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 James P. Hackett, president and C.E.O. of Steelcase, the office furniture company based in Grand Rapids, Mich. He observes that good leaders “have this sense of peace, this self-awareness, that says, ‘I understand who I am.’ ”
I flew to meet him, and he couldn’t have been more accommodating. As we were talking about strategy, I remember being struck by the look in his eyes as he talked. I understood in that moment that he knew who he was. I wanted to have that quality as a leader, where it’s really clear who you are and what you stand for. It’s about being authentic.
On my flight home — and I remember this like it was yesterday, even though it was 18 years ago — I was looking out the window. I had been struggling for six or seven months about this notion of identity. What does a C.E.O. look like and feel like? What’s the texture of what you’re supposed to be? And I understood from seeing Bill Marriott’s eyes that you have to be who you are. Since then, because of the business we’re in, I’ve met just about every C.E.O. who runs a big company. The ones I’m most impressed with do not seem packaged. But they have this sense of peace, this self-awareness, that says, “I understand who I am.”
Bryant: Tell me more about the context when you took over Steelcase.
Hackett: I came into a tumultuous situation, replacing an interim outsider. So my first reaction was, what does the family who owns the company want me to be? But you can exhaust yourself trying to make sense of what everybody wants in a really difficult situation, particularly running these big corporations.
But that’s what leadership is for — to look at the chaos and provide a point of view about what needs to be done. At the highest levels of leadership, I’ve seen people who are not comfortable with setting the point of view, and there are others who are extraordinarily gifted at doing this, and people want to work for them.
Bryant: To be clear, I assume that you don’t just mean having a point of view in terms of strategy.
Hackett: It’s this notion of authenticity — that’s what people look for and respect and want to follow. Bob Pew, who ran the company for 30 years, was chairman when I became C.E.O. He said to me, “I’m going to give you one bit of advice, which is that if you want to lead others, you’ve got to have their trust, and you can’t have their trust without integrity.”
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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. To contact him, please click here.