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 Roger Ferguson, chief executive of TIAA-CREF, the retirement services provider. 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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Were you in leadership roles when you were younger?

I was captain of the high school cross-country team and editor of the yearbook, but nothing extraordinary. It’s not as if people looked at me and said, “That young man is going to be the C.E.O. of a Fortune 100 company one day.”

Tell me about your parents.

My mother was a public-school teacher, and my father was a cartographer for the Army. He was also very interested in banking and investments. We didn’t have much money, but he spent a lot of time talking to me about interest rates and the stock market and banks.

Any expressions they would often repeat with you?

No job is too small to do well. In my family, whatever you did, you did it right the first time. And if you didn’t do it right the first time, you learned and you went back and did it.

Any leadership roles in college?

I went to Harvard, and got involved in leadership roles on campus, including as a treasurer. I also was part of a college-wide committee on undergraduate life, which allowed me to work with some pretty important leaders.

What else did you do outside of class?

For my first two years at Harvard, I cleaned bathrooms. That was my work-study job — Monday through Friday, two hours a day, cleaning bathrooms for other students. I may have been the best bathroom cleaner that they ever had. A lot of students might be a little embarrassed by it. But I was, as I say to this day, proud to be a scrubbie. Somebody had to do it, and I did it well.

Any challenges in your early management roles?

When I was a second-year associate at a big law firm in New York, you start to have summer associates working for you on transactions. At first, you assume that everybody else, because they have very similar backgrounds and training, has exactly the same views about how work is going to get done. You have to get that balance right between leaving them alone and micromanaging.

You worked at McKinsey & Company for many years. What leadership lessons did you learn there?

Almost everything at McKinsey gets done as a team, so you have to figure out how to be a constructive team member from
Day 1. You can lead from whatever position you’re in because you have expertise that the team needs. Everybody has a leadership role to play. You also have to learn how to lead people who don’t even report to you, and you do that by influence, rather than hierarchy.

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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.