Simon Anderson, on Creating a Culture of Shameless Honesty This interview with Simon Anderson, chief executive of DreamHost, a Web hosting provider and domain name registrar, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant. Q. You became C.E.O. through an unusual process - you were elected in a vote by all the employees. How did that play out? A. It all started when I got a call from an executive recruiter. I was a chief marketing officer at another firm, and the recruiter said, "You should really look at this company." It was founded by four undergrads and they'd grown it to about 100 employees, without taking any outside investment. They wanted to bring in an outside C.E.O. to help take the company to the next level. When they told me I was on the short list of candidates, that's when they sprung on me that there was going to be an election. At first I was surprised, but I leaned into it and I said: "O.K., no worries. Let's go ahead. All of the team members whittled down a list of questions to come up with the top 12 that they wanted to ask each candidate in a town hall setting. I didn't know what they were ahead of time. One of them was around my attitude toward freedom of speech. Another was about my upbringing in Australia, and how that had shaped my perspective on jobs I've had. Q. How did you answer that? A. Both my parents are teachers, and our family always had holidays together that were very much adventure-type activities. I think I probably spent a third of my life growing up in a tent camping at the beach or in the mountains in Australia and almost being a little bit nomadic. As Australians, we tend to have a broad and a very empathetic perspective on people and different cultures, and that there's not one set way of doing things. We're very outward-looking people. That, combined with my experience of traveling and interacting with a lot of people, helped me to have that empathy where you sit. You meet someone, and you don't judge them. You listen about who they are and what makes them tick. Q. What's your approach to fostering a culture? A. What I always say is: "I don't have an open-door policy. I have an open-mind policy. An open door suggests that you're coming to me in my space, whereas an open mind helps you hear things, good or bad, from someone who is an expert. We've also gone through a very democratic process of crystallizing the values that DreamHost has as a company and as a team. For example, everyone has a voice. We also practice shameless honesty, which is a fantastic value used in meetings regularly. Q. That's an interesting phrase. A. Our employees came up with it. You can be sitting in a meeting and you can say, "I'm going to be shamelessly honest here." Boom. Now there's respect and it's not rude honesty. It just gives us permission to have those hard conversations and get to a point where the elephant is not in the room. We don't have elephants in the room for very long because someone's going to call it out and say, "Look, I'm not getting this." When people talk about culture, they often think that culture is about the lunches and that sort of thing. We don't really see culture like that. Culture's a full-contact sport. You're fighting for what you believe in. Culture is debate. It's argument. It's messy, and for culture to be strong, people have to be fighting and challenging each other. What qualities are you looking for, and what questions do you ask? A. I like to hire someone who's the sort of person who believes they can come up with solutions to problems. It's definitely not black and white, but I find that if I ask someone about their experiences, and their answers start sounding like, "The world did this to me," or "An outside party did this to me," then that can be a signal that maybe they're not the right candidate. I'd much rather have people who believe that they're empowered to do things. Q. If you could ask only a couple of questions in a job interview, what would they be? A. Probably the first one would be, "Tell me about the first experience in your life when you realized that you had the power of change or the power to do something meaningful." It's open-ended. Some people might tell the story of when they were 5 and there was some incident and they had to take more responsibility for their baby brother or sister. Maybe it was from their teenage years. Something bad was going to happen at school and I stood up for this friend of mine and all of a sudden I felt self-empowered to do things. I think that's really important. If someone sits there and they're stumped, I think that tells you something. I think there's this big shift under way in business where you have to respect the fact that people are going to forge their own path and they're going to be motivated by different things and they're going to want to do meaningful things. So in our business, finding people who are equally motivated and believe in that is really important. Q. How would you answer the question about the moment you realized you had the power to change things? A. The first time my dad took me surfing with my brother was at this beach called Narooma, and it's a pretty wild beach. I was probably 7, and I just remember being really fearful because it was a real surfboard. The three of us were together and we paddled through the foam. It probably wasn't that far but it felt a long way out at the time. I got separated from my dad and my brother. I tried to catch a wave and I got washed in, and I just went through this whole experience of feeling fearful of sharks and the waves and worrying that I was going to drown. But I just made a decision: "I'm going to work through this. I'm going to stay out. I'm not going to go in. For me, there's a lot of those kinds of experiences in my upbringing that have helped me feel very self-empowered, and that I can effect change.