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 Pedro Baranda, president of the Otis Elevator Company, who says that “if you want to develop leaders and not followers, one of the key things you have to learn to do is delegate.”

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: What was your first management role?

Baranda: I studied a lot in my 20s — a six-year program in Spain, and then a Ph.D. here in the United States. So my first management role was when I was about 30. I was a research engineer and I had to hire two people.

Bryant: And was it an easy transition for you?

Baranda: I probably made quite a few mistakes and learned from them. The main mistake I tended to make — and probably still do sometimes — is that because I’m an engineer, I like to get into the details of things. So I got some feedback about it early on, such as, “Let me do my job.”

That was an important lesson, because if you want to develop leaders and not followers, one of the key things you have to learn to do is delegate. One of my bosses once told me: “You’ve got to delegate because there are only three possible outcomes. You tell them what your expectations are, and if their solution is better than yours, that’s fantastic. If the solution is the same as yours would be, then it’s fantastic, too, because at least you didn’t have to do it. And if it’s not as good as you expected, you can always take the time to teach them why and what to do differently. That way, you will have learned about the person and the person will have learned from you.”

That lesson about delegation is fundamental if you want to develop leaders and not followers. I heard an expression from one of my business professors — that talent flow is the best predictor of future cash flows — and that has stayed with me.

Bryant: What is some other feedback you’ve heard over the years about your management style?

Baranda: When you do 360’s with your team, you learn that the perception people have about your skills might be different from yours. When I took over a role in Portugal, my big concern was whether I knew the business well enough. When I had the 360, the feedback was just the opposite. They said: “You understand the business pretty well. What you’ve got to do is not intimidate people at meetings, to be more open to things that may not be right, and listen.” That was a big lesson — you have to learn to be tolerant of failure, because if you are intolerant of failure, your company will retrench and not be innovative. You have to encourage people to take calculated risks. If you punish people who take risks and don’t succeed, they will never take a risk again.

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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. To contact him, please click here.