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 Christy Wyatt, the chief executive of Good Technology, a provider of mobile security solutions. She says leaders should pay the right amount of attention to detail. “It’s not about micromanaging,” she says. “It’s about asking the right questions.”
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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When you were a child, were you in leadership roles?
The first leadership role I can remember was in elementary school. They had a choir, but when I got to third grade, they didn’t have a teacher for the choir anymore. So I became the instructor after convincing the music department to let me and a friend who played the piano do it. So we told the first- and second-graders that we’d create a choir. It seemed wrong that there wasn’t going to be a choir, because I had had one when I was in the first and second grade.
Tell me about your parents.
My mom did mostly office work, and my father had a variety of different jobs. We were not an affluent family by any stretch of the imagination. So my mother would often say, “If you want something, you’re going to have to figure out how to go get it, because nobody’s going to bring it to you.”
My grandfather was also a big influence. He moved his whole family from Holland to Canada after World War II, and came in as an orchard worker in British Columbia. He lived in a little shack in an orchard, and worked for one of the local families. Then he built a bigger house for him and his family, and then he built somebody else a house, and he eventually started his own construction company. So I spent weekends in his workshop. If I wanted something, he would show me how to build it — he wouldn’t build it for me. “Anything you want, you just need to make it,” he would say.
Tell me about your college years.
I went to the College of Geographic Sciences in Nova Scotia. It was very small and it was very intense — a really brutal course. On the first day, they said: “Look around you. Fifty percent of you will be gone by Christmas.” I remember feeling that everyone was looking at me, because I was only one of three women in the room. They were thinking, “That’s the first one who’s going.”
I was very intimidated at first, because I had no technical background. I had barely touched a computer. Even though everybody assumed I would be the first to go, I made sure I was the last to go. By Christmas, I was actually head of the class.
Any challenges when you first started managing people?
There’s the work side versus the personal side of managing a team. I’m very driven, and I’m very focused on what we need to get done. So early on, I had to kind of remind myself to hit the pause button, check in with folks, and make sure they’re with you as you’re going forward.
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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 more recent book, Quick and Nimble: Lessons from Leading CEOs on How to Create a Culture of Innovation, was also also published by Times Books (January 2014). To contact him, please click here.