Adam Bryant conducts interviews of senior-level executives that appear in his “Corner Office” column each week in the SundayBusiness section of The New York Times. Here are a few insights provided during an interview of Amber Guild, president of Collins, a brand consultancy. “To be an effective leader, you can’t be conflict-averse.” To read the complete interview, check out other articles, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

Photo credit: Earl Wilson/The New York Times

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What were some early influences for you?

I grew up in two different homes. I had my father’s home in New Jersey and my mother’s home in New York City.

Tell me more about your parents.

They never married. They became good friends, had me, and then they separated. My dad later moved out to New Jersey with my stepmom, and my mother was in New York. Both were very politically active. I probably went to my first demonstration before I could walk. We were always protesting something or other at a rally.

And I grew up in these two different cultural households. My dad’s household was all white, and my mother and my two older sisters are black. I’m the only one who’s biracial. So I found myself always being a bridge in terms of culture and different classes.

In my home in the city, we were poor. My dad’s household was working-class, but there was always food on the table. Growing up with those two very distinct experiences started to form my relationship with the world and with people in different communities, and seeing both differences and similarities.

Then, to top it all off, I ended up getting a scholarship to boarding school in Connecticut when I was 14, which was another radically different culture and experience.

And how have your parents influenced your leadership style?

The organizing aspect of it — organizing people in a way that leads to collaboration because you have a shared vision and mission. I started organizing when I was 8 or 9.

Really?

It was with my classmates. Someone had been stealing from the cubbies in our classroom, and so I organized a couple of my classmates and we started the Star Detective Group. And I got my teacher to sign off on this group to make it legit, and we then investigated. When I got to junior high, I organized a walkout from the school to protest the first Iraq war. But I also got it endorsed by the teachers, because I was never too much of a rebel.

I also learned resilience from my mother. The confidence that you have to have as a survival skill — I saw that in her and learned that from her. You have to feel that your voice matters and that you can drive change and impact change, because if you feel like you can’t, then you won’t.

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To read the complete interview as well as Bryant’s interviews of other executives, please click here.

Adam Bryant, deputy national editor of The New York Times, oversees coverage of education issues, military affairs, law, and works with reporters in many of the Times’ domestic bureaus. He also conducts interviews with CEOs and other leaders for Corner Office, a weekly feature in the SundayBusiness section and on nytimes.com that he started in March 2009. In his book, The Corner Office: Indispensable and Unexpected Lessons from CEOs on How to Lead and Succeed, (Times Books), he analyzes the broader lessons that emerge from his interviews of hundreds of business leaders. To read an excerpt, please click here. To contact him, please click here.