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 Michael P. Gregoire, chief executive of CA Technologies, the software makers based in Islandia, N.Y. In his opinion, “If you’re dreaming bigger, you have to bring more diverse types of people into your organization.”
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: When you were growing up, were you in leadership roles?
Gregoire: I was active in high school sports. I rowed. I played hockey. Nothing particularly remarkable. I was probably more of a kid who sat and observed rather than trying to be the center of attention. It took me a long time to get to a point where I was very confident in my own thinking. I was much more happy to be lost in my own thoughts, rather than having to share them with other people.
Bryant: Tell me about your first management job.
Gregoire: I worked at G.M.’s Oshawa car assembly plant in Ontario as an engineer right out of school. I actually worked for EDS — which G.M. owned back then — and we were building custom systems. They gave me a small team that grew to about 40 engineers. I was about 27 at the time.
Bryant: Any early speed bumps?
Gregoire: The usual ones. My team was completely homogeneous. They were all people who kind of looked and acted and thought like I did. Almost zero diversity. And I don’t just mean diversity in terms of gender or race; I mean diversity of thought. Anybody who didn’t fit the mold didn’t really stay on the team. It wasn’t until later that I realized I had missed out on a lot of creativity because everybody thought the same way.
That project was very successful, and so I started getting bigger projects. But that’s when the wheels started to come off with my management style. I’d give myself pretty low grades on being able to manage a diverse work force when I started out. If your team is crafted only in a very narrow pattern, there’s only so many people who will fit.
If you’re dreaming bigger, you have to bring more diverse types of people into your organization. If you don’t have the skill set to be able to understand what they want out of that experience, and what they expect from you out of that experience, you’re going to have tension. I think that fundamental skill is something that you work on your whole life. It is, in my opinion, one of the most important parts of executive leadership.
In today’s day and age, you cannot manage by fiat. I always make a joke at the office: “I can’t get people to deliver sandwiches with no mayonnaise.” I have to convince people that what we’re doing is in their best interest, it’s in the best interest of our company and it’s going to be fun to go down this path.
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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.