This interview with Deborah Dunsire, M.D., president and chief executive of Millennium: The Takeda Oncology Company, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant.
Q. What leadership lessons did you learn when you first started managing others?
A. When you desperately want to do well, and I am a person who’s typically worked hard and done well, sometimes that desire translated into overdoing it on the leadership side. If something went wrong, I would get too anxious about it or think I had to fix it personally.
As I’ve stepped further and further outside my comfort zone to the job I’m in now, I’ve had to focus more on the work of leadership and not focus on being the person who solved the details of the problem.
In my first management position, sometimes if something didn’t go well, I would feel I had to get personally involved, in some ways duplicating what the person who worked for me was doing. I had to learn to step away from that and ask myself what I could uniquely do.
The focus on the work of leadership means asking yourself: “What do I add? What can I bring that others cannot access without me?”
Q. How did you learn that lesson?
A. The light bulb didn’t pop to full intensity right away. But I heard gentle feedback that, “You’re in my sandbox and we’re not accomplishing a lot being in here together.” I’ve also heard feedback from a team I worked with that said, “Gee, we know you’re good at this stuff and you’ve done it, but sometimes we need to kind of bang our heads a little bit more without you fixing it.”
So I learned to step away sometimes and, in the right situation, allow a person to stub their toe. You don’t allow them to do that if the chairman’s coming for a presentation. But in a safe situation, it’s O.K. to allow them to present their work with a flaw that you can see clearly, because you’ve done this more times than they have, and letting them learn from that.
It also came at a time where I was more confident in my own leadership, so that by allowing that to happen I wasn’t failing. I learned to separate the fact that everything had to go perfectly for me to feel that I was being the leader I needed to be.
Also, I grew to understand more and more that the job of leadership is developing people, and that it involves not doing everything for them, but sometimes allowing them to stub their toe. The work may not come in perfectly, but the learning was much more effective, and people felt empowered to own the outcome in a different way. Putting that into practice was very hard for me because it’s very hard for me to see a problem and not try and fix it.
Q. You say it’s important to be patient. On the other hand, the speed of business keeps getting quicker, and the competition isn’t resting. How do you resolve the two forces?
A. I think it comes down to a fundamental premise, and that’s having the right people on the bus. There’s a need to have the right people with excellent experience and good judgment, because all of us are going to always be faced with things we’ve never seen before. And your experience, combined with good judgment and high integrity, will allow you to react to situations you’ve never seen before. So I always look at who’s leading the function. My trust in those function heads is very important.
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