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 Mark Josephson, chief executive of Bitly, the web link shortening service. He says that effective leadership means empowering individuals to make, and own, the decisions.
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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Early lessons for you?
I was always interested in being an entrepreneur. My dad is an entrepreneur — he’s a clinical psychologist and built a pretty successful private practice. I remember when he was building the practice and was on staff at hospitals, he used to take my brother and me to the cafeteria for breakfast on the weekends, and we would sit at the tables with the other doctors. My dad was networking and building a referral base, which is how you have to do it. I learned from watching him that you’re always working as an entrepreneur. My dad always told us that it doesn’t matter who you work for and who signs your check; you work for yourself. That resonated with me. As you try to figure out what your career path is going to be, you have to ask yourself: “What do I want to do? What am I good at? How can I be successful?”
Before I joined Bitly last year, it was the first time I’d done a job search, as opposed to things just happening organically. It was the first time I really stopped and tried to figure out what I wanted to do. A C.E.O. coach I had worked with said to me: “You need to understand your priorities. What were the three times in your career when you were the happiest, the most successful and just the most fulfilled, and what were you doing? Find an opportunity that matches those.”
That was liberating because I was coming out of a big company, but I was the happiest and most successful and most fulfilled when I was building a team and selling the vision and the passion and the dream. The second thing that I realized I loved doing was picking a path. There are so many different things you can do in every business, and every company has a thousand opportunities, and most of them could be right. But the biggest mistake is when you don’t pick any. Every group needs a leader, every team needs a boss, and you need to pick one and go. And I love growing a business and succeeding as a team. Seeing your numbers go up is just incredibly addicting.
Tell me more about “picking a path.”
I’m competitive, and I want to win. To win, you have to do something. You have to be in motion. You have to take action. A lot of people are happy with the status quo. Working in a technology start-up requires you to shake things up and do things, and I love that. I like being in charge. Organizations and teams need leadership, and they need somebody with a compass. I like to manage with a compass and not a map, because you need the team to actually build the map.
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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 more recent book, Quick and Nimble: Lessons from Leading CEOs on How to Create a Culture of Innovation, was also also published by Times Books (January 2014). To contact him, please click here.