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 K. Mitchell, president of Amdec, a partnership of New York medical research institutions. She says her nursing background lets her “get a sense of somebody pretty quickly.”

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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Bryant: Have you always been interested in leadership roles?

Mitchell: I think some of it is who I am. My mother told a story about me that’s sort of a predictor of how I would be very different from everybody else in my family. When I was in kindergarten, the bus stop was down the street past my house. So I asked the bus driver to stop at my house, because why should he go to the corner when my house was here? I talked them into changing the bus stop to my house because I thought it didn’t make sense. My mother said she just couldn’t believe that in kindergarten I was having this argument with the driver about where to go. So I think some of it is a little bit genetic.

I also discovered over the years that I’m good at taking complex problems and simplifying them and figuring out a path to a solution. I was always very goal-oriented. I would watch people in meetings sit and talk in a lot of disarray and never get anywhere, and I just found that I would naturally take charge and try to get to a place where there was a solution.

I also found I was pretty intolerant of people not quickly getting to where they needed to get to. I still don’t have a lot of tolerance for people not getting to the point, or not coming to a solution. I’m a doer.

Bryant: How has your leadership style evolved?

Mitchell: A colleague once told me that I was overprincipled. I remember saying to him: “That’s ridiculous. How can you be overprincipled?” I didn’t quite understand what that meant at first, but I think I was too black-and-white about people’s work ethic early on, without taking into consideration a lot of the gray. I now think it’s O.K. to manage within more of those gray areas. I’ve also learned to listen better to other people’s ideas and take them, not just listen to them. I’ve learned to be more flexible.

I also think you need to know who’s working for you and working with you. By virtue of being together all day, you learn about people’s lives. If there are things that need understanding, you make it clear that you do understand, and if there are things that people need, time or whatever, you give it to them. But clearly there are people who might take advantage of that and — this is another aspect of myself — I tell people when I hire them exactly who I am. I’m informal. I’m nice. Everything looks friendly, but don’t ever mistake that for not getting the job done.

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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. To contact him, please click here.