Victoria Ransom (Wildfire) in “The Corner Office”

Ransom, VictoriaAdam 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 Victoria Ransom, chief executive of Wildfire, a provider of social media marketing software; it was acquired by Google last summer.

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

Photo credit: Librado Romero/The New York Times

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Bryant: Tell me about some of your early leadership lessons.

Ransom: When I look at my values as a leader and at the culture in our company, they’re really a strong reflection of the values I was raised with, such as hard work and leading by example. I grew up in a really small farming community in New Zealand. Everybody pitched in. Everybody worked hard. We talk a lot about the value of humility at Wildfire, about not getting ahead of yourself.

I also took on leadership opportunities pretty early in my life, and that started informally in the school I attended. There were 30 students, from ages 5 to 12, and a lot of it was the big kids teaching the little kids.

Bryant: What about some more recent leadership lessons with your company, which has grown rapidly in the last few years?

Ransom: Yes, we’ve hired quickly — we’re more than 400 people now. I think I’ve learned a lot through trial and error. I don’t believe in hierarchy or creating hierarchy. I believe in earning respect. Nevertheless, I think people do want you to be a leader and they want someone to tell them that things are O.K. One of the things I’ve learned is to just step up a bit more.

Another lesson I’ve learned as the company grows is that you’re only as good as the leaders you have underneath you. And that was sometimes a painful lesson. You might think that because you’re projecting our values, then the rest of the company is experiencing the values. What you realize is that the direct supervisors become the most important influence on people in the company. Therefore, a big part of leading becomes your ability to pick and guide the right people.

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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.

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