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 Sarah Barnett, president of SundanceTV, a cable and satellite network owned by AMC Networks. “There’s a certain liberation and relief to give yourself permission not to always handle things well, and to create a culture where you can say: ‘Hey, you know what? Maybe I didn’t deal very well with you yesterday; this is what I meant to say.’ “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 come from a large family. I’m one of six kids, and I’m the eldest girl, which made me very attuned to what needed to get done for the good of the family. That’s something I’ve taken with me through different roles — that awareness of the group, what the gaps are and what needs to be done. My mother passed away when I was 10, so I think that certainly exaggerated this natural tendency.

Tell me about your father.

I grew up in a village about 70 miles south of London, and my dad commuted to the city every day. He started in an ad agency as a very junior person and worked his way up to chief financial officer. He always had a fierce idealism about equality. He went from a very humble place in his career to a fairly senior role, and always believed that everybody was equal, and he insisted that we behave that way.

Did you have specific ideas of what you wanted to do for a career after university?

I’d worked for the BBC a couple of years before I went to university. When I left college, I wasn’t totally committed to a career in broadcasting, but I had student debts, and a friend invited me to work on a project at the BBC. I stayed a long time.

What I continue to enjoy about my career is the excitement and openness of being curious about what might come along, and trusting my reaction to it. The counsel I give to people starting out is not to be too fixed, and to be open. Otherwise, you’ll miss the adventures that come along.

What did you learn in your first management role?

It’s the classic thing that not everybody is like you. Sometimes that can feel like a very emotional thing, like it’s about values. If you think it’s all about the team, and you’ve had any strand of narcissism knocked out of you from an early age, then someone who’s driven by a more personal quest can feel like they’re wrong at a profound level. I’ve realized that it’s just different, and you can’t change that, and it’s all relative. You have to figure out how not to be triggered by that.

I’ve also learned that you can’t control what people project onto you as a leader. For me, it’s been a really interesting process of accepting that and understanding that I can’t fix that, and that it has little to do with me. I’ve learned not to get too pulled into it, and to just move on.

Other lessons?

I’ve come to realize that, as a leader, it’s O.K. for me to fail in terms of my management at times. I think women are ridiculously hard on themselves about needing to be both nice and perfect in managing people. I can feel terribly responsible for hurting someone’s feelings, or for just handling something badly. But a big thing I think about is that as long as we’re heading in the right direction, and with the right momentum, then it’s O.K. to not always be perfect as a leader. In fact, if you strive for perfection, I think you’ll end up, paradoxically, being less of a good leader.

There’s a certain liberation and relief to give yourself permission not to always handle things well, and to create a culture where you can say: “Hey, you know what? Maybe I didn’t deal very well with you yesterday; this is what I meant to say.” That’s a nice thing to model as a leader — that conflict or even a failure of communication is something that’s not only survivable, but can get you to a more open and honest and trusting place.

How else have you evolved as a leader?

I’ve come to realize that one of my strengths is that I like ambiguity, and shaping things. They’re good skills for this job because I actually am not required to be the expert in anything. My job is to synthesize. That process of understanding what the priority is and how to shape this thing is something I enjoy. Earlier in my career, I had an idea that there was something fixed that we were all sort of trying to perfect. Instead, it’s about recalibrating along the way, in big and small ways.

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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.