And he said, “Well, but how often?” “All the time,” I said. Then he asked me, “But do you ever ask them how do they feel?” And I said, “Am I supposed to ask that?”

I was treating people the way I expected to be treated, and I don’t expect anybody to ask me how I feel. I just expect to talk about the work. So he said, “Lisa, you have to know that to get the best out of your people, different people need to be managed differently.”

That was a revelation to me. I say this now to my team: “Our jobs as leaders are to get 120 percent out of our teams. We’re supposed to make the team better than they thought they could possibly be.” The way to do that is to treat everyone as an individual, in terms of what they need to be successful and how they need to be coached.

How would you describe your leadership style today?

I like to set very high standards and expectations. What’s inspiring to me is working on something that is really, really hard, or really, really important, and then working with the team to figure out how to reach that goal.

There’s an art to doing that, because sometimes those stretch goals can seem unachievable and they can make a team less motivated.

That’s where the intuition comes in. I can’t say I’m an engineer anymore, but I started as an engineer, and so I have enough intuition about just where to set those goals.

And if I use my analogy of we’re trying to get 120 percent out of the team, I think you can use that in just about any situation. If the team thinks they can do something, then they can probably do 20 percent more.