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 Doreen Lorenzo, president of Frog Design. She says that one-on-one meetings are vital for business leaders.  “Though you’ve talked about the vision 5,000 times,” she says, everyone can learn from a private talk.

 

To read the complete interview and Bryant’s interviews of other executives, please click here.

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What’s the Mission? Your Troops Want to Hear It From You.

Bryant: What were some big influences for you early on?

Lorenzo: Certainly my parents. Their view was, whatever you want to do, we’re fine with it. I wanted to major in theater. They said: “Fine, that’s terrific. Go for it.” And they were incredibly supportive. And my father told me, “Don’t ever say no to anything.” That is always in the back of my mind, and it’s something that I use in leadership, too. You’re presented with an opportunity. Maybe you’ve never taken on a challenge like that before. But don’t say no. You take that leap and you take that risk.

Bryant: How has that played out in your life?

Lorenzo: I went to film school. I’m running a company now. How do those two things connect? I’m a storyteller. I love telling stories. I love listening to stories. I feel like the business that we’re in is storytelling. And in filmmaking, I was really involved in managing the process, putting the pieces together. My business is like that today. It’s a lot of different pieces. We have a lot of different kinds of people who work together. It’s a very team-based environment.

Bryant: What kind of films did you work on?

Lorenzo: I was the producer on anything from documentaries to corporate videos to commercials. I did it all. I held the purse strings, made sure that all the schedules were set, worked with the directors. I love to be around creative people. I’m very good at managing the chaos and pulling it all together to make something that’s really tangible and creating that environment where people can thrive.

Bryant: What were your leadership roles in high school?

Lorenzo: I was involved in theater. I worked on the newspaper. I did speech. I was always a very outgoing personality, and I think outgoing people have natural leadership capabilities. I remember reading an article that said that the No. 1 fear that people have is public speaking, and the second fear they have is death. But I have never had a fear of public speaking. It was something that just came very naturally to me.

Bryant: When you first joined Frog Design, how big was the company?

Lorenzo: Fifty people. We’re 600 now.

Bryant: What were some leadership lessons for you as the company grew?

Lorenzo: I think that what creative people want, more than money or fame or power, is to be listened to. They want to see their ideas be made into something. They love when something we work on actually goes to market. That’s more exciting to them than anything else you can give them. So it’s very important to get really, really interesting projects, with hard problems to solve. They might say, “Oh, this is so difficult.” But at the end of the day, they really love that.

Part of this is just having, I think, an instinctual knowledge of people. I’m a people person. I like people very much. My mom always said I should have been a psychologist, because I can read a person pretty quickly and I have a lot of empathy for people. So I kind of pick up where there are weak points and use that. So part of this is just using your instinctual knowledge to make it work, and sometimes you fail. But that’s part of innovation. You fail fast. You move on.

Bryant: Can you talk more about the culture of your company?

Lorenzo: The small things matter. We have many rituals. One is something called coffee time: every day at 4 o’clock, in every one of our studios around the world, everybody stops and they have the opportunity to go into the kitchen and people just socialize. They might play a game of Ping-Pong, they might play a video game, and there are pool tables, foosball. Different studios have different toys. That’s a ritual and that’s just accepted. That’s what we do.

Bryant: Why do you do that?

Lorenzo: These are intense people. This is a time for them to take a break, to talk to people they might not work with, and to listen to things. That’s every day, Monday through Friday. We often joke that if we ever took coffee time away, we think everybody would quit. And we have 10 o’clock Monday-morning meetings at every studio, where they go over anniversaries, birthdays, projects, and share stuff that another studio has done. That’s something that’s really important to people.

Then each studio has a little bit of its own culture to inspire creativity. They might go on field trips. There’s a “sketch jam” in one of the studios every Tuesday at noon, and people come in and they just practice their sketching skills. But that’s all accepted. That’s part of the culture.

Bryant: How do you preserve the culture as your company continues to grow?

Lorenzo: You can only lose it if you want to lose it. I remember somebody telling me: “Oh, you can’t have a creative studio bigger than 30 people. If you’re bigger than 30, you’re going to lose it.” Then they said, “you can’t have it bigger than 70 people.” And then, “you can’t have it bigger than 100 people.” So now we’re up to 150 in one of the studios, and you know what, we’re still creative, we’re still driving it.

The mission statement at Frog has always been to change the world, and our people are really passionate about that. And if you keep that in the front of your mind, it is amazing that no matter how big you get, if you hire the right kind of people, that’s their mission. And you have to empower people. Micromanagement is the death of creativity, so you have to create an environment where they can succeed, and where the environment can expand.

Bryant: So how do you hire?

Lorenzo: There’s a certain type of personality you look for, because the business changes so rapidly and it moves so fast. As I always say, “Jump on the train, it doesn’t stop.” So you’re looking for people who are, obviously, very talented, very smart, who like process but understand that process has to change, and who are very eclectic in their thoughts and are passionate. I look for people who have that sensibility. They come from diverse industries. They have conquered something.

They have to be very articulate, because, in our business, you have to explain complicated ideas that have never been done before. Let’s say a designer presents something to a client, and the C.E.O. asks, “Well, why did you choose that?” You don’t want somebody to say, “I don’t know — because it’s cool.” That’s not going to work. You need somebody who can really explain why you’re doing what you’re doing. Being creative is just not enough. And sometimes you get very, very creative people, but they can’t work in a team — it’s their idea or it’s the highway. That’s not going to work, either.

Bryant: So what questions do you typically ask?

Lorenzo: One of the questions I always ask them is, why don’t you want this job? What are the things that scare you about this job? You learn a lot about a person that way. And if they say, “Well, what scares me about this job is it’s too chaotic,” they’re not going to thrive here. Or if they say to me, “You know, I like to be in charge,” then you’re thinking, this person’s not going to thrive in his group.

You’re really looking for that person who understands the mission. Not that they agree with everything that you say, but they understand the mission. I want to hear someone who says: “I can contribute. I want to be part of this team. I feel like I can add some value and these are the reasons why.” That’s important. You want people who can put in and not take out.

Bryant: Have you been given feedback about your leadership and management style that led to you to make some adjustments?

Lorenzo: People want to hear from me. I thought I was being very communicative. But they want more, so I send out updates constantly. They are usually pretty passionate and it’s about what’s going on in the business.

I’ve added companywide phone calls. I’ve added town hall meetings and then I make my rounds to all the studios. And as I do, I just try to meet people one-on-one. I’ll set up a day and book my calendar to have one-on-one’s with people, because I’ve found that you learn so much that way.

So that was an adjustment I had to make. Somebody said to me, “Well, how do you manage the time?” But you have to recalibrate. If your people are asking you for something, and you’re a people-driven business, you’ve got to listen to that. I think that’s part of being a good leader — really listening and making those adjustments and letting people know that you are serious about what you say. It’s not just lip service.

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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. To contact him, please click here.