This interview with Paula Kerger, president and C.E.O. of PBS, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant.
Q. Tell me about your early years.
A. I grew up outside Baltimore in an area that was largely rural. When my parents married, my grandparents gave them a piece of land adjacent to theirs, so it was really the idyllic life. I spent a lot of time outside running around and just doing stuff.
My grandfather was a great influence on me. He was a physics professor, and his expertise was in microwave technology. He founded the public radio station in Baltimore as a real-world application for his students. He also was interested in the arts — he was very involved in local theater and did a lot of set design, and he was a great storyteller.
The fact that I ended up in public media seems destined in hindsight, though that was not the path I took.
What was your plan when you went to college?
I started out in pre-med, but then I hit organic chemistry, and that was the end of my designs on being a doctor. And so, without any real notion of what I wanted to do with my life, I switched to business.
I also worked during college at a processing center for Visa and MasterCard, and was in a management job there even as I went to school. Afterward, just by serendipity, I saw an ad in the newspaper, and then went to work for Unicef. From there, I moved to a couple of different nonprofits.
What have been some important leadership lessons for you?
I’ve learned so much from great bosses, but I’ve learned more from really bad bosses: They’re not clear, they’re not focused on making sure everyone shares the same strategic vision and understands what success looks like, and they don’t give people the room to figure out how to get there.
I’ve also seen bosses who deliberately give four people the same assignment, thinking that survival of the fittest gets the best work out of people. But fear doesn’t work well.
So what’s your approach?
With the teams we build, we look for different skill sets and we look for people who bring different voices to the table. I know that’s now become very popular in theory, but that’s something I’ve always done. I always believe that the best projects are managed not by people who all think alike but who are all contributing something different.
The biggest mistakes that I’ve made have all been human resource-related, particularly those when I’ve not moved quickly enough when I realize the fit is wrong. All of us have some humanity. Some of us have a softer heart than others, but when you have someone who is not a good fit, it is not kind to them or the people around them to keep them too long.
What else?
I like to get a lot of information before I make a decision, but I’m not afraid to make decisions. That comes back to the whole thing about being the C.E.O. You have to be able to move. People who always want all the information before they make a decision are disastrous C.E.O.s. You’re never going to have all the information.
Cultural change is also the biggest challenge for leaders, and it’s also the thing that will kill you if you can’t figure out how to manage what is clearly a shifting landscape, and get people moving along that path and not be stuck.
We’re going through a big rebuild of our whole infrastructure of how we distribute our content. When you get your head around it, it’s such an extraordinary time, and it’s not one for the faint of heart.
Life is often about those moments — you have to be willing, every once in a while, to jump, and it’s absolutely terrifying. Our nature as humans is to not change. We get comfortable, and we don’t want to be pushed outside that comfort zone, whether it’s moving from a job that you know is not the right one or because it always feels so much easier to keep doing the same thing, even if it’s painful, rather than taking that leap.
And so what have you done as a strategy to make the culture shift work?
I’ve really tried to pull teams together that have representation from every facet of the organization. So you’re aligning people together around shared projects and shared outcomes, and people get to know each other so then it’s not about us versus them. I think it’s good to have a blend of people that have been there for a while as well as new talent. I think tipping too far one way or another is always a problem.
Sharing information is also really important. In some organizations, leaders can go into their bunkers, and if people don’t get enough information, then they start making it up.
I try not to shield people when the news isn’t always good, because they just need to know.
How do you hire?
I look for intellectual curiosity. I look for people who are passionate about what we do, because I’m in the nonprofit sector. I care about hiring people who really want to work in public media because they have a fire for it.
I also look for people who are going to bring something to the table and who will work well collaboratively, but I don’t want a group of people that just tell me what I want to hear. I just want them to tell me what I need to hear. And so I want people that are going to be comfortable doing that.
You want at least one person around the table who’s going to be the devil’s advocate, who’s always going to make sure that you don’t come to consensus too fast.
Even if you end up at the same outcome, you don’t want people walking out of the room saying, “Well, I wonder why we didn’t think of … ?”
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