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 Amit Singh, president of Google for Work. 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 your early influences?

I grew up in India. My dad was in the armed forces, and at an early age I went to a boarding school in Delhi and learned most of my leadership lessons there. There were a lot of sports teams, and everyone belonged to one of five houses, as they were called.

It’s quite an interesting experience at 12 years old. You learn sharing, and with boarding school food you were always starving. So you learn negotiation — one jam roll is worth 10 butters, for example. You really stayed together as a team because there’s a lot of rivalry with the other houses. It’s like Harry Potter.

I also remember wanting to be on the basketball team, but I’d never played basketball before. And I wanted it desperately enough that I used to wake up a few hours before everybody else and just practice by myself. I did that for six months. Then I made the team and eventually became the captain. As a senior, I was the prefect, in charge of our house.

When did you move to the United States?

I did my undergrad at the Delhi College of Engineering, and then I did my master’s in industrial and management at Rensselaer Polytechnic in upstate New York. I didn’t know much about technology at that stage, but I got a job right after that with Oracle.

And what were some early leadership lessons for you?

I learned the hard way about the importance of coaching people rather than jumping in and doing the work for them. A lot of folks have a tough time with that balance, and I did, too. Instead of giving people advice or coaching them on how to present something, I would go and do it for them or write their presentation.

Over the years, I have tried to find the balance of when to jump in and when to coach. I’ve also learned how to coach. A lot of folks wait until a formal review, and I’ve always felt that the best coaching is in the moment and actionable.

It’s about trying to make somebody better versus criticizing someone for doing something. Done right, people love it, because you’re really invested in their success. The flip side is that if you just say what’s wrong, then people feel terrible.

Other lessons?

Whatever amount of time you’re spending communicating, it’s never enough. I realized that so much gets lost in translation in emails. You have to spend time communicating your point of view and establishing a vision for the team and how you’re going to get there. It’s superimportant.

I think people are looking for inspiration. Work needs to have meaning, and they want to feel like they’re part of something bigger. To do that well, you have to be thoughtful, and you have to communicate effectively.

Another lesson is that as big as the organization might be, it doesn’t always take that much to reach out and connect with people. We have a very flat structure at Google, and it’s pretty open. Anybody can come into my office and say, “Hey, I want to have a cup of coffee with you.” I remember being so motivated by a leader who always felt so accessible even though he spent all of five minutes with me.

I’ve also learned over time that you can’t do too many things well. And so you narrow the focus down to the things that truly matter, which forces you to prioritize ruthlessly. Sometimes you just have to say that you’re not going to that meeting. That takes some self-confidence and discipline.

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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.