Q. Tell me about your approach to leadership.
A. Part of my role is to be “chief ironing officer.” It’s very easy in a fast-growing company and fast-changing industry to get hung up on all the things that aren’t working and that we should be fixing. If you want to get extraordinary results, you have to play to people’s strengths and you have to help them work as close to plan as possible. If you allow them to get bogged down in all the problems that are out there — and there are always problems — they’ll be unproductive.
You can get a lot of speed by thinking of yourself as a chief ironing officer. Once you have a successful system in place, you can spend some of your time just walking around talking to people and asking: “What’s preventing you from doing an even better job? What are you spending time on that you don’t feel you should be spending time on?” Those kinds of questions are easy to ask, and people relate to them.
Q. What else about your leadership style?