Adam Bryant, New York Times; Corner Office, Interview with Barbara J. Krumsiek, chief executive and chairwoman of the Calvert Group Ltd., an investment firm:
"Q. Tell me about your first management experience.
A. I’m not a trained business or organization development person. I’m a mathematician. I was an analyst and had no one working for me for the first seven years of my career. I developed the business strategy for entering a new market, working with all the other departments. Booz Allen, the outside consultant who’d been helping the team launch this product, recommended that I run this business. All of a sudden I went from no one working for me to having 200 people working for me.
Q. And how old were you?
A. Thirty.
Q. Talk about that.
A. I really admired and liked the team of people I was working with. Being able to work with my peers is probably the single most important attribute that helped me along my path or, as I like to call it, my career obstacle course. In those days, I don’t think it was really appreciated. That was my strength.
The biggest success was convincing or cajoling one of my colleagues on that team who was probably 20 years older than me to work for me and head systems operations. I still keep a note from him. He probably worked for me for seven or eight years until I moved on, and the note was thanking me.
He was promoted to vice president while he was working for me. He said no one worked harder for him in his career than I had worked to support him and move him forward. I keep that note because it was very special.
Q. So where did you learn those skills?
A. I have to credit two early experiences. One is Girl Scouts. It was a huge part of my life growing up in Queens. It was an opportunity to learn selling through Girl Scout cookies. I always vied for the top selling awards. I remember having a troop leader have confidence in me that I could go off and lead a group of girls to start the campfire or whatever.
The other was my education in girls’ schools. I went to Hunter College High School, which was all girls when I went. It’s now coed. I think it really drove home that girls could do anything.
I remember as a young teenager, my parents lived in a neighborhood in Queens. At Christmas, we would always go next door to the couple who were Russian immigrants to say “Merry Christmas.” I remember the husband asking each of us what we wanted to do — what our favorite subjects were, and what we were studying. I said I loved math. He said, “Oh, girls, women don’t do math.” I remember being — whatever I was — 13 or something, thinking very calmly to myself, “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
Q. Going back to that story of suddenly managing those 200 people. Can you analyze a bit more how you were able to do that?
A. I’d rather put it in today’s context because I’m still managing the same way. I think the key is that people who work for me honestly believe that there is going to be a win-win here. I’ll bring it back to my obstacle-course analogy. I believe that the whole career ladder concept is a very disruptive concept because what does it suggest? You can’t get past the person ahead of you unless you push them off the ladder. It promotes aggressive behavior.
When you think of an obstacle course, there are a lot of people on the obstacle course at the same time, and my success doesn’t impede your success. And I may be able to take a minute and help you over that next obstacle and still get where I want to get to.
I also think you have to be a little humble. You have to be maybe a little bit overly confident to break into new things, but a little bit overly humble about what you don’t know, and admiring of the talents different people bring to the table.
Q. What’s it like to work for you?
A. I’m the kind of person who delegates everything. Theoretically, there’s not one piece of paper at my desk. So everything that happens at Calvert happens in the management team, with a few exceptions, like strategy, brand image, and our relationships with our boards and owners."
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/business/23corner.html
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