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 Tracy Streckenbach, president and chief operating officer of Innovative Global Brands.  She said she might spend months to define the right goals for a company and set the benchmarks for performance.

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

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Bryant: What were some early jobs that had a big impact on you?

Streckenbach: My father owned a small printing company. I ended up working there one summer during college, and I just sort of reorganized all the processes. That’s what I love to do. Everybody has that one thing about the way they see the world, and for me that one thing is process. I see streamlined processes very clearly. And so becoming a consultant — I worked for Ernst & Young for many years — was just a great fit for me.

What I do now is turnarounds and start-ups. I typically spend two years with a company and help it get on a fast-track growth by putting in new processes, technologies and structures, and then I hand it over to somebody for the long term. Then I go on to do another one.

Bryant: Tell me about how you diagnose the problems at a company.

Streckenbach: I spend my initial two weeks talking with people, and often it’s not the senior executives. Sometimes it’s the middle managers who really know what’s going on, and you uncover the biggest problems by talking to them. I’ll ask them: “What makes it difficult to do your job? What is it that you struggle with? What is taking you more time than it should?”

If you ask people what makes it difficult to do their job, they know, particularly at the middle-manager level, and they want to tell you. But at the senior manager level, sometimes they don’t want to tell you because there’s a little bit of a job preservation going on. In the first phase, it’s tough stuff. I mean, I’ve been threatened.

Bryant: Really?

Streckenbach: I don’t know if you can print some of the things people have said. When you’re shutting down or de-emphasizing divisions, and making changes to senior leadership, it can be difficult.

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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.