Sheila Talton (chief executive of Gray Matter Analytics) in “The Corner Office”

TaltonAdam 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 Sheila Talton, chief executive of Gray Matter Analytics, a consulting firm for financial services and health care. She observes, “It’s very important that my team know that I’m invested in their career.”

To read the complete interview as well as Bryant’s interviews of other executives, please click here.

Photo credit: Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

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When you were a child, were you in leadership roles?

I was not. When I was younger, I remember being the only African-American in my Brownie troop and Girl Scouts, and I never got picked for anything. But when I got to high school, I was picked to be an organizer in my high school around civil rights issues. That was one of the first times someone said to me: “Sheila, you’ve got a point of view about this. Why don’t you lead us and tell us how we might want to organize and march and protest?”

I carried that through to college, and I was so passionate about it that I forgot to go to class a lot. As a result, I was asked to leave college, as I like to say, because I spent all my time organizing and protesting. That was during the Vietnam era.

So I got a job as a secretary at a forklift company. There was a salesman there, a white male, and one day he came over to me — and remember, I was quite militant — and he said, “Why are you here?” I said, “What do you mean, why am I here?” He said: “I’ve watched you. You’re capable of so much more.” He went on to compliment me about how I took initiative, and he said, “Why aren’t you in college?”

I explained that I flunked out because I spent a lot of time organizing and protesting. He said that I should go back, and that if I took some really difficult classes at a community college, like quantitative analysis and statistics, and aced them, the college would take me back. “And I’ll tutor you,” he said. I did exactly what he said. I aced the classes, reapplied and went back to Northern Illinois University and graduated on the dean’s list.

When I started thinking about career paths, I thought about discrimination a lot. I asked myself, “What field could I go into where there’s a shortage of talent, and I would be able to ascend and have a lot of success if I were extremely good at it?” I decided on technology.

Tell me about your parents.

My father was a very smart man. He was a laborer, but much of that was because of the time he came along, as well. There weren’t many opportunities for African-American men, but he coached me. He told me to never let anyone define what my path would be, and should be, in life. He was always telling me to be very selective of people. He was very discerning. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust people; it was more about having the right kind of people around you to support you and complement you, and to be thoughtful about it.

My mother always saw the glass half full. I’ve worked in big corporations, but I’ve had many entrepreneurial roles, including this one. I think I get a lot of that from my mother because the thought of not being able to succeed never really crossed her mind.

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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.comthat 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.

His more recent book, Quick and Nimble: Lessons from Leading CEOs on How to Create a Culture of Innovation, was also also published by Times Books (January 2014). To contact him, please click here.

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