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 William D. Green, chairman and chief executive of Accenture, the consulting, technology services and outsourcing company. He says competence, confidence and caring are vital to success.

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

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68 Rules? No, Just 3 Are Enough

Bryant: Tell me about important leadership lessons you’ve learned?

Green: I’m a proud plumber’s son from Western Massachusetts. In my family, working with tools is the highest honor. It isn’t how many degrees you have. It’s what you can do. So that had a big impact on me. What that says is, it doesn’t matter what you look like, what you talk like, where you went to school, where you came from, any of that stuff. What matters is what you’re capable of.

Bryant: What else?

Green: I was not a good student. I took what they call today a gap year, but back then it was called “finding yourself.” I did one of those, and I finally found my way into a two-year college. I went from an underperformer to a solid performer, with a little inspiration from some professors. That had a profound effect on me, to realize how much raw talent there is out there for us to exploit, leverage, take advantage of, and how much talent there is that people can give that organizations don’t mine, they don’t harvest, they don’t get the best of, because of structure, because of strategy, because of rules.

Bryant: So how do you break through?

Green: I once sat through a three-day training session in our company, and this was for new managers, very capable people who were ready for a big step up. I counted, over three days, 68 things that we told them they needed to do to be successful, everything from how you coach and mentor, your annual reviews, filling out these forms, all this stuff.

And I got up to close the session, and I’m thinking about how it isn’t possible for these people to remember all this. So I said there are three things that matter. The first is competence — just being good at what you do, whatever it is, and focusing on the job you have, not on the job you think you want to have. The second one is confidence. People want to know what you think. So you have to have enough desirable self-confidence to articulate a point of view. The third thing is caring. Nothing today is about one individual. This is all about the team, and in the end, this is about giving a damn about your customers, your company, the people around you, and recognizing that the people around you are the ones who make you look good.

When young people are looking for clarity — this is a huge, complex global company, and they wonder how to navigate their way through it — I just tell them that.

Bryant: Talk about the challenge of running a big global company in this tough economy.

Green: We operate the company so that we keep one foot in today and one foot in tomorrow, regardless of what’s going on. In an economy like this, everyone wants to look at their shoes. You can’t. We’ve got to be doing as many things about tomorrow as we are today. We operate with a philosophy that says, never be afraid to change, even when we’re at the top of our game.

In our company, usually in the summer, people ask me, “When are you going on vacation?” Because when I come back from a week’s vacation, they know I’ve had time to think and reflect and have been strategizing about changes and it could be anything.

Bryant: Does that usually happen?

Green: Happens every time. People even joke about it a little bit. Even my outside board members say, “When are you taking the vacation, Bill?” This year, in the middle of tough economic times for everybody, we built a human capital strategy for the future, we refreshed our corporate-wide strategy, and I moved my leadership people around into different positions and promoted some new people into leadership roles to infuse energy.

All of this is about energizing people, giving them broader scope and new experiences. This obviously helps build durability in terms of people being able to have multiple jobs, and it’s an important part of succession planning, getting the athletes the experience they need in different spaces.

So just when you think all the cylinders are clicking and everything’s right, that’s the time you have to change, because that’s the world we live in now. If you rest, it will cost you, because global competitiveness is here to stay, and it’s not about the traditional competitors anymore. It’s about new and emerging competitors that you’ve never heard of, and you just have to get your mind around the new normal, as they call it.

Bryant: Can you elaborate on why you shift people around?

Green: If you look at why people in general leave companies, they often leave because they get bored. And high-performance people are learners by nature. And as long as they’re learning, they’ll stay where they are. When they start to think about leaving, when they start to respond to a headhunter’s call, is when they haven’t been learning.

On my leadership team, I have 15 bona fide C.E.O.’s. These people are capable of running big companies. But as long as they’re learning and engaging and on a mission, they don’t need to be the C.E.O. They just need to be part of the ecosystem that leads the company.

Bryant: What other basic messages do you have for all your employees?

Green: One of our other principles is that people who are successful are the ones who ask for help. It sounds simple, but to get an organization to believe that asking for help is a sign of strength, and not weakness, is a huge thing.

Bryant: You have to make sure people aren’t going to worry they might be criticized for asking.

Green: You want to challenge people to get them to raise their game, as opposed to criticizing them, which makes them raise their defenses. It’s like learning. With a motivated learner, you can work wonders. In institutions, it’s the same thing. Are there companies with the will and resolve to change — that’s the equivalent of a motivated learner. Or are there companies that are just sort of stuck where they are, and they like the status quo? In the end, that’s the difference between winners and losers in corporate America and around the world. That’s the contrast. So, the question is, how do you get motivated learners? So, I bring it back to me, and how did I become a motivated learner? Somebody inspired me.

Bryant: How has your leadership style evolved?

Green: I used to be an orchestrator from behind the scenes. I could make stuff happen, but I never wanted to be on point. I could connect dots. I could catalyze activity. I could get other people to do things without being in the front. I sort of engineered it from the back.

Bryant: And you preferred it that way?

Green: At the time I was comfortable with it because I was never comfortable with the spotlight. I took great pleasure and pride in seeing things get done that I knew I had made happen, and when it came time to taking bows, I didn’t do the bow-taking part. I felt good about myself for that because it’s just sort of where I came from. Now I lead a lot more from the front. I have a better appreciation of what people are expecting of me and how people are counting on me.

Bryant: How have you adjusted your leadership style based on feedback you’ve received?

Green: I needed to beef up my operator skills because I’m an instinctive and intuitive guy. I listen, I synthesize, I process, I make judgments. There’s another school of thought — that’s analytics, and I needed to turn the dial a little more toward analytics and a little away from seat-of-the-pants. I didn’t have to turn it a ton, but I have. I have purposely tried to get better grounding in the analytics behind the decision-making and used that to check to see if there was a huge disconnect between what my instinct told me and what the analytics told me.

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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 Sunday Business section and on nytimes.com that he started in March 2009. To contact him, please click here.