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 Pamela Fields, chief executive of Stetson, the hat and apparel company “People know that they can come to me and let me have it if they think I’m wrong.” She may not always agree, she says, “but there’s a complete fear-free zone.”

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

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Valuing Those Who Tell You the Bitter Truth

 Bryant: Tell me about your early career decisions.

Fields: I majored in nuclear engineering and nuclear arms control through the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton. But when I went to work for an engineering firm, it was the wrong fit. It was terrible, and I had no business to be there.

So I decided I wanted to go into cosmetics, and I went to the phone book, opened it up to the cosmetics and beauty section, and I started with A. The first company I saw that I had heard of was Avon. So I called them up — this goes under chutzpah — and I said: “I’m Pam Fields, I can speak Portuguese, French and Italian fluently. I know you’re a global company. Surely you need me.” As it turns out, they did. They had an opening on the Brazil desk, which is to this day one of their biggest markets. I learned to choose which of their thousand products should go into their little biweekly brochure.

And after doing that very well — no management involved — I was promoted to a job developing lipsticks and picking great shades for blushes and eye shadows. I was then promoted to manager of color, and all of a sudden I had people working under me. There were three people in the group. And I didn’t know anything about management. And I was awful. I made every mistake there was to make.

Bryant: Such as?

Fields: I would see what I wanted to accomplish. Let’s say I saw from A to F, but I would forget to tell everybody what F was and what the steps were for getting there, and I was just a bull in a china shop.

Bryant: So what happened?

Fields: Fortunately, I had people working on the team who were not shy. And they called a team meeting and they sat me down and they said: “You’re really smart. We know you’re full of energy and passion. But you’re not telling us what you want and you’re not telling us how you think we should get there and why, and you’re doing a bad job and we’re not happy working for you.”

Bryant: And how did you react?

Fields: They were older and more experienced than I was, and they had a lot of spine. I was so grateful to them. I mean, can you imagine how lucky I was to have had that experience so early on in my career, that someone could sit there and put the cold washcloth on my face and say, “You have to articulate. You have to tell people what you want. You have to have a reason why, and you can’t operate as an island.”

I also had a director of the department who was extraordinarily generous as a mentor. Every time I thought I had it right, she would turn around and say: “Did you think of this? Did you think of that?” I was used to getting A’s at Princeton, and you think you’re a reasonably smart kid and you get it right the first time. But I was humbled, and I was broken down into little pieces and reassembled as a much more intelligent operator.

Bryant: What else did you take away from that experience?

Fields: The lesson I learned, which I think has made a big difference for me, is the importance of telling the truth, and being in an environment where truth-telling is valued, just the way these women came to me and told me the truth about what I had done. I vowed to create an environment in which truth was important. And you know, it takes a lot of spine to tell the truth, especially in a large organization, where obfuscation is a political skill that I don’t have. I see a problem, I see an opportunity and I want to go for it. Business is too fast and we have to move. So everything else was a subset of that lesson, and it was really important; I can even tell you what I was wearing when they laid me out.

Bryant: You’ve worked at how many different companies?

Fields: Well, I had my own consulting company for a long time; I was a rent-a-president. My goal was to position myself as someone who could do what was on a president’s list and get it done with equal or better efficiency than the guy who’s busy running the business. I was on my own for a good 15 years, and I worked for about 20 different companies.

Bryant: You were exposed to a lot of different corporate cultures.

Fields: Across different industries, cultures, price points and distribution channels. And in no instance — and I say this with pride, and I look for it in people I want to hire — in no instance did I have direct prior experience for the job that I was doing.

Bryant: So what kind of playbook did you develop for going into these companies?

Fields: You have to be respectful of the politics and the process in order to be effective. But as a consultant, you were able to say things that other people might not be able to say comfortably and advance the ball on behalf of your client. But I never just jump in and go; you jump in and listen. I used to joke that I was on my Hillary Clinton listening tour at every single company. It’s not unusual, it’s not new, but it’s essential. You sit down with everybody and ask them: “What’s working for you? What’s a momentum killer?” That’s a good question I ask people all the time: “What’s stopping you from being successful or your project from being successful? What is working for you that you wish you could build on? Why can’t you build on it, or how have you tried to build on it and it hasn’t worked?”

And I would spend the first three weeks doing that, no matter what the assignment was. I would write a report for myself, a way of organizing my thoughts so I would have a way to go forward. Then I shared the report with my client, because it’s part of the truth-telling. You can’t advance things if you don’t. But there are definitely cultures that are more willing to fail. There are definitely cultures that are more willing to be a risk taker, and there are lots of cultures that profess that they’re willing to do both and would die rather than actually live that dream. You sometimes see leaders who profess to want risk, but every other signal they send is, “Don’t do it,” because the compensation plan doesn’t reward risk and the last guy who tried something really different is working somewhere else. And if you send those subliminal or not-so-subliminal messages, people aren’t dumb. They’re going to figure out how to game the system.

Bryant: On that question about momentum killers, are there answers you heard time and again?

Fields: Yeah, my favorite is, “Oh, if I tell them what’s really going on, I’ll lose my job.” If I had a dime for every time I heard that answer, I would be able to shop with abandon.

Bryant: And do you think that’s true or was it a little bit of a cop-out?

Fields: I think these people believed it. And it doesn’t really matter — they were convinced that if they actually spoke the truth, they would be in big trouble. You know, achievement is not a popularity contest. It should be about getting it done. But in many cultures it is a popularity contest. And for some folks, it’s better to be a great member of the team and achieve less than to try and stand out and stand up. I’m not talking about being rude and being disrespectful. I’m talking about normal professional behavior. But if it’s obvious that something can be done, should be done or ought not be done any longer, the culture should permit someone to stand up and say so without fear of being told, “We really can’t listen to you anymore.”

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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 new 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.