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 Christopher Cabrera, founder and C.E.O. of Xactly which provides employee-incentive software. 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 was the fourth of five kids, and I learned that you have to fight for everything, including dinner. Once the food was on the table, if you didn’t dive in, you were going to go hungry.

My mom was always a stay-at-home mom and was the ultimate optimist about what we could be, and how smart we were, and how good-looking we were, and how we were always the best. Hearing that drumbeat in your brain for years gives you a certain confidence as you go out into the world.

My dad was a serial entrepreneur, and he always bootstrapped his companies. The family finances and the business finances were kind of one. Every single summer as I was growing up, I worked at his companies.

Some of the best lessons I’ve learned came from my father, in terms of the way he treated his employees. On the day before Thanksgiving, we’d load up his station wagon with frozen turkeys, and we would deliver them to each one of his employees.

How else have your parents influenced your leadership style?

What I love about the big family I grew up in was that we could argue and fight around the dinner table, debating everything you could imagine, from the constellations to national politics. We’d have these lively debates and people would get emotional, and then we’d all go back to being normal. So I’m very comfortable with my executive team being super open and communicative, and apolitical as much as possible.

What did you do after college?

I started a security guard company with my dad during my senior year. It gave me instant managerial experience at a time I probably didn’t deserve it. I was dealing with personnel issues and hiring people and firing people. It was kind of a crazy, fun experience. But I cringe when I think back on some of the things I did, in terms of poor leadership.

After a few years, I wanted to do something different, and I joined Silicon Graphics, which was the hot company in Silicon Valley during the ’90s. I spent seven years there, and that’s where I became a manager.

I had a seasoned boss who was a wonderful mentor, and he really helped me with hiring and understanding how to create diverse teams. The company was growing quickly, and hiring was a big part of my job.

I needed to hire eight people for my team. I was about halfway through, and I had one of my normal sit-downs with my boss, who was African-American, and he said, “I want to go over your last four hires with you. Do you realize that they’re all basically white 23-year-old men? This isn’t a fraternity.”

I was so embarrassed because I certainly hadn’t done that on purpose. The lesson was that we often just do what we’re comfortable with. The thing I learned that day, and every day since, was the power of diversity and the power of bringing people together from different cultural backgrounds and experiential backgrounds.

I distinctly remember him saying to me, “How interesting do you think your team meetings will be when you have 12 guys that are 23, white, with the same background? Do you think that that’s really going to be a challenging and rich environment where you’re learning?”

And I just remember thinking, “Yeah, that’s crazy. Why would I want that?” It really stuck with me.

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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.