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 Lindsey Ueberroth, chief executive of the Preferred Hotel Group. “When running a meeting, speak last.” The chief executive of Preferred Hotel Group says that to avoid swaying the conversation in meetings, “I’ve learned to throw a topic out, ask a lot of questions and get a lot of engagement before I speak my mind.”

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

Photo credit: Earl Wilson/The New York Times

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Were you in leadership roles when you were younger?

Most people don’t believe me, but when I was a child, I was a painfully shy person. But my family moved from Los Angeles to Minneapolis when I was in fifth grade and that was a big turning point, because all of a sudden I was in a new environment. And it was really cool to be from California, so I had that going for me.

We ended up moving a lot, and I became very good at being the new kid and learned very quickly that you have to get involved in things. I ended up in a lot of leadership positions.

Tell me about college.

I studied organizational communications. I was always interested in what motivates people, and how to affect people’s behavior. I interviewed for everything when I graduated, but I ended up working for Accenture. That was an interesting interview process, because it was a highly coveted company and everybody had said: “You’ve got to have this G.P.A. You have to have scored this on your SAT.”

I didn’t, but I figured that there’s always an exception to the rule. I made it through the first interviews, and then 10 of us went to the Charlotte office for the final interview, and everyone was expecting to get an offer.

I found out that there was a division called “change management consulting,” and I kept asking people about it. They’d all say, “We don’t hire college graduates for that.” They let me meet the partner who ran change management, and I asked him a lot of questions. I ended up leaving without an offer. I was devastated.

But two weeks later, I got a phone call from the partner, who said, “You were gutsy enough to keep pushing for this, and so we’d like to make you an offer.”

He gave me some good advice, too. I remember asking, “What’s the one thing I should know as I start my professional life?” He said, “It’s always better to be tired than bored.”

Any lessons from working in change management?

I learned that a lot of the work was about listening. I was like a therapist most of the time, because people just wanted to get things off their chest. The more people tell you what the problems are, the faster you can figure out how to solve them.

Ultimately you switched to the family business, in the travel industry.

I had never once contemplated working with my family, but it was just a natural fit. At first, I was consulting, helping my father integrate the businesses he was buying. My dad never once said, “Will you come work with me?” It was always, “Will you go spend some time there and let me know what you think?”

But family businesses are hard because you have to work three times as hard to prove yourself, because everybody thinks that you’re overpaid and that everything is handed to you. People always have a lot of preconceived notions about you, and it just takes a lot more time and a lot more work to prove yourself.

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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 with more than 70 leaders. To read an excerpt, please click here.

His more recent book, Quick and Nimble: Lessons from Leading CEOs on How to Create a Culture of Innovation, was also also published by Times Books (January 2014). To contact him, please click here.