Wolters Kluwer's Nancy McKinstry on Working in Many Cultures This interview with Nancy McKinstry, the C.E.O. and chairwoman of the executive board of Wolters Kluwer, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant. A. I became a manager when I went to work for Booz Allen Hamilton, the consulting firm. I managed junior people, and I quickly realized these folks were eager to please, very bright, but had literally no business experience. So my first lesson was to be very clear upfront about what I wanted because if I didn't say, "I want you to go off and do these five things," I might not get back what I needed. Q. How did you learn that was important? A. I'd been a research assistant for a professor, who was this brilliant guy, but not always the most articulate in terms of what he was trying to get at. So I learned early on, in my own experience, that you could produce better results if you knew where you were headed and what somebody wanted. Q. Is that a part of your leadership style today? A. Yes, especially now that I've been running Wolters Kluwer for over six years. I had been running North America and was dealing exclusively with Americans, and then I went into this global job. What I've learned is that every culture is very different in how they make decisions. So that ability to understand how they interpret what you've said to them, and how you interpret what they've said back to you, and what are the rules of engagement about how you're going to make a decision, is very important. Q. Can you give me a couple of examples? A. In the Netherlands, where our company is based, what you find is that people really want to be heard early on in the process. So if you just go to someone and say, "I want you to go take this product and enter this new market," most likely the first response they'll say is, "No, and let me tell you how that won't work." What they really want to say is, "I'm not going to commit yet to that objective until we have a chance to really sit down and explore how we're going to do that, what your expectations are, and how we measure success." So what I've learned in Holland is that if you invest a lot of time upfront to explain what you're trying to accomplish, get people's feedback, then when they do say yes, the time to implementation is really fast. But if you don't invest that time up front, you're going to get such resistance that you'll never get to the end. Then, when I work with my Italian colleagues and the Spaniard colleagues, what you find is they can't always tell you how they're going to get something accomplished, but they manage to get it done, and providing them the latitude is important. Q. What other leadership lessons have you learned? A. The first thing that I learned was results matter. At the end of the day, no matter how much somebody respects your intellect or your capabilities or how much they like you, in the end it is all about results in the business context. You have to be able to demonstrate that you have proven you can drive something forward. So when I talk to my team, I use a football metaphor - every day, we have to come in and advance the ball. The second thing is that you have to have a direction for a business. How can you possibly motivate somebody to work hard and sacrifice time with their family, etc., if they don't have an understanding of where you're trying to go? So I believe very strongly in setting a direction for the business, creating the plan, and really allowing people the opportunity to get engaged around that. Q. Can you talk more about what you learned from those early years in consulting? A. Most companies hire consulting firms when they don't know how to solve a problem. So you're forced into these situations where you're trying to solve incredibly complex problems across a wide range of industries, and the client is spending a lot of money. So you're expected to almost perform miracles. So what that taught me was not to fear any new problem. I truly believe to this day that I can solve any problem. Every day you were confronted with these very complex products. One day you're working in chemicals, next day you're working in the car industry, next day you're working in media. So what you brought to the table was your ability to decouple a problem and analytically work your way through it.