Corner Office: Jed Yueh of Delphix on Learning to Manage Yourself

This interview with Jed Yueh, chief executive of Delphix, a software company that streamlines data management, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant.

Q. What were your career plans in college?

A. I was an English and psychology major at Harvard, so I had no plans to be an entrepreneur or in technology. My friends from college and high school who were interested in computers all scratch their heads and wonder, “Why are you the tech C.E.O.?”

Q. So what happened?

A. There’s so much money in Silicon Valley to create new technology companies, and I was one of the little particles on the fringe of the carpet that got sucked into the vacuum. I learned how to program in Excel, and built a couple of models for some friends. They got me some contract work for this one company, and I looked at their technology strategy and products and I learned about the industry. That gave me the idea for my first company.

Q. What were some early leadership lessons as you built that first company?

A. My biggest lesson was that you could be technically right and management wrong, and I learned that early on. I can articulate and debate a viewpoint from many angles, and I found that I could be technically right and force somebody into a viewpoint. But then they would slowly spiral into a place where they’re not really working hard because they feel demoralized. So I lost wars by winning battles.

So the first of my three management principles is that you’ve got to learn how to manage yourself. You have to understand how to win wars, not individual battles. If you don’t manage yourself very well, it’s hard for you to maximize the performance of a team. And managers can either increase or decrease motivation for their teams. They can either increase or decrease clarity for their teams. They can either build cultures that are highly collaborative and capable of solving problems quickly, or they can create cultures where you have a lot of paralysis and it’s very difficult to make decisions.

My other rules are hire right and fire right, and that’s pretty much all you have to do to be a great manager. It’s really not that complex at the end of the day.

Q. So let’s talk about hiring.

A. Hiring is the moment when your biggest lever exists for defining the culture. If you don’t know the traits you’re looking for and you haven’t hired around those traits, then you are effectively hiring a wishy-washy culture.

Q. What are the qualities you look for?

A. My two highest-level traits are clarity and creativity. Let’s talk about clarity first. When you’re building a business, there are so many things you can do, so many avenues you can chase, that you have to very quickly find the optimal path. If you can’t separate the signal from the noise, if you can’t find clarity, it’s going to very hard for you to manage a group. It’s also going to be easy for you to spend time in all the wrong places. So it’s very difficult to become efficient if you don’t have clarity.

Q. How do you determine whether somebody has that quality?

A. When I interview someone, I’ll often ask them: “Tell me about why you’d like to join Delphix. What do you think is valuable about Delphix?” I want them to pitch Delphix to me. They’ve had to take in a lot of information about us. They’ve probably read things from a number of sources, and read our Web site. They might have talked to a number of employees ahead of time, and they’ve been synthesizing the information.

So what I want them to do is to present to me how they think about and try to understand something that is new to them, which in this case is Delphix. Some people will immediately dial into the most important elements in the exact right order, and it’s not as simple as it looks. There are a thousand ways you can tell a story and only a few ways that really hone in on what’s important.

I also will ask them about successes and achievements in their career, and then dig deeper. “Why were you successful when you were doing this specific project?” And you’d be amazed at the range of how people answer that. Some meander around, and they cannot get to the point. They don’t really know why they were successful, in which case I know they actually never had clarity. Can they find the story? That really is how you identify clarity in an interview.

Q. You said the other quality was creativity.

A. They have to be able to solve a lot of problems, because the problems you’re going to encounter in a start-up are in every direction. So we have to have people who are creative. It has to be core to a technology company, too. In the technology industry, the chessboard continues to unfold and change.

So I’ll ask people to describe to me how my product works. You’ll find that a lot of people have no creative curiosity. But let’s say you’re one of these engineers who is creative and curious and you’ve figured out how the product works. It’s guaranteed that you don’t understand how every aspect of the product works. So I’ll push somebody until they enter an empty space, in terms of their knowledge, and I have an unfair advantage, because I know how it works. If they can’t answer it, I’ll say, “How would you fill that space?” Some of them will actually problem-solve on the spot, and nail the design, in which case we have a winner. You can do it in all industries and roles, too. You can ask a salesperson, “Tell me about a complex deal that you worked on, and how you got stuck and how you solved it.”

Q. And your third rule is “fire right.”

A. We’ve all made mistakes in hiring, and you know you’ve made a mistake when you keep investing more and more time in an individual, and you’re not getting a return. You have to invest in new talent. You have to coach them. You have to help them. But if you are not seeing a return, then you have to make changes.

Q. Anything you have a particularly low tolerance for?

A. My pet peeve is people who think in silos. You want people to think globally and execute locally. But a lot of people just want to think about their own little world and not connect it to the broader picture. We can’t afford that in a start-up.

This interview has been edited and condensed.