I don’t always click with the folks that Adam Bryant interviews in his Corner Office series, but after this weekend’s installment I really want to meet Kathleen Finch:
Adam Bryant: Tell me about your leadership style now.
Kathleen Finch: One of my favorite things to do is to put a team together in an informal way, then figure out who can do what best. Not everybody likes that because I will oftentimes change somebody’s responsibilities pretty significantly. But I like people playing to their strengths. Some of my best performers are people who had very different jobs than the ones they’re doing now.
AB: What else?
KF: I have a meeting every few months that I call a “pile-on meeting.” I bring about 25 people into a room and go over all the different projects that are coming up in the next six months, and the goal is that everybody piles on with their ideas to make those projects as successful as they can be.
The rule walking into the meeting is you must forget your job title. I don’t want the marketing person just talking about marketing. I want everyone talking about what they would do to make this better. It is amazing what comes out of those meetings.
I need to pull a pile-on at Gigaom Research, where we have dozens of projects coming at us.
from Stowe Boyd http://stoweboyd.com/post/128480273947
