Adam Bryant

For this book, I was interested in pursuing a different story line about CEOs—their own personal stories, free of numbers, theories, jargon, charts, and with minimal discussions of their companies or industries. I wanted to hear what they had learned from their ups and downs, their stories about how they learned to lead, the mistakes they made along the way, how they fostered supportive corporate cultures, and how they do the same things that every other manager does—interview job candidates, run meetings, promote teamwork, manage their time, and give and get feedback.

“I do think that’s something we forget,” said Tim Brown, the CEO of IDEO, the design consulting firm. “As leaders, probably the most important role we can play is asking the right questions. But the bit we forget is that it is, in itself, a creative pro cess. Those right questions aren’t just kind of lying around on the ground to be picked up and asked. When I go back and look at the great leaders—Roosevelt, Churchill—one of the things that occur to me is they somehow had the ability to frame the question in a way that nobody else would have thought about. In design, that’s everything, right?"

Learning how to delegate, learning how to let go and still make sure that everything happened, was a very important lesson in my first role in management. And that’s where I learned a principle that I apply today—I don’t micromanage, but I have micro-interest. I do know the details. I do care about the details. I feel like I have intimate knowledge of what’s going on, but I don’t tell people what to do.

As much as people can try to prepare for these jobs, they’re likely to feel blindsided. That’s a lesson many CEOs share, and their experiences are useful for managers at all levels, helping them to prepare for promotions into new roles, and to develop their sensitivity to the potential outsized impact of a small gesture or an off-hand remark. Management jobs are a very public form of on-the-job training—people have to learn how to handle the work under the bright lights of center stage as employees scrutinize every move. The sooner executives appear comfortable in the role, the quicker they will win the confidence of employees. The reality of management has a way of steamrolling the theory of management, particularly for anyone taking on such a role for the first time.

Most people in my position would say that as much as we’ll whine about traveling, time on planes probably is critically important to us doing our jobs. It’s time to be reflective. It’s time to catch up. It’s time to really be thoughtful and communicate. So I get off a plane with just a ton done, and that’s really important in terms of time management.

said she doesn’t like assigned seats in a meeting room. “I always sit in a different chair,” she said. “When I was in different roles in this company, I saw a lot of leaders sit in the same chair, think the same way and talk to the same people. And I said to myself, ‘When I become a leader, and I have a big team, I’m not going to play favorites. I want to be a dynamic leader.’ And I think being disruptive, not always being predictable, is healthy.”