Corner Office | Selina Lo: Selina Lo of Ruckus Wireless, on Leadership vs. Management

Q. Do you remember the first time you were someone’s boss?

A. When I was a student at Berkeley, a real estate company hired me to computerize all its investment listings.  I started there part time in my junior year, and when I graduated, it needed me to stay on for another year to finish the project.  And one of the things it offered me, as an incentive, was to let me manage a programming team. And that was my first time being a manager. The other programmer obviously felt that I wasn’t qualified to manage her. And it was not something I enjoyed.

As a young manager, I had no idea what to do other than supervise the actual work. I also felt that as a manager, the one thing you do is you take care of your people.  So we were flying on a business trip, and when we got off the plane, I said, “Hey, remember your briefcase.”  I was just looking out for her.  But she took it as me micromanaging her. And that got escalated up to my boss, and I just thought, “Wow, why would anybody want to manage people?” 

Then I went to Hewlett-Packard, where I had two mentors, and they really showed me how to get things done within the organization, both on the formal and informal track. And during my six years there, I actually got trained on a lot of the formality of being a manager, and the responsibility. 

But I still did not want to be a manager. I decided that I liked to touch things and to do things too much.  Part of being a manager is that you have to deal with other people’s pace and style of doing things.  I didn’t want to have to deal with that, and throughout my H.P. career, I would completely excel on everything in my performance review except for teamwork.  They would always say, you have to respect other people’s opinions.     

Q. So what changed?

A. When I was young and very single-mindedly focused on my career, I realized that you have to be a manager to move up.  And so, even though I resisted management all those years at H.P., when I moved on to another company, management was offered to me again, and I accepted it because I felt it was good for my career. I thought that H.P. was incredibly political. But little did I know what politics really meant.  In my next job there were different camps, and a hostile environment. That reinforced my feelings about not wanting to be a manager.   

And because of that experience, I swore to myself that if I had any control of the environment, it would never be political. I would never let internal problems become the agenda, and that has been the theme in my career since then. So the next goal for me was, how do I get myself into an environment where I can control who I hire? That was really why I got into this whole start-up thing.   

Q. And so how has your leadership style evolved?

A. I’m impatient.  I can occasionally get emotional, and sometimes when you’re too passionate about something, it can become disruptive. However, the one thing I learned is that a lot of people actually respond well to that because it means you can cut through all the stuff and get things done. That was what I lived for — to get things done, and really be the cheerleader for those people who want to move faster than the system is moving. 

But I also had a wake-up call. One of my employees told me that he wanted to report to another person. He said my pace was just way too fast for him, and I was just way too abrupt, that I was too demanding and expected people to know what I wanted just by osmosis. He also told me that I created too much stress for him and that he was having trouble sleeping. And I thought, really?  It had not occurred to me that people would actually have a physical reaction to my style.  And so that was a wake-up call.  I was greatly humbled.   

There’s a Chinese proverb that doesn’t translate very well, but it’s basically a spoonful of sugar, a spoonful of tar.  Tar is like the Chinese medicine, the herbal thing that is always very bitter, and that was me. And so, people love me and hate me at the same time.  But I thought that was O.K.  The problem I had was the balance. I’m sure, even today, people love me and hate me at the same time.  Today, I’m much more mindful of that balance.  But in those days, the hate part completely dominated the love part.    

Q. You joined Ruckus in its infancy, so you had a chance to set the culture early on. What did you decide to do?

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=4f687ba8278c7ef8a9e12ffc29320d53