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 Chauncey C. Mayfield (president and chief executive of MayfieldGentry Realty Advisors) who says he aims to pick the best team leader for any given situation — so a more junior-level employee may be directing company veterans..

 

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

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Attention, Team: Park Your Egos at the Door

Bryant: Do you remember the first time you were somebody’s boss?

Mayfield: I was 22, and I was recruited out of college to work as a production supervisor for Polaroid on a manufacturing floor.  And the interesting thing was that I didn’t know anything about the production process. I was in charge of about 20 men, and most of them were about 10 to 15 years older than me.

Bryant: So how did you do it?

Mayfield: I decided they were going to become my new best friends.  I needed to, first of all, defer to them on almost everything.  It was out of respect and it was real.  And, second, I tried to figure out what we had in common. I found out that one guy’s family was from South Carolina, and my family is originally from South Carolina, so we really bonded over that.  The other guy was a former marine who had spent time in Vietnam. We kind of bonded over the fact that I’d gone to military school. And so I relied on those guys to teach me the business.  I didn’t come in saying, “I’m the college guy, I know what I’m doing and you’ll listen to me.”

Bryant: How did you know to do that at such a young age?

Mayfield: When I was 15 or 16, my dad made me go to work for a construction company. And I was the guy at the bottom.  I mixed the mortar.  I moved the bricks.  I brought in the Sheetrock.  All the guys were considerably older, and they knew I was only there for the summer, and they tried to work me to death.  And I was going to win their respect by showing them that I could really work.  And the more I showed them that, they realized that maybe this kid’s O.K., maybe we’ll bring him in, because he didn’t come in saying, “I know everything.” I just came in just to do the work.

Bryant: What about other early influences?

Mayfield: As a kid, I spent time working in my dad’s law firm — he was a criminal lawyer — as a gofer. Oftentimes, when clients would come in and if I didn’t have anything to do, I would sit in the lobby and talk with them.  I was curious. I’d ask them: What did you do?  Why are you here?  I became very comfortable over the years with older people.  I always thought I could learn something from them.  Tell me, teach me — how does this work?

I have the same philosophy today. I have no idea, for example, what irritates my administrative assistant.  I’ll say: “You have to tell me, specifically, what makes this work for you and what doesn’t make it work for you.  I’m not going to try and figure it out.  I know what I need, but you’ve got to share with me what you need as well.”

Bryant: How do you hire?

Mayfield: Here’s what I’m trying to figure out:  I’m trying to get to know them as people.  I ask them to tell me about themselves.  I ask them to tell me what’s important to them, and the answers are absolutely fascinating.

Bryant: Just simple, open-ended questions like that?

Mayfield: Open-ended questions: What’s important to you? And tell me something about yourself? Tell me something that I can’t read on your résumé. I’m more interested in understanding what’s important to them, because we’re trying to build a company where the priority is the family.  If we keep our families as our priority, I think we can balance everything else out. And, so, if someone won’t give me an answer, I’ll say, “You want to know what’s important to me?  My family.”  I’ll add: “Think about it this way. If one of my kids got sick right now, I’m leaving.  And guess what, I expect you to do the same thing.”

The other thing to understand is that if your child plays soccer at 3 in the afternoon, I think I’m hiring a responsible person, and you should be at the game. And they’ll say, “You’re not serious.” I’ll say, “I’m very serious.”  This comes out of my experience when I started a company in the go-go ’80s. I worked seven days a week and I worked 16 to 18 hours a day.  My son and daughter were probably 1 and 2 at the time.   And the best thing that ever happened to me was that the company went under.  It taught me a lot of things, but the most important thing it taught me was that, at the end of the day, they were still there. My wife and I divorced, but I would pick up my kids every weekend and we would go and do things.

And I said, “Never, ever again will I have workweeks like that at the office.”  And I won’t expect anybody else to do that as well.  I want people to come into an environment and understand that we’re not going to try and move family away from being the most important center.

Bryant: And how many employees do you have?

Mayfield: We have 20 on the investment management company side and 70 on the property management company side.  And I tell the employees this every year: “You know, whatever lifestyle I and my four partners lead, you guys are a significant part of making that happen, and so it’s got to be a two-way street here.  You need to understand that you’re important to us.  I need to demonstrate that to you every single day.” One of the things we did was to pay 100 percent of health care, and there will not be a difference in health care for executives and the employees.

Bryant: When you built your company for a second time, what else did you decide was important to you?

Mayfield: There were several things.  One is that it had to be fun, and I didn’t want it to be simply a pressure cooker.  I once worked in a company that, walking in the door, it seemed like everybody was given a big club to see whose knees we could knock out from under them first. I was pretty good at it, but I said I never want to work in this kind of environment again. So if you can’t have fun here, then why are we spending all this time here?  And what I mean by fun is there are a couple of very basic principles that we operate with.  One is that, when you come to work, and you have an assignment that you absolutely cannot complete, you’re not penalized for saying, “I’m not sure if I can do this.”  We encourage you to do that.  You’re penalized if you don’t tell us you can’t do it.  We’ll find someone to work with you to do that.

There are some things I do extremely well and some things I am not good at doing. I think what happens in some companies is that people are put in positions where they can’t complete the assignments.  But they’re concerned about what is going to be said on their performance review and how it’s going to affect their bonus. So all of a sudden they sit there and they sort of dabble and worry over it.  And they dabble over it and they eventually turn in something and it leads to the same result, which is a bad performance review and they probably won’t get moved up as quickly. It shouldn’t be an environment where you come and worry all the time. That’s not what I want for us.

The second thing is that it’s got to be a team environment.  We, first of all, pick the best team leader.  And oftentimes, the best team leader is not the most senior person.  The objective is to win. So you can have a person who’s at a pretty junior level leading the team with senior people on it.  Now, what that requires you to do is to check your ego, because your middle manager is now giving out assignments, and for the partner, your assignment may not be the assignment you like, but, you know what, you’re on his team or her team.

Bryant: How do you decide who’s going to be the team leader for a particular project?

Mayfield: Based on what has been demonstrated as their strengths, or sometimes they put up their hand and say, “I want to lead this one.” And so we’re encouraging them to go ahead and take risks, because what we’re trying to do in particular is build up our middle managers so they start taking on more leadership responsibilities. In order to do that, they’ve got to take risks, and they’re going to have to feel comfortable giving direction to people and seeking advice from people who are above them, and this is part of that training. The point is, we’re all smart, that’s a given.  But are we smart enough to take our egos and park them?  So when I’m hiring, I’m trying to figure out, are you able to play that third position on the team, because we need you to play third position.  And if you are, then it’s probably a pretty good fit for us.

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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.

 

TABs: Adam Bryant, Corner Office column, SundayBusiness section, The New York Times, Chauncey C. Mayfield, MayfieldGentry Realty Advisors