as high-potential folks are people who come with a problem but also bring ideas for the solution. It may not be the right solution. We may do something entirely different, but they’ve been thoughtful about it.

Earlier in my career, when I went to my C.E.O.’s, I walked in and said, “Here’s the problem and I have two ideas for what we can do.” I never walked in without trying to be thoughtful, and at least two steps ahead. If people are looking to advance their career, they may want to be more thoughtful about bringing some ideas for solving a problem, and not just presenting a problem.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Corner Office: J.W. Marriott Jr.: Bill Marriott Jr., on Inclusive Decision-Making

Q. Do you remember the first time you were somebody’s boss?

A. I guess it was in the Navy. I was in the Navy Supply Corps on an aircraft carrier. I eventually took over the officers’ mess. I had worked in my dad’s restaurant when I was in college, and I had all the recipe cards sent to me because I didn’t like the food they were serving on board.

I went to these Navy stewards and said, “I want you guys to follow the recipes.” And they looked at me, they didn’t say much, and they didn’t follow the recipes. I came back a few weeks later and said, “You’ve got to start following these recipes.” And they didn’t follow the recipes. They were all World War II veterans, they’d been everywhere and they had learned not to pay attention to all these green, young ensigns.

In later years, I realized I’d failed to get them on the team. I had walked in and said: “Here, do it. I’m an officer. Salute and do it.” They ignored me and didn’t do it, and we still had lousy food when I left the ship. I realized that I should have sat down with them and said, “What do you think we can do to improve the food?”

Q. Did you have an explicit conversation with your father, J. W. Marriott, about leadership and management?

A. He was an interesting mentor in that he would rarely praise. Nothing was ever good enough. He was a perfectionist, and very critical, very tough. He would never really come right out and tell me what I ought to do. He tried to make me figure out what I should do.

I remember one time when I had a problem that I couldn’t solve. I struggled and struggled. I had a meeting with him, and he wouldn’t help me, and he saw that I was just about at the end of my tether. Then he walked in my office and gave me all the answers. He knew them all along, but he wasn’t about to give them to me. I just thought to myself: “He’s forced me to think. He’s forced me to step up.”

It’s an interesting way to mentor somebody, but it was extremely tough and hard. I think that if I hadn’t been his son, he wouldn’t have been as hard on me. I think a father who’s in the business with his son is usually pretty rough on the son.

Q. Other leadership lessons?

A. In 1954, I had just finished Supply Corps School and came home for Christmas to our farm in Virginia. Dad’s best friend at the time was Ezra Taft Benson, who was secretary of agriculture and later became president of the L.D.S. church [Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints]. And he invited Ike and Mamie Eisenhower. So here’s the president and the secretary of agriculture, here’s my father, and here I am. They wanted to take Ike to shoot some quail, but it was cold and the wind was blowing like crazy. My dad said, “Should we go and shoot quail or should we stand by the fire?”

And Eisenhower turned around and looked at me and he said, “What do you think we should do?”

That made me realize how he got along with de Gaulle, Churchill, Roosevelt and others — by including them in the decision and asking them what they thought. So I tried to adopt that style of management as I progressed in life, by asking my people, “What do you think?” Now, I didn’t always go with what they thought. But I felt that if I included them in the decision-making process, and asked them what they thought, and I listened to what they had to say and considered it, they usually got on board because they knew they’d been respected and heard, even if I went in a different direction than what they were recommending.

Q. So did you go out and shoot quail?

A. I said: “It’s too cold. Let’s stay in by the fire.”  

Q. What else have you learned during your career?

A. Over the years, I’ve tried to hire a lot of smart people, people who were smarter than me. But many of them had big egos, and they wanted to be president or C.E.O. There was a lot of competition and they were fighting with each other and fighting with me. Because they were so smart, they were getting job offers from other people, and I let them take them.

It took me almost 35 years to get to the point where I had a team that really worked well together and weren’t competing as much and were doing the best they could to support the company instead of themselves. I’ve learned that ego’s important, but if it overrides everything else, it isn’t going to work for me or our company.

Q. It really took you 35 years to get the right executive team?

A. It really did.

Q. What are some questions you ask people during job interviews?

A. Are you willing to get your hands dirty? Are you willing to get out of the office? Are you an office-bound guy? How are your people skills? Are you a good listener? Or do you do all the talking?

The relationships in our business are extremely important because we have so many audiences: our shareholders, our hotel owners, our associates, our employees and our customers. The people who succeed in this business know how to develop those relationships. We look for general managers in our hotels who embrace the culture and believe in taking care of their people. When I tour a hotel, I like to watch the manager interact with the associates. I’m interested in managers who know their employees’ names without having to look at their name tags.

Q. When you give talks about leadership to your executives and managers, what do you tell them?

A. The four most important words in the English language are, “What do you think?” Listen to your people and learn.

Q. Why do some leaders not listen well?

A. I think it’s because their ego jumps in, as in, “Why should I ask you if I already know the answer?” Most of the time, you do know the answer. But if you let them know that you know, and you’re not interested in what they have to say, forget it.

This interview has been edited and condensed.