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 David Reimer, the chief executive for the Americas at Merryck & Company, a business leader mentoring firm. He says good leaders have a very clear set of core values and know how to stick with them, even “in the midst of chaos.”

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

Photo credit: Earl Wilson/The New York Times

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Bryant: You worked for 12 years at Drake Beam Morin, a consulting firm that helped companies with restructurings and layoffs. What were some of the broader lessons you learned about why companies get into trouble and how they respond?

Reimer: I ended up in almost every role in that company, and I saw a variety of ways that organizations, particularly C.E.O.’s, dealt with those kinds of changes internally. It was fascinating because most C.E.O.’s delegated in those moments of crisis. They’d make an announcement about a restructuring, but then sort of vanished from the internal spotlight for a while. Then there were C.E.O.’s who were pretty good about at least getting the message out on a regular basis through town halls. But they also kept an arm’s length, particularly once they’d announce a layoff.

And then there were C.E.O.’s who would actually check on the people who’d been laid off to see how they were doing. So with some C.E.O.’s, their stated values literally didn’t end with your layoff notice, to some degree. People who stayed felt differently about the place because they knew that even though it wasn’t employment for life, there was a psychological contract that would extend beyond their formal association with the organization.

The places that were incredibly effective at going through difficult times well and coming out the other side in good shape had very clear core values and put those values out on the table in the midst of chaos. With organizations and individuals, one’s values are often the values until there’s a crisis, and then people say, “Look, we need to suspend these temporarily while we deal with the crisis and then we’ll put them back into place.”

C.E.O.’s are also, by their nature, pretty invested in this idea that their job is to create clarity out of ambiguity, and then get the organization aligned around that clarity and help drive toward a commonly agreed-upon goal. But clarity doesn’t always mean the absence of paradox. You have to make it simple, clear and doable, but there are times when organizations get in trouble because they try to eliminate ambiguity altogether, and you can’t.

Bryant: Other patterns you noticed about all the companies that were in trouble?

Reimer: The biggest challenge is that when you become a C.E.O., you effectively step inside a bubble. Not by choice — it’s a fact of the job. Nobody comes to you anymore without an agenda. It doesn’t matter how open-minded you are. People will tailor their views, their positioning and everything else to suit you. At a lot of organizations, an outsider would have seen problems coming from a few miles away. But inside the organization, even at the C-suite level, it came as a shock when it finally occurred.

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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.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 with more than 70 leaders. To read an excerpt, please click here. To contact him, please click here.