To MasterCard's Retiring Chief, the X Factor is Presence This interview with Robert W. Selander, chief executive of MasterCard, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant. Mr. Selander will retire from the C.E.O. position on July 1, after 14 years in the job. Q. What are the most important leadership lessons you have learned? A. I spent a reasonable amount of time living overseas. So relatively early in my career I moved first to San Juan, then to Rio, then to London, then to Belgium, running businesses in those markets. Pretty early on, I recognized that more is the same than is different - fundamental values, wanting to give your children more opportunity or at least as much as you had in life, etc. It's present all around the world, and that happens to be true in a lot of aspects of business as well. More is the same than is different, but we tend to focus on differences, and perhaps exaggerate or accentuate those beyond the reality of what we have to worry about. I can remember when I moved to Brazil and I had spent two years learning Spanish. I was out visiting branches. I was working for Citibank at the time and had responsibility for consumer businesses there. Brazil is a big country. I was living in Rio and it's like living in Miami. I was out visiting a branch in the equivalent of Denver. Not everybody spoke great English and I hadn't gotten very far in Portuguese. As I was sitting there trying to discern and understand what this branch manager was saying to me, and he was struggling with his English, the coin sort of dropped that this guy really knows what he's talking about. He's having a hard time getting it out. As I thought about the places I'd been on that trip, I realized this was probably the best branch manager I'd seen, but it would have been very easy for me to think he wasn't, because he couldn't communicate as well as some of the others who were fluent in English. I think that was an important lesson. It is too easy to let the person with great presentation or language skills buffalo you into thinking that they are better or more knowledgeable than someone else who might not necessarily have that particular set of skills. So that was something that sounds obvious in hindsight, but as I was sitting there, boy, for me this was a thunderbolt. I think that's another thing that sort of served me well, not letting the veneer distract you from the substance. Q. Let's say you're interviewing me for a job reporting directly to you. How does that conversation go? A. Beyond the discussion of what you're going to do for us, I want to know two or three of your strengths and weaknesses. And then I'm going to ask you about those two or three things that you've acknowledged are flat sides, and how you think we should work on those, how you think we should ensure those don't become barriers to success. I think probably the final thing is that I'm going to try to ensure - and I'm going to ask you if you feel good in your gut about it - that there is going to be some chemistry here, that you're not out in left field and I'm out in right field from our respective positions, that we're in fact sort of more or less in the center of the infield together. Q. What qualities are you looking for in hires? A. What I'm looking for is always the same. The more senior a person, the richer I expect them to be in these attributes. The top two are leadership and results. From a leadership standpoint, I would expect you, as a more senior executive, to be able to talk about where you've provided strategic leadership. It doesn't mean you're a brilliant strategist, but you've been able to get a team together to agree on who the target customer is, what products and services you're going to offer them, and the value and competitive advantage you're going to create. Tell me about what you've done in bringing along talent. Tell me about difficult things you had to do in terms of reconfiguring a team, or whatever. Talk to me about successes and all the net talent you provided to other parts of the companies you worked in. The second would be results. At the end of the day, I want to have people who have been able to, and will continue to be able to, deliver results. That can mean starting with a clean sheet of paper and having a very credible business three or four years later. It can mean going in and taking over something that's already very big and making it better, whether that's revenues, expense management, bottom-line profitability.