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 Jennifer Dulski who is president and chief operating officer of Change.org, a web platform for social change.
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 as a kid?
Dulski: The one I consider my first leadership role was when I was in high school. I became a coxswain on the men’s crew team. Coxswains are like coaches in the boat. You steer. You strategize. So it was me, five feet tall, and a bunch of really tall boys.
Bryant: What did you learn from doing that?
Dulski: I learned, first, that respect is earned. You can’t just come in and tell people what to do. You have to earn their trust, and, for me, that meant things like working out with them when we weren’t in the boat. I did all the sprints on the beach. I did the stairs. I worked hard to show that I could also understand physical pain and that I was there with them. I also learned that relationships are really important. When you’re coaching people, it was helpful for me to understand each one individually so that I could give constructive feedback.
And I learned how to inspire people to win. Even when they were in maximum pain and they didn’t want to push harder, how do you get them to push harder and to work together as a team?
Bryant: Highlights from your college years?
Dulski: I just tried to push myself to do the hardest, most challenging things because I wanted to see if I could. I joined the volunteer fire department in town. They had to order custom-made boots for me because there weren’t any small enough for me.
For my semester abroad, I planned to go to Italy to study art history. But before signing up, I thought, “I could probably do something where I would learn more, where I would push myself harder.” So I picked what I thought would be the most challenging: Amazon rainforest ecology. That time in Brazil — I didn’t speak a word of Portuguese — was probably the single hardest thing I’ve done in my life.
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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 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.