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 Robert J. Murray, global chief executive of iProspect, a digital marketing agency. He says a past superior seemed to put inordinate value on his own time and little on the team’s.

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

Photo credit: Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times

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Bryant: Tell me about your approach to giving people feedback.

Murray: I’ve definitely learned to be thoughtful around giving people honest feedback but not killing them with feedback. I don’t believe you can give someone 10 things to work on. I think you can give people three things to think about how they can make themselves better and make the company better, and then you check in regularly.

And the most important time is not the review time. If you see something that you talked about, you have to pull them aside right then and there.

Bryant: How do you spread that thinking throughout the company?

Murray: I’ve hosted meetings we called management round tables. I would get the young managers together in a room every two weeks, and we would share examples of times they had to deal with a difficult employee situation. I felt it would resonate more with them if they saw each other learn how to manage people.

So I would go around the room and say: “Someone give me an example where they’re looking for advice. Let’s open up. Let’s put an example on the table and let’s all talk about it.” I could always tell the managers with the strongest leadership characteristics during those meetings because they were always the ones who were most willing to share. Others would worry that they might look weak. But the point is, this is a learning environment.

Bryant: How do you maintain the culture you want as the company grows quickly?

Murray: Once you get beyond 100 people, being able to manage a culture does get harder. But certain things we were able to do have allowed us to do that. We’re 450 people, but spread across six offices. I like to empower people in each office to take elements of the broader culture and make it more their own. We created what we call employee experience teams. Every office has one, focused around employee morale and team-building. I give these teams budgets, and tell them to go figure out the types of events they want to organize.

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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.