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 David Cote, chairman and chief executive of Honeywell. He observes, “Your job as a leader is to be right at the end of the meeting, not at the beginning,”
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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Bryant: Were you in leadership roles early on?
Cote: Nothing that I can really think of. I wouldn’t say that from the beginning people said, “You know, that’s the guy in charge, and your peers always vote for you.” I had a lot of friends, and I had a lot of people I got along with. I grew up in a pretty rural part of New Hampshire. So there weren’t a lot of planned activities. You just kind of organized stuff.
Bryant: And in college?
Cote: When I got to college, I never really worked all that hard. That’s why it took me six years to get through college, because I just didn’t like school. I felt like I was wasting time, and there was something else I should be doing.
Cote: I had some difficulty figuring out what that something else was. I quit between my junior and senior year because I decided I was going to make my fortune as a commercial fisherman.
But finding out that my wife was pregnant is what turned everything around for me. I was 23. We were living in this third-floor tenement. The only heat came off the stove. This is New Hampshire, so it’s chilly. I thought: This baby’s going to be dependent on me? I don’t make enough money to support myself, never mind three of us. So that’s when I went back to school and got very serious.
Bryant: What did you learn from your year of fishing?
Cote: It was a great experience, but the biggest thing I learned was that hard work doesn’t always pay off. If you work on the wrong thing, it really doesn’t matter how hard you work, because it’s not going to make a difference. So make sure you put some thought into what you’re working on.
Bryant: Any leadership lessons you learned early on from your parents?
Cote: My dad constantly said, “Be a leader, not a follower.” My dad owned a service station, and I learned a lot just watching him interact with customers. My dad was a very proud man, and as a kid, you didn’t ask him the same question twice.
I once watched how he handled a really angry customer. He was yelling at my dad, and I was thinking, this is not going to be good. And he never said a word. He just kind of took it, apologized, and you could tell it really bothered him. And I remember all he said was, “Dave, sometimes in business and in life you’ve got to put your pride in your back pocket.”
That always stuck with me. There are times when your pride and your emotions make you want to do one thing, but it’s important to be smart and to think about what’s important.
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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.com that 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.