At many large companies, CEOs are squared away in plush corner offices, where they take meetings and receive elaborate lunch orders. But when midday rolls around, Ancestry employees find their CEO Howard Hochhauser taking his meal in the office’s eating area.
It’s a habit he picked up from Ace Greenberg when Hochhauser worked at Wall Street investment bank Bear Stearns in the late 1990s. He held multiple positions within the equity research department, ultimately serving as a vice president and equity research analyst. And when it came time to step away from the keyboard and sit down for their midday meals, the company’s longtime CEO, Greenberg, would eat among his employees.
“Ace Greenberg, who founded the firm, sat on the floor every day, and it stuck with me. Like, gosh, that’s really a visible statement. He’s really accessible,” Hochhauser tells Fortune. “You could talk to him. He wasn’t sitting in some glass office that’s untouchable.”
He continues, “One of the things that I think I struggle with—I think other CEOs struggle with—is access to unfiltered information. People wrap you in this bubble…And so if you’re breaking bread with people casually over lunch, you tend to get that [information].”
What Ancestry’s CEO learned from having lunch with staffers
By sharing meals with employees, Ancestry’s CEO can get a temperature check on how policies and decisions land with staffers. Even when Hochhauser had to remind employees of the company’s in-person working expectations, he says employees were honest about their feelings.
About two days before he announced in-person expectations to his employees, Hochhauser informally ran the idea by a bunch of staffers. Immediately, they felt comfortable raising concerns about how that will impact caregiving: dropping their children off at school; being able to make soccer games in the evenings; helping their kids move into college.
“People appreciate it, leveling with them and telling them what expectations are,” Hochhauser says. “And over lunch, people were honest and raised their concerns, but also appreciated the candor.”
He took their direct, candid feedback into account. While communicating the in-office policy, he made one thing clear to Ancestry employees: “You’re an adult. Use your judgment.”
The CEOs who break bread with workers: ‘That’s when the real stuff comes out’
From getting candid feedback to building consensus during difficult transitions, shared meals can give executives a window into what employees are really thinking.
When $36 billion Dutch bank ABN Amro announced it would cut a fifth of its workforce over the next three years, its CEO, Marguerite Bérard, rallied the troops by discussing the growing pains with staffers over weekly lunches. The bank had been taking hits since the financial crisis, having previously been rescued from collapse. And more recently, ABN Amro’s 2025 fourth-quarter net profit was lower than market expectations. In a bid to turn things around, ABN Amro would let go of around 5,200 staffers between 2024 and 2028. By the end of 2025, 1,500 employees had already been cut, ABN Amro confirmed with Fortune in April of this year.
Now, once a week, the French banker has sandwiches with eight to 10 colleagues to “hear their views on the bank” through the transition. Bérard told the Financial Times earlier this year, “Building consensus and coalitions is often important in the Netherlands. It’s something that the French don’t always know how to do well.”
Even Tim Cook didn’t always take lunch in the corner office when he was running $4.9 trillion tech behemoth Apple. The former CEO frequently sat down with random employees at the company’s cafeteria during lunch—a shift from his predecessor, the late Steve Jobs, who often dined with design executive Jonathan Ive.
Leaders at Duolingo also like to gather with fellow executives in the office’s public commissary so they can rub shoulders with all kinds of staffers. Severin Hacker, CTO and cofounder of the $7 billion learning platform, said that these daily team lunches, which include cofounder and CEO Luis von Ahn, are “fundamental to our company culture.” He added that connecting with employees is better than any engagement survey, because they’re more open about how things are going at the company: “That’s when the real stuff comes out.”
Hacker wrote in a LinkedIn post a year ago, “Lunch is an opportunity for people who don’t normally work together to actually talk. On any given day, Luis or I might be sitting next to a new hire fresh out of school. Or people from completely different teams.”
First Watch CEO Chris Tomasso takes a similarly hands-on approach to leadership. The leader of the breakfast and lunch chain, which brings in over $1 billion in annual revenue, likes to break bread with staffers rather than hide away in a corner office. He also takes time every month to write out congratulatory letters to cooks and dishwashers hitting career milestones at the breakfast and lunch chain.
“I tried to minimize the [CEO] title as best I can when I’m interacting with people,” Tomasso told Fortune earlier this year. “I eat lunch in the break room with everybody, which always, for whatever reason, blows new employees away—that I just sit down next to them and bring my lunch and have lunch with them. I think it’s a shame that there’s that feeling.”
