Bryant:You worked for many years as a management consultant. How did that help you prepare for a C.E.O. role?Rees: As a consultant, I learned that you really have to listen to the lowest-level people in a company, because that’s where the answers are — with people who are interfacing with the customers. A lot of what consultants do is stuff that senior management ought to be doing, which is really communicating effectively at all levels and putting those ideas together. That’s a big part of my approach as a C.E.O. I find that hierarchy’s a killer, particularly in a fast-paced company. You have to go out of your way to keep ripping out those levels and barriers between people.

Bryant: How do you do that?

Rees: Some of it, frankly, is a bit corny. I have “Cookies With Ken” every couple of weeks, and we bring in about a dozen employees from across the company and talk about what’s going on. At the end, I always ask, “Tell me one thing you really like about the company and one thing that frustrates you about the company.” I always come out with at least one thing that is eye-opening.

We also have a quarterly town hall meeting where everybody in the company gets together. We walk through all the financials — the good, the bad and the ugly. Then, each quarter, we have five things that we’re focused on doing, and we get that widely communicated. At the end of the quarter, we discuss how we did, and we grade ourselves.

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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.