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 Mark Fuller (C.E.O. which stands for chief excellence officer of WET Design which makes large fountain installations). He brings improv classes to his company to train people to actively listen to one another. It helps avoid “serial machine-gun monologues, and very little listening.”

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

Bryant: What’s unusual about your company’s culture?

Fuller: We have three classrooms and a full-time curriculum director who teaches all the time and also brings in outside instructors. One of the really fun classes we do is improv.

Bryant: Why improv?

Fuller: Improv, if properly taught, is really about listening to the other person, because there’s no script. It’s about responding. I was noticing that we didn’t have a lot of good communication among our people.

If you think about it, if you have an argument with your wife or husband, most of the time people are just waiting for the other person to finish so they can say what they’re waiting to say. So usually they’re these serial machine-gun monologues, and very little listening.

That doesn’t work in improv. If we’re on the stage, I don’t know what goofball thing you’re going to say, so I can’t be planning anything. I have to really be listening to you so I can make an intelligent — humorous or not — response.

So I got this crazy idea of bringing in someone to teach an improv class. At first, everybody had an excuse, because it’s kind of scary to stand up in front of people and do this. But now we’ve got a waiting list because word has spread that it’s really cool.

You’re in an emotionally naked environment. It’s like we’re all the same. We all can look stupid. And it’s an amazing bonding thing, plus it’s building all these communication skills. You’re sort of in this gray space of uncertainty. Most of us don’t like to be uncertain — you know, most of us like to be thinking what we’re going to say next. You get your mind into a space where you say, “I’m really enjoying that I don’t know what he’s going to ask me next, and I’m going to be open and listening and come back.”

We’ve got graphic designers, illustrators, optical engineers, Ph.D. chemists, special effects people, landscape designers, textile designers. You get all these different disciplines that typically you would never find under one roof — even making a movie — and so you have to constantly be finding these ways to have people connect.

So we do things like improv, and I think they really have developed our culture.

Bryant: What else?

Fuller: We also encourage people to put their ideas on our walls. Or if you’ve got a drawing, you can stick a couple of magnets on it. The point is to get people to put their stuff out where other people can see it. We don’t want a culture of, “That’s my idea. I don’t want anybody to see it. Maybe they’ll find a flaw in it.”

I had a teacher once who said, “Whenever you guys are sitting here, and you realize that you’ve made a mistake on something you’re working with, I want you to applaud yourself.” He said: “That will accomplish a couple of things. First of all, instead of saying, ‘Oh, I made a mistake, I’m never going to learn this stuff anyway,’ you’re going to reward yourself because you caught the mistake before I did.” We all rolled our eyes in the class, but I’ve never forgotten that.

So one of the things I will do is to start some meetings by saying, “Let me tell you where I just screwed up.” That sets the tone of, we’ve got to put our mistakes out there. They don’t call it “learn by trial and success.” You learn by trial and error.

Bryant: What else have you done through the years to set the tone for your culture?

Fuller: Early on, I decided that whenever somebody comes into my office and starts blaming something on another department, I will say: “Really? Let’s get them in here. Hold that thought.” It’s just like with your children at home — you don’t want serial tattletaling. You get everybody together, and then suddenly people are saying that maybe they exaggerated a bit, and things weren’t quite as bad as they said.

I’ve been in environments where a C.E.O. will sit back and try to watch a gladiator match for entertainment. That’s totally not cool. It’s so common, I think, in corporate life. You want to have the conversation and say: “O.K., what really went wrong here? There’s three of us in this room. We’re going to fix this thing. How do we do it?”

Bryant: You’ve clearly thought a lot about cultures and how to get people to work together.

Fuller: I really love coming to work to develop the workplace and the team. I think it’s either a virtuous or a vicious spiral, and it’s exposed when you go to hire somebody.

To get really good talent, you need to be doing interesting stuff. Take a great kid out of college or somebody from another company — they’re not going to come if there’s not something really interesting to work on. I suppose you could throw gobs of money at them or something, but that’s not the idea. So you need to build the company so you have great talent, and great projects, and a great environment. You get those three, and then they just feed off of each other.

Bryant: I’ll keep asking: What else is unusual about your company?

Fuller: One thing we do is we move people around a lot into different positions. And quite honestly, it’s pretty unsettling because everybody loves to be comfortable. I think we’re built that way. Find your cave, and draw some nice picture of a mammoth on the wall so it feels like home.

Most of my key people have held really different positions. That helps prevent these silos and fiefdoms that tend to get sclerotically reinforced over time in companies when people say: “Oh, the fifth floor is engineering. You don’t go up there without a hall pass.”

The world is driven by change, so part of my job, I think, is to stir things up.

Bryant: But at what level are you moving people around? You’re not taking the Ph.D. chemist and saying, “Learn sheet metal,” are you?

Fuller: Not full time. We do take all of our key employees and put them through an immersion program that typically lasts six weeks. I can show you some great receptionists who are pretty darn good welders because they spent a week or two in the machine shop. They get it, and they understand what’s going on. Again, they’re not permanent assignments for everybody, but it’s really about walking in the other person’s shoes to understand their job.

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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. His book, The Corner Office: Indispensable and Unexpected Lessons from CEOs on How to Lead and Succeed, was published in April of 2011 by Times Books.

To contact him, please click here.