Adam Bryant, Corner Office, New York Times; Interview with Lisa Price, founder and president of Carol’s Daughter, a beauty products company: Memo to Self: Don’t Take It Personally:
"Q. What’s your philosophy of leadership?
A. I want people to feel passionate, the way that I do, and feel like they are coming to a family and coming to a place that builds them up, and not a place that tears them down. So that’s my leadership style — keeping people passionate, keeping them inspired. I love to give people feedback. I’ve learned to give negative feedback. I didn’t always like it. But I’ve learned that when you give it, instead of avoiding it, it can help the person.
Q. How do you hire?
A. I do listen for what they say about the brand. I want to know that they’re comfortable voicing their opinion, because it’s a very entrepreneurial setting, and you cannot be a corporate person who likes all the layers. You have to be able to assert yourself and make your voice heard and lead and push something. I want to know that people are comfortable multitasking.
Our head of H.R. cleans out the copy room and takes the coffee filters out of the coffee and makes sure that there’s toilet paper in the bathroom. That’s just how the company is, and those are the things that she needs to do. So you have to be confident in order to do that. That’s just the entrepreneurial environment.
Q. But how do you figure out if the person is like that from an interview?
A. When you talk to them about things that they’ve done, you drill down on what their responsibilities were. When they describe it to you, they really break it down — what they had to do, how they had to push it through. You can tell that kind of person just doesn’t go, “I can’t figure it out.”
Q. How else has your leadership style evolved?
A. I have learned to be distant without really being distant. I’m very friendly with everybody, but I would get so invested before, and if there was a transition for whatever reason, it would hurt for me to lose that person. And that discomfort is very hard to deal with, and it doesn’t really have a place in business.
So I’ve found this interesting space within myself, where I can have these really great relationships and work closely with people, but still have that distance. I feel like I’m in a place now where I can be close to you and collaborative with you, but I don’t get as emotionally attached.
Q. You’ve touched on this theme a couple of times, that you take things less personally.
A. It comes from taking things super-personally and being upset, and then getting over it and realizing that I did it to myself. People have asked me, if I’m speaking somewhere: “What’s the biggest obstacle you’ve ever overcome? And how did you do it?” My biggest obstacle is myself — being afraid, being nervous. So it’s hard sometimes to get past yourself, to just get over yourself.
And what I’ve learned, as the company has changed and different management people come and go, is that the thing that’s constant is me. I can’t control how many people come and go, necessarily. I can’t control the economy. I can’t control what beauty buyers are going to want tomorrow versus what they want today. But what I can control is me, and how I react to it and how I respond to it.
So I try not to get so caught up in what people think of me, or what someone is going to say. It still rears its ugly head every now and then. But I am my biggest obstacle, and I’m learning to get around myself and over myself and through myself. And it’s a great learning process.
One of the things that this business has taught me is that it’s made me a person I never thought I’d be. I was very much a perfectionist. And I did not like the idea of being a jack of all trades. I had to be a master of one. And I’ve learned how to do a lot of things and be O.K. with not doing all of them very well. Some things I do very well, and some things I’m not so good at. And I’ve learned that from being an entrepreneur, because I was not like that before, at all.
Q. What’s your best career advice?
A. Be open. Your way is not necessarily the only way or the right way. But while you’re open, be assertive. Because I feel like I wasn’t as assertive as I could have been in my earlier years, and I did what other people told me to do. It’s only now that I’m learning to be more assertive. So I think it’s important to find that balance between being open and listening, but also not letting someone bulldoze you into doing what they want to do.
It’s an interesting line that you have to follow. It takes a certain amount of assertiveness, but it also takes a willingness to see how the process works, and not assert your opinion into it, in order to observe and become a part of what’s going on. So it’s just finding that balance. I think you can learn a lot more that way."
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/business/22corner.html
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