Soledad O’Brien (chief executive of Starfish Media Group) in “The Corner Office”

O'BrienAdam 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 Soledad O’Brien, chief executive of Starfish Media Group, a multiplatform media production company and distributor. 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 your early years like?

I grew up on Long Island, in a small town that was somewhat rural back then. I have five brothers and sisters, and I’m No. 5, and my parents were both immigrants. My dad’s Australian and my mom is Cuban, and my mom’s black and my dad’s white. That framed a lot of my thinking about the work that I would do in my career, and also how I think about big American issues.

I did a lot of after-school activities: student council, Rotary Club, track, the badminton team. We didn’t have a lot that you could do otherwise, so if you didn’t push yourself to go do something, you just couldn’t do it. There was no sitter who schlepped you to ballet classes and then made sure that your interest in art was being nurtured.

Because we were middle class, there was not a ton of money. So if there was something I wanted, then I’d have to be able to pay for it. When I was about 13, I wanted to ride horses, and I got a job mucking stalls so I could pay for riding lessons.

Helping kids figure out how to make things happen on their own is just good strategy anyway. But I think if you want your kids to be entrepreneurial, it’s probably critical.

Tell me more about your parents.

My dad was a professor of mechanical engineering, and my mom taught Spanish and French at the local high school. They were the kind of people you’d turn to for really good advice.

I remember when I first had kids and I was working, and I just was completely overwhelmed. My mother used to say: “You can always quit tomorrow. Just try to get through the day.” The point was to never quit when you’re in the throes of feeling terrible, and you should take a bit of time to get some perspective. I’ve given that advice to so many people.

They were of the era when people thought that, at the end of the day, hard work wins out. And so I grew up on that idea. If you’re going to do something, do it well. If you’re going to plant tomatoes in the garden, my parents would make sure they looked good. They just never did anything halfway.

What were some leadership lessons you learned during your years in TV news?

When I was at CNN, I worked under five different news presidents over a period of about six years. It was the most chaotic time I’d ever experienced in a corporate workplace. How do you carve out a niche in an environment that is changing all the time?

What I learned there was that you have to go back to the basics of thinking, “Here is what I do well, and I am going to make sure that everything I touch is good and solid.”

Is this your first management role?

Yes. When you’re an anchor, you don’t really manage people. You manage the ideas. So it was a real challenge when I started this company three years ago, because this was really the first time I was fully and utterly responsible for managing a team.

It was a very steep learning curve, mostly because there was not a lot of overlap between the kind of journalism I was doing and running a business. A key insight for me was that if you want good feedback from people, you have to create an environment where people want to come and tell you things. But I had no concrete idea of how to do that.

Another challenge was that I was successful in my previous role because I really worked hard and took a lot of responsibility for making things good. But that’s not actually a great skill for being a boss. The job of the boss is to help other people reach their goals and their dreams.

The area where I’ve grown the most is that I am good at making decisions in the macro and helping other people make the decisions in the micro.

The broader learning curve has been exciting, but while you’re in it, it’s also kind of annoying. It felt like a slog. At what point will I actually grow into this job, because I have the title? At what point will I actually be making decisions like someone who is the C.E.O. of the company? I would say it took a solid year before I felt good about it.

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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.

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