This week’s New York Times Corner Office section featured Maigread Eichten, CEO of FRS, a maker of energy drinks. Eichten had a lot of insightful things to say about her leadership style and how she approaches management.

A swim coach as a teenager, Eichten told Times reporter Adam Bryant that she learned to deal with people and to cope with not making everyone happy all the time dealing with athletes and parents poolside.

“I was 17 and you’ve got these parents screaming at you every weekend — “How come Johnny didn’t get to swim?” and “He’s better than Sally.” — and you’re going back and forth on this every week: Do I want to win or do I want to swim all the kids, and the kids are looking at you and the parents are screaming at you.

That experience is very similar to many days how I feel here. I feel like I’m a judge, and I use that mental image a lot, which is that my job is not to make everybody happy. My job is to chart the right course and, at the end of the day, I leave this building and if I feel like I’ve done the right thing and people respect me, I’m happy. But on any day someone is probably unhappy with a decision that I made in the day, and that’s the best I can do.

It’s the same thing with the swim team. Mr. Smith is probably mad that I didn’t swim his daughter, and sometimes I have to look at little Jane and say, “You know what, you’re not going to swim the 100 fly today, sorry.” It’s a team sport.”

The idea of her staff as a team and herself as a coach is one that Eichten brings up again when helping her employees to stay on target or work through a problem. As their coach, she intuitively knows when a team member needs guidance.

“Eichen: I walk around a lot and if I see in people’s eyes that they need help, or if I get a sense that something’s up, I drop things because sometimes people just need help.

Q. And you’ll sense that just by the look in their eyes?

A. Absolutely, or I can hear it in their voice. I can hear it in their voice, and I think that’s really important that you have sense for your people. I call it my Spidey-sense. My 13-year-old daughter does not like this, by the way. It’s the same Spidey-sense I have with my kids. If something’s off, something’s off, and if I get a sense something’s off, I drop everything and I will not let go until I know what it is because it’s a sign there’s a problem.

Q. So how do you broach it?

A. Well, my people know me well enough. They know I’ll come in, I’ll close the door, and I’ll just say, “O.K., spill it.” There’s no warm-up for me. They know I will not leave. I want to help. I always say to them: “Look, guys we’re in this together. We’re a team.”

Even if you don’t possess a “spidey sense” like Eichten, it seems the key to her success is open communication and accepting that while you can’t please everyone all the time, you can help them and remind them that they’re a aprt of a bigger team and that while they might not be getting what they want, what’s important is that the team succeeds.

As for her advice for job seekers, “Be superqualified” and don’t be afraid to be annoyingly informed about the job and the company.

“I interview a ton of people and I get really frustrated with interviews, to be honest, because I find that people come in a lot of times and they don’t even know that much about the company, which I find just really odd.

I went to business school, and I decided I wanted a PepsiCo internship. They were only taking one intern, so my shot at getting this Pepsi internship was slim to none, because I had no experience.

But I decided I wanted this internship and what I did was — I think about this all the time when I interview people, sort of, why don’t they do this to me? — I researched all the people coming to campus to interview. I knew everything about them. I knew everything about Pepsi-Cola and the PepsiCo company. I knew everybody in the U.C.L.A. recruiting office and I wrote the story of myself as a brand and I came up with a whole talk about why Pepsi should hire me, and the assets I could bring.

I had called up the two or three people who had been Pepsi interns from other campuses, and I found out every single thing that they had done as interns. So I had done all that work before I took this interview. I was one of the four people they took back to New York for an interview, and I got this internship. I was probably also incredibly annoying, but I certainly was superqualified.”

And what I would say to my kids is, to get the job you need two things. You need the functional skills, but then you also have to be superprepared, and you have to have incredible passion. You have to make that person want to hire you. They have to have a reason to hire you. There’s no excuse why you can’t have that.

I’m just really surprised by some of the people I interview. A few people, when I say “FRS,” they say, “I haven’t tried the product.” If they say that, the interview is over.”

Read the full article here.