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 Jonathan Klein, C.E.O. of Getty Images, a distributor and creator of photographs and other media. He advises against critiquing others’ work in too much detail. “In fiddling over the small stuff,” he says, “you take away all the empowerment.”

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

Photo credit: Yana Paskova for The New York Times

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Bryant: Any early leadership lessons for you?

Klein: My father was C.E.O. of a manufacturing company in South Africa. He wasn’t entrepreneurial, though. He worked for the same company his whole career. He just made his way up from an engineer to running the company. We sort of grew up with business around the dinner table. I have two older brothers. One had his first C.E.O. gig when he was 24, and the other has always had his own companies. I went into law, then spent 10 years in investment banking before deciding that I wanted to do my own thing.

Bryant: Tell me more about those dinner-table conversations.

Klein: More often than not, the conversation had to do with both the challenges and the joy in managing people. And he had challenges that I have not had to face because he had thousands of workers in apartheid South Africa. We were brought up in a very liberal household, so he felt very strongly about what his obligations were toward his people.

Bryant: Were there certain expressions he would often use with you?

Klein: The main ones were around your word and reputation. He would always say you could spend a lifetime creating a good reputation, and you could lose it with just one bad judgment. Always focus on the long term, because the short term is, by definition, short. And he would say: “Jonathan, you talk too much. There’s a reason you have two ears and one mouth. If you’d shut your mouth, you might learn something.”

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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.