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 Patty Stonesifer, . 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 some early influences for you?

I’m the sixth of nine children. The most notable things about my family were that my parents had to achieve order at scale, and they were extremely community-oriented.

My dad was a sales manager for an auto dealership, and yet he found time on the way home to pick up excess food from the local grocery markets and repurpose it for those who needed food. We participated in the soup kitchen. He drove a bus for the deaf children who were coming to Sunday Mass. This idea of being part of a team really defined my childhood.

Any thoughts on how your birth order shaped you?

Being in the middle taught me to use my voice. I was a talkative child, I had a lot to say, and I knew how to get my points across at an early age because there were a lot of people with a lot to say at the table.

Being right in the middle also teaches you that it’s not about you. Some of my first memories were folding diapers for my younger siblings or taking somebody’s hand to go to school. It was always about making sure that the whole came together.

You moved up the ranks pretty quickly at Microsoft early in your career. What were some inflection points?

This was back when Microsoft was really small. They had an annual managers’ retreat, and each vice president picked a new leader to bring along, and I was chosen. There were only two women.

When we were discussing an issue, I started questioning where the group was heading. The executive team, especially Bill [Gates], decided after that I was somebody they should move around so that I had opportunities to use those skills. I literally was packing my bags within a few weeks after the retreat to run our operations in Canada.

You obviously made an impression on the boss. You became the founding C.E.O. of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The thing about growing up at a big dinner table is that people are going to disagree and people are going to have points of view, and for me, that was very comfortable. I’m really comfortable with a fair amount of conflict and disagreement. As long as people are nice and not mean about it, those conflicts can be really productive.

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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.