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 Maria Contreras-Sweet, head of the Small Business Administration. She believes that a leader’s job is to create an empowering environment where the best ideas can surface.

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Photo credit: Earl Wilson/The New York Times

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Tell me about the early years of your life.

I was born in Guadalajara, Mexico. I always wanted to be a schoolteacher. I remember going on my grandmother’s roof and I’d organize the plants and talk to them and nurture them. When they produced a berry or little piece of fruit, that felt like my reward.

And what about your parents?

My father was over 30 years older than my mother. They had six children, but they didn’t have a cultural connection. My mother was from an immigrant family and my father was a business owner, and came from a more established family. That’s why my mother left and she traveled here to the United States with her six children.

And how old were you when you came to the States?

I was 5 years old. I still remember my first class, in first grade. My teacher thought that I was some unruly kid because she didn’t understand that I didn’t understand what she was saying. She would say, “Line up,” and I’d stay seated until I saw that everybody else was lining up and then I’d follow.

It was a really awkward time because it made me feel dumb and that I didn’t know anything. I was failing my tests. It was just a really difficult period. Because of that, I’m so much more sensitive now to people who come here to integrate and to learn about our society. You feel very different, particularly if you can’t communicate. Somehow you feel inferior to everybody else.

But my first-grade teacher, Miss Tanaka, worked hard to help me learn English. She actually went to the principal to ask if she could teach second grade because she said that she saw promise in me and she wanted to be able to teach me into the next year. When I finally got to third grade, they said, “You know, she’s actually pretty bright.” And I was able to skip a grade. It just renewed my sense of confidence, my self-reliance. Once you learn any language — whether it’s English, or the language of medicine or the language of business — you can get in the game and win.

It must have been hard for your mother to raise six children.

She made enormous sacrifices. Call it chutzpah, moxie, or ganas in Spanish, but can you imagine what it took for her to leave a little community, after being married to a very established businessman, and settle into Los Angeles without any economic advantage? She was educated up to the third grade and she provided for us by working at a little poultry processing plant. I saw her fingers stiffen and her legs thicken, and some of those lessons really do inform me today.

One of the things that I really appreciate about my mother and my grandmother is that they’ve always felt a sense of exceptionalism. Even today, my mother, who is now in her mid-80s, still has this sense of confidence, that “I matter,” when she enters a room. I think that’s important to instill in our young girls — that we matter, we deserve to be heard and we deserve to be treated equally.

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