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 Tracy Dolgin, president and chief executive of the YES cable sports network, who says companies often promote people for doing a job well, not because they’ll be great managers. The key, he says, is to have managers continue as doers.

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

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How to Practice the Reverse Peter Principle

Bryant: What are some of the most important leadership lessons you’ve learned?

Dolgin: I’ve found over time that there is no substitute for experience. Everybody always feels like they’re twice as smart as the person who’s managing them. But there is no magic bullet for experience. There is no substitute. They don’t teach it in school.

My experiences have framed the way I look at management and different management styles for different organizations. There’s no one right management style. Every company is different. There are size differences — big corporations have to deal with issues of scale and leverage. There are different phases in a company’s life, just like with people. And you always have to run a company based on a style of management that allows you to maximize the advantages you have over your competitors.

There are some people who can be productive in only one kind of situation. “They’re the right person for the right job,” as the saying goes. Then there are a lot of people who are more like chameleons, and I put myself in that group. You have to adjust to the situation. I can do that partly because I’m not particularly the best at anything. I’m more of a jack of all trades. Some people are more left-brain or right-brain. I’m pretty comfortable in both creative areas and analytical ones. That’s allowed me to adapt my management style.

Bryant: What are some other leadership lessons?

Dolgin: I’ve really tried to use the Reverse Peter Principle at the YES Network.

Bryant: Explain that for me.

Dolgin: Let’s start with the Peter Principle. Most people start out as doers, and they have a function — they’re a marketing person, a human-resource person, a finance person, a production person. And they get really good at doing that as they gain more experience. The reason they usually get promoted is not because someone innately thought that the person would make a great manager.  They get promoted because they were a great doer. Is the same person going to be a great manager? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. The Peter Principle holds that as people  get promoted again and again, they keep doing less and managing more until they get to a point where they stop getting promoted because they’re not as good at their new job. The Peter Principle says that you end up in the job you’re the worst at.

So, I said, let’s try the Reverse Peter Principle. The company was small enough so that if I found the best doers of every single critical function and convinced them to come to the YES Network to manage less and do more, to create a flat organization where they were going to be the best doers in the world, we would actually be able to create something incredible. That would allow us to compete with the big boys and maximize the business by out-executing them.

Just change the rules and you could compete with them, because now I could out-execute them because my executors would be the best people at executing, and they would be spending 90 percent of their time executing and not managing.

So when I went out and recruited, I basically told people my theory, and that we were all, including myself, going to go from being a manager to a doer. I was looking for the best people in each particular function.

Bryant: How did you make sure they were the right fit?

Dolgin: Did they have the passion? Did they believe that we could win that way?  Those were some of the questions I asked. Did they think that this was a good idea or a bad idea? Before I even explained this to them, the first question I asked was: When you’re working, what do you love doing? I looked for people who would talk to me about doing, not managing.

I also looked for people who’ve done everything.  They’ve had long careers. And they said: “Frankly, I’m just ready to roll my sleeves up again. I’m tired of spending 90 percent of my day dealing with management, which is usually dealing with people’s problems, not even business problems, and the politics.  If I could just spend my energy on doing this. … ”

So I had to find people who were the best doers, who were willing to give up the management part of it and thought this could work. We wanted it to be more like a start-up environment, except we didn’t have a start-up product.

Bryant: Were you asking people to take pay cuts?

Dolgin: No. The Reverse Peter Principle actually is a fantastic thing, because I can pay you like a manager to be an executor because I’ve got far fewer people: no layers, and a flat organization. The best doer who has a lot of experience can do more things than five or six or seven new doers. And so we didn’t have to build up a big company. I could pay a small group of people really well, like the big media companies pay them, to be doers.

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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.