Corner Office, Interview with with Bill Carter, partner in and founder of Fuse, a youth marketing agency; New York Times, 4/18/10

Corner Office, Adam Bryant; New York Times, Interview with Bill Carter, partner in and founder of Fuse, a youth marketing agency:

"Q. So, what kind of leader are you now?

A. I think that I’m fair, because I try to be honest and direct in a helpful way. If you want people to be at their best, and if you want the whole company to be on the same page all the time, you need to be willing to communicate directly with people. In our office, what we’ve achieved is that being direct is not a personal attack.

I did learn that, to some degree, in my college lacrosse experience. When my coach was coming down on me or somebody else, it never felt like a direct attack. Now, it felt awful, but I never thought he was being mean-spirited about it. I never thought he was doing it for any other reason than he wanted us, as a team, to be on the same page and to be the best that we could be.
Q. How has your leadership style evolved? What do you do more of, or less of?

A. One of the things I do more of now, and probably a better job of now than I did 10 years ago, is being really present in our office when I’m there. I think many senior people, C.E.O.’s and presidents of companies, both small and large, obviously spend a lot of time outside of the office. What I used to tend to do with the 50 percent of the time that I was in the office would be to go into my office and shut the door, literally or figuratively, and delve back into the real core responsibilities of that day or that week. And I might as well have not been in the office. I wasn’t interacting with other staff, both senior and junior staff. I wasn’t gauging anything that was going on in the staff, learning anything new, or understanding the challenges that people were facing.

I’ve learned that when you’re in your office and you’re in that position, the best thing you can do is spend at least 50 percent of your time in the office communicating with as many staff as you have time to communicate with. Holing yourself up in your office is not the way to learn about what’s happening in the organization. The information doesn’t flow up to you when you’re in a closed-door situation like that.

I think that if you look at your core responsibilities a little less literally, you’d probably want to spend more time with your staff, because what are most C.E.O.’s really in charge of? Well, they are in charge of setting strategy. They are in charge of creating the best work environment. They are in charge of finding the best talent. How can you possibly do that by isolating yourself in your office and only communicating with people from accounting or your outside legal counsel or the majority of the people that are probably the ones e-mailing you?

Your junior staff people are not e-mailing you. And if you don’t go down the hall and talk to that person, you’re not going to know the real challenges."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/18/jobs/18corner.html?pagewanted=2&sq=corner%20office&st=cse&scp=4