Adam Bryant conducts interviews of senior-level executives that appear in his “Corner Office” column each week in the SundayBusiness section of The New York Times. Here are a few insights provided during an interview of Amy Errett, chief executive and co-founder of Madison Reed, a provider of in-home hair color. She says that it’s her job to build trust and to bring the best out of her team. “What I learned really quickly was it was all about the relationships.”
To read the complete interview as well as Bryant’s interviews of other executives, please click here.
Photo credit: Earl Wilson/The New York Times
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What were some early lessons for you?
My parents got divorced when I was 7, and that was a defining moment in a lot of ways. It was about understanding how to deal with hard things and staying on track in your life. And there is something in knowing that when you’re an entrepreneur, because the certainty is uncertainty. You have to be able to understand that whatever is happening at this moment will surely not happen again. It taught me how to deal with adversity and really keep a positive attitude.
Were there certain expressions your parents would repeat often?
My mother used to say all the time, “The sun will come out tomorrow.” It was that same theme that things may feel not so good right now, but you will get through this and there will be another positive thing. I think about that a lot.
What were your career plans when you were in college?
I thought I was going to go to med school. But I couldn’t get into one, so that was an interesting experience at that point in my life, because I had been relatively successful in high school and college. And that was a moment when I started to understand, oh, it doesn’t all work the way you’ve planned it.
I came to Manhattan and got my first entry-level job as a credit analyst. That was a grind, and I had this challenging boss. He would come out on the floor of this big room, and just yell and call people into his office. So I learned a lot about how some people use fear at work. One of my basic premises about leadership is that people actually divide along this binary decision process of whether you’re going to lead from fear or lead from love. Other people might not call it love. But that’s what I call it.
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Adam Bryant, deputy national editor of The New York Times, oversees coverage of education issues, military affairs, law, and works with reporters in many of the Times’ domestic bureaus. He also conducts interviews with CEOs and other leaders for Corner Office, a weekly feature in the SundayBusiness section and on nytimes.comthat he started in March 2009. In his book, The Corner Office: Indispensable and Unexpected Lessons from CEOs on How to Lead and Succeed, (Times Books), he analyzes the broader lessons that emerge from his interviews with more than 70 leaders. To read an excerpt, please click here.
His next book, Quick and Nimble: Lessons from Leading CEOs on How to Create a Culture of Innovation, will also be published by Times Books (January 2014). To contact him, please click here.