The Limited's Chief - Re-Recruit Your Team Every Day - NYTimes.com This interview with Linda Heasley, president and chief executive of The Limited, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant. Linda Heasley is president and chief executive of The Limited, based near Columbus, Ohio. She says that it's her job to always give her associates "a reason to choose to work for us and for me as opposed to anybody else." Q. What were some big leadership lessons for you? A. When I was in college, I took a leave of absence from school and worked as a community educator in Arizona, and I learned a lot from a man who was in this tiny community who was trying to get plumbing and streets for his town. He was a simple man, but he had incredible dynamism, and a lot of that was from the vision and the selflessness that he put forward. So I learned from that experience that it's not about you, it's about the bigger picture. Q. How has your leadership style evolved? A. I didn't start out thinking I'd be in retail. I worked with analytical teams, and what I have come to love about retail is the link between art and management science. It's a very creative environment, and it's been great for me to bring the rigors that I learned in that analytical world and apply it to retail. What I have come to understand in managing creative types is intuition and appreciation for the art, and I'm always willing to back the intuition of my best merchant. There's something that you can't pin down. So it is balancing the art and the science of it all. We're still a fact-based organization. We still have to drive to the bottom line. At the same time, I have come to realize there are some things you cannot explain with a hypothetical model, that you just do have to go with your gut sometimes. You trust and you believe. Q. Let's talk about hiring. What qualities are you looking for? A. Passion. I like curiosity. I like energy level. They have to have a sense of humor. They have to be willing to take a risk. I will ask questions around each of those to try to flesh that out, like, "Give me an example of a situation where you think you took a risk or took a controversial point of view." It's as much about seeing how they addressed issues and difficult situations as it is what they decided to do. I do want to see how they think. They have to be smart. I like people who have demonstrated performance in a number of different places. They don't have to have stayed at the same place, but I like to see that they were at a place long enough to annualize things that they started and had time to build relationships. But I like the fact that people have moved and have had different experiences. Each of the places I went, I learned a tremendous amount and then was able to build on that. Q. And what are your best interview questions? A. I always like to hear what books they read. What keeps them up at night? I like an example of a challenging situation in a business environment where they took a controversial position. As I said, it doesn't matter to me what they decided to do, but I like to see how they handled it. I like hearing what they do when they're not in the office. I like to hear how a direct report would describe you and your management style. I like to hear their philosophy of leadership. Q. Any memorable answers, good or bad, about philosophy of leadership? A. What I don't like to hear, and I think it's something we're probably all guilty of, is a focus on business results. It's an important thing. You wouldn't be interviewing with me if I didn't know you had a track record. But leadership style, and how to describe it, is something we're not as comfortable talking about as leaders. It's interesting for me how undeveloped those responses can be. What I do like to hear is, even when a bad situation occurs, is the willingness to take a risk and try to do something to turn it into an opportunity and lead a group to do that. I look for a little bit of thinking out of the box, but I think many executives have a hard time talking about that. Q. And what's your philosophy of leadership? A. I believe that it's not about me. I believe it's very much about the team. I believe that my associates can work anywhere they want, and my job is to re-recruit them every day and give them a reason to choose to work for us and for me as opposed to anybody else. So it's about making it fun. It's about making it exciting. It's about keeping them marketable. I encourage people: "Go out and find out what the market bears. You should do that and then come back and help me figure out what you need in your development that you're not getting, because we owe you that.